UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI DATE: May 12, 2003 I, Cynthia Nitz Ris , hereby submit this as part of the requirements for the degree of: Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in: English It is entitled: Imagined Lives Approved by: Don Bogen, Ph.D. John Drury Jim Cummins IMAGINED LIVES A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the Department of English Composition and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences 2003 by Cynthia Nitz Ris B.A., Texas A&M University, 1978 J.D., University of Michigan, 1982 M.A., University of Cincinnati, 1998 Committee Chair: Don Bogen, Ph.D. ABSTRACT This dissertation consists of a collection of original poetry by Cynthia Nitz Ris and a critical essay regarding William Gaddis’s novel A Frolic of His Own. Both sections are united by reflecting the difficulties of utilizing past experiences to produce a fixed understanding of lives or provide predictability for the future; all lives and events are in flux and in need of continual reimagining or recharting to provide meaning. The poetry includes a variety of forms, including free verse, sonnets, blank verse, sapphics, rhymed couplets, stanzaic forms including mad-song stanzas and rhymed tercets, variations on regular forms, and nonce forms. Poems are predominantly lyrical expressions, though many employ narrative strategies to a greater or lesser degree. The first of four units begins with a long-poem sequence which serves as prologue by examining general issues of loss through a Freudian lens. The second section looks more specifically at a localized event—the breakup of a marriage—and ends with another long poem that seeks to recast the events through the use of navigational themes. The third section expands that view to more general losses and the attempts by the subjects and the poet to navigate those events. The final section, including three dramatic monologues, uses four personae to revisit some of the issues raised in the collection through more specific acts of remembering prior events. The critical essay looks closely at William Gaddis’s use of varieties of spheres— including the institutional and private—and the use of various forms of exposition, to argue that society’s attempts to order life are ultimately futile. The acceptance of that futility and the willingness to embrace the unpredictability of life are suggested as the only possible sources of hope for a satisfying existence. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for the guidance of a number of teachers and colleagues for thoughtful suggestions regarding the poems and critical paper that comprise this manuscript, including Don Bogen, Stan Corkin, Jim Cummins, John Drury, Jane Hirshfield, Tom LeClair, Henry Taylor, Reetika Vazirani, Alli Hammond, Gary Leising, C. Lynn Shaffer, Dirk Stratton, Juliana Vice, and Ruth Tucker. I am thankful for the friendship of many of these individuals, as well as for the other fine writers who cast a critical eye on my poetry and shared their poems with me in workshops at University of Cincinnati. Individuals whose support and friendship also influenced this work, and my state of mind while completing it, and to whom I owe much gratitude, include Cathy Piha Huffman, Michele Griegel-McCord, Maggy Lindgren, Hope Pierson, and Robbin Titone. I would like to extend my appreciation to Nancy Baumann for her friendship and her crucial knowledge of the intricacies of bureaucracies. Finally, I would like to thank my sons to whom this work is dedicated and for whom I am grateful beyond words. To Andrew, Greg, and Geoff, with love always. CONTENTS ONE Libido 5 Misreading 5 Censor 7 Free Association 8 Repression 10 Cathexis 11 Libido 12 Antithesis 13 TWO Mercury 15 Post Card Home 17 Why the Psychic Never Wins the Lottery 18 The Contemplative Marriage 20 Breaking the Rules 22 Gone 24 Fate 25 Another Way Toward Grace 27 Navigation 29 1 THREE Dissolution 36 By Faith Alone 38 Fourteen 43 Night Vision 44 Widow 48 Crane 51 Lot’s Wife 53 Giotto’s Resurrection 56 Vacation Home 57 FOUR The Source of Light 62 Left Behind 69 Uncharted Waters 75 Repressed Memories 81 The Unswerving and Unpredicatable Influence of Memory in William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own 83 2 “Memories, many of them not my own, are passing shyly and vividly through my chamber.” Ranier Maria Rilke “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.” Lewis Carroll 3 ONE 4 Libido Why it is that [the] detachment of libido from its objects should be such a painful process is a mystery to us. —Sigmund Freud, "On Transience" Misreading A promise as something offered without reserve. "I do" for "I will." The words love, commitment, trust, as what I took them to mean. Manet's La Regalade: "to pour a liquid down one's throat from a jar without touching one's lips." The man in the painting holds his flask overhead, the liquid ready to surprise his throat with its fierce line. Why not the support of lips, the slow flooding of mouth and throat? How many must drink open-mouthed, the source at arm's length 5 before someone fabricates a word for it? "Dissolution" as salt in water, a cleansing solution to rid sores of pain when the wound is touched, the lips kissed. A second love as better than the first. Longing, sorrow, regret—words forged from experience: his, mine. The fierce line never the same. Mouths wide in expectation. 6 Censor When I first heard the creaking, aching groan, I imagined a human origin—a crowbar, splintered wood, imminent bludgeoning. But ice against the shore intended no harm, its mournful cry an embrace, as I lay outside his play of dreams where the day's repast turned upside down, found someone who looked like him in chase after one who looked like me who wanted desperately for the fox to be the hound and so, he said, next morning, I must have been him who wanted to be me who wanted to be loved. Do you? he asked. Beyond, I saw where ice had churned against the shore, the water now calm. I tried to, but couldn't, describe the sound. 7 Free Association Love: tight spaces, darkness, trials, Nuremberg. The movie with Spencer Tracy, who wishes Marlene Dietrich were not German, not a woman with mixed loyalties. My father is German. His father banished the violin, saying it caused "too much sensitivity in the boy." One lover accused me of being too sensitive, another, not sensitive enough. The plant that folds its leaves when touched. My skin feels his touch, still. A cry, a seagull, an ocean, brine. The skin, raw and blistered. A wound to prod at. Your questions, your concerned stare. Your own heart, its walls, 8 distances that keep us on each side. The gate you ask me to open, the slow surrender, open arms, the flaming arrows that breach the unspoken truce. 9 Repression Each erupted from the grass, then returned en masse to peck at what emerged to feed them. The unmown lawn hid the grackles as they dipped, gleaming heads and tail tips surfacing, foraging across the expanse, away, then toward the house. Arising, they broke apart, then returned as smaller formations that bobbed in the grass, bodies half-seen, but not the gleam of their yellow eyes or their beaks that punctured the soft earth. 10 Cathexis I held the flesh but not the man. He'd fled again to the core he'd found so early on, he'd gone beyond all deaths—his father's, his own. When called by something resembling love he would unfurl his legs and follow a ghost of warmth along a shadowed path, the promise of green fields, warm embraces, until his father’s charms would lure him, turn him from the sun, the open unknown sky. 11 Libido Unleashed, it roams like a great, grieving dog, yellowed with age. It clatters down, eyes others who approach, warns them away. I know when it’s had its fill of grief and murmur that I am its owner again. It trots, slow beside me, backward glances. Nudges my hand. Decides at last to run, charges a squirrel up a tree. I can chain it so it will strain, whimpering at night for my bed, or let it roam, be torn to shreds, set free to sing the sweetest songs. 12 Antithesis To love: to hate. The smooth stroke knows the rough; the loosening ties, the bind. To cleave: to bring together and cut apart. To open the mind includes its narrowing gaze. Twenty years knows two: the sound a lie makes when it grates against blades sharpened by the heart. To satisfy: to want. To lose oneself: to find. The moment rain reveals restless urgings of green, we turn from muddied boots, aching backs, and celebrate the weeds. To hate: to love. To turn away: embrace. The one who leaves, arrives. The sinner knows the truth; the lying heart, the jewel. To bury life in death: to know the love of life. 13 TWO 14 Mercury I feared it as a child, as I feared desire. It survived by the edict divide and conquer; the smooth silver globule would split into miniatures of itself until some were lost in the shadow outside the lamp, or attached to me: the curve behind my knee or the hollow just above my elbow. If found, each would disperse at my eager probings into spanglets no larger than a sneeze, absorbed through my pores, or inhaled into the very linings of my lungs which, at nine, old enough to dream of a romantic death— O! handsome doctor, kiss me once before the end—I thought a likely breeding place for mercury poisoning to be.