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The Fiction Factory: a Novel University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2018-04-24 The Fiction Factory: A Novel Jansen, Brian Jansen, B. (2018). The fiction factory: A novel (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/31862 http://hdl.handle.net/1880/106576 doctoral thesis University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY The Fiction Factory: A Novel by Brian Jansen A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENGLISH CALGARY, ALBERTA APRIL, 2018 © Brian Jansen 2018 Abstract This dissertation is composed of two parts. The first, a critical foreword titled “The Fiction Factory: On Precarity, Popularity, and Piecing Together Our Stories,” discusses my creative work through a theoretical lens. In it, I draw on contemporary discussions around precarity in cultural and academic work, theories of cultural industries, and scholars of the “ethical turn” in literature—such as Wayne Booth, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Marshall Gregory—to explore questions of agency and ethics in popular fiction. In complicating binaries (the sphere of art versus the sphere of commerce; work versus labour; friendship versus transactional relationships), and by taking Leslie McFarlane (better known as Franklin W. Dixon of Hardy Boys fame) as a case study, I seek to turn away from sometimes dismissive treatments of popular fiction and offer a more nuanced and charitable reading of the cultural objects—series fiction, ghostwritten thrillers, popular Young Adult novels—that live or die by the marketplace. The second part of this dissertation is the novel proper, “The Fiction Factory.” Taking inspiration from a New York Magazine exposé by journalist Suzanne Mozes of memoirist James Frey’s “fiction factory,” Full Fathom Five—a publishing venture initiated by Frey and staffed primarily by young Creative Writing MFA graduates who churn out Young Adult novels according to pre-determined formulae for appalling wages and no credit—the novel imagines a literal fiction factory, a corporation where ghostwriter employees manufacture stories for mass consumption for unremarkable wages. “The Fiction Factory” simultaneously dramatizes the corporatization of the arts and the precarity of contemporary labour (particularly labour in the sector of cultural work). The novel illustrates the cultural pervasiveness of storytelling through a ii commercial office in which daily business is literally conducted in (and in the service of) stories, suggesting how much, ethically, is at stake in each storytelling act. iii Preface This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. iv Acknowledgements Innumerable thanks are due to my supervisor, Dr. Suzette Mayr, for her patience, her guidance, and for random pictures of canned tuna. Thanks are due as well to the members of my committee—Dr. Michael Tavel Clarke, Dr. Jonathan Kertzer, Dr. Jackie Seidel, and Dr. Kit Dobson—for their charitable and insightful readings of my work; to Michael Laverty, whose passing observation that “man, that’s a great premise for a novel” planted the seed of everything that came after; to the Department of English at the University of Calgary; to my current and former colleagues therein, especially Tom Miller, Martin Schauss, Rebecca Geleyn, Jess Nicol, and Rod Moody-Corbett, for variously providing conversation, food, drink, hospitality, and reading recommendations; to my colleagues in the English program and the School of Arts and Sciences at Red Deer College; and to my family, who eventually came to realize that “So, when are you going to graduate?” was not a productive question. I acknowledge the financial support of the University of Calgary, Red Deer College’s Professional Development Fund, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Finally, to Roland Barks—you’re a very good boy, no matter what they say—and to Hollie: thank you for the support, always, and I hope you’ll keep letting me ride your coattails. v Table of Contents Abstract ii Preface iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents vi The Fiction Factory: On Precarity, Popularity, and Piecing Together Our Stories 1 A Scholarly Interlude (or, an Interlude about Scholars) 25 Something Happens 30 The Fiction Factory: A Novel 57 Works Cited 399 vi The Fiction Factory: On Precarity, Popularity, and Piecing Together Our Stories As someone who normally writes fiction, I found myself last year, for the first time in perhaps ten years—in the minutes between teaching two classes—writing a short poem. A few weeks later, I caught myself doing it again. Last year, for the first time in my career, I found myself teaching a full, 4/4 course load, on a sessional basis; this year, I am teaching a 5/4/1 load. In a very roundabout way, my dissertation project, The Fiction Factory (even though it began with the kernel of an idea years earlier) is about how these two facts are, I think, related, and why it might matter. It might (and I hate to do this) also be about Donald Trump, or at least what Donald Trump represents.1 Sorry. 1 I note here that—despite the fact that I am a Canadian citizen working and studying in Canadian institutions and my novel is set in Canada—I lean heavily on US data and trends in this exegesis. I do so for a few reasons that I wish to clarify early on: one is that my area of expertise lies primarily in American literature and culture. Another is that my partner is a dual citizen, and I grew up in a border town (Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit, Michigan); my sense of self has thus been very much shaped by American culture (I did not, for instance, take a class in Canadian literature until graduate school; I still measure warm temperatures in Fahrenheit). Finally, I focus on the US because of its influence on Canada and the world—not just in the sense that (as the cliché goes) “When America sneezes, the world catches cold,” but in the sense that I worry about the spread of certain political and social movements into Canada. Pollster Michael Adams’s Could It Happen Here? (2017), for whatever it is worth, examines Canadian versus American and European social values surveys to make the case that such fears are overblown. And yet recent events—the popularity of Rob (and Doug) Ford, Kellie Leitch’s proposed “Canadian Values” test, the Harper-era “Barbaric Cultural Practices” tip-line, the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting—do not instill confidence. 1 When the votes were finally counted—or, well, when enough of the votes were counted in enough of the places that mattered—it turned out that Donald J. Trump had won the 2016 US Presidential Election in a shocking upset. At no point during the election campaign did Trump lead in the aggregated polling; according to numbers compiled by the New York Times’s Josh Katz, statisticians and betting sites favoured his opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton, by margins ranging from 71% (fivethirtyeight.com) to 85% (The New York Times’s own estimate) to greater than 99% (Sam Wang at the Princeton Electoral Consortium, who vowed to “eat a bug” if Trump exceeded 240 votes in the electoral college [A. King]). Yet Trump did win; Wang, as promised, ate the bug—and a mini-industry has sprung up seeking to explain exactly what happened. I do not want to discount the extent to which the Trump campaign undoubtedly preyed on America’s worst impulses: racism, misogyny, xenophobia. As CNN political correspondent Van Jones put it, in a widely- shared viral clip, Trump’s election was a kind of “whitelash . against a changing country, . against a black president” (qtd. in Ryan), and there is evidence to suggest (as one might expect) that hate crimes have surged in the wake of Trump’s victory: Voice of America’s Masood Farivar quotes lawyer Mark Potok, who has acknowledged that the Southern Poverty Law Centre “had received some 315 reports of racially-charged incidents in the past week [after Trump’s election], more than were recorded in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks” (Farivar). But—and I am certainly not the first person to make this claim—this sort of explanation feels incomplete, and the exit polling (see Huang et al.), though there remains some statistical noise, may point toward why. To be sure, Trump benefitted from the demographics we might expect, given the above- 2 stated theory: men, whites, the uneducated all swung Republican. But what I found fascinating as I looked over the exit polling, with my own scholarly work percolating in the back of my head, were the demographic swings between elections—a 5-point swing that saw more Democrats voting Republican in this election, for example. And, most shockingly, a 16-point swing toward the Republicans among those making under $30,000/year: a traditionally reliable demographic of blue-collar Democrats. A demographic that voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama twice, complicating any easy knee-jerk claims of conscious (if not unconscious) racism.2 I do not want to belabour the point, as much has been written on the topic, and it is only a way station on the road to the point I’m driving at, but Donald Trump (arguably) won the US Presidential Election on the backs of economic anxiety among the blue- collar, working poor—what scholar and journalist Richard C.
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