Ten Impossible Things Before Daylight: Collected Essays A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Wesley D. Roj August 2016 © 2016 Wesley D. Roj. All Rights Reserved. 2 This dissertation titled Ten Impossible Things Before Daylight: Collected Essays by WESLEY D. ROJ has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Eric LeMay Associate Professor of English Robert Frank Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT ROJ, WESLEY., Ph.D., December 2016, English Ten Impossible Things Before Daylight: Collected Essays Director of Dissertation: Eric LeMay Ten Impossible Things Before Daylight is a collection of essays which turn on experiences with the uncanny, including premonitions, visitations, bizarre coincidences, impactful dreams, and lucky charms. My essays seek to explore a side of the uncanny that is not horrific but instead, eerily invigorating. The lead-off essay “Goodnight Noises” is an uncanny elegy for friend that I knew since childhood who tragically developed severe schizophrenia. My essay is about making sense of his somewhat mysterious disappearance and death. “Far and Wee” is the story of the unplanned rescue of a baby goat that my wife and I found in an ocean while on vacation. Our rescue of the goat led us to many moments of prescience regarding the birth of our firstborn son. The collection is a varied and confessional portrait of my evolving sense of the uncanny and its influence over the red letter days of my life. It also celebrates Cleveland, new love, and old friends, and seeks to surmount and memorialize the loss of friends, a serious illness, and the zombie-like horrors of the moment, gun violence at home and a war in the middle-east that, unlike the soldiers fighting in it, seems impossible to kill. “Canary from a Coal Mine: Reorganizing a Sense of What is Possible in Uncanny Nonfiction, is a critical introduction to the essay collection. In it I seek to establish some strategies for working with the uncanny, a concept frequently associated with fiction, in creative Nonfiction. My essays picks up Marjorie Sandor’s notion of the uncanny as a 4 genre-busting “viral strain” and uses it to examine the differences between the uncanny in fiction and in life. From there, it observes how those lived examples are represented by nonfiction authors, with the aim of re-enacting uncanny experiences in the minds of readers. 5 DEDICATION For: My Equinox (who has lifted me past what is possible) My New Deal (the deal of a lifetime), My wish for 11:11 (who already has my heart) Wine and Roses, The Early Girls, and a few late guys (the side door is open for you) 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3 Dedication ........................................................................................................................... 5 Critical Introduction- A Canary from a Coal Mine: Reorganizing a sense of what is possible in Uncanny Nonfiction.......................................................................................... 7 Goodnight Noises.............................................................................................................. 48 Guardian ............................................................................................................................ 66 Even the Losers get Lucky Sometimes ............................................................................. 85 Far and Wee .................................................................................................................... 111 The Crows and the Pussycat ........................................................................................... 124 Safety Deposit Boxes ...................................................................................................... 145 The Joker and the Theif of the Night .............................................................................. 150 Overdrawn....................................................................................................................... 161 : Midsentence* ........................................................................................................ 172 Moment in Red ............................................................................................................... 194 *Amendment: The author has redacted names, places, and select conversations in the interest of anonymity and safety of the people therein. 7 CRITICAL INTRODUCTION - A CANARY FROM A COAL MINE: REORGANIZING A SENSE OF WHAT IS POSSIBLE IN UNCANNY NONFICTION Possession: The Effect of the Nonfictional Uncanny Not long ago, my wife took our two-year-old son to a restaurant. I was working that day, so I didn’t go with them. During the meal my son happened to glance across the restaurant and that was when he saw me sitting at another table with my back to him chatting with strangers. As soon as he noticed me, my son started to call out in my direction, “Dad! Daaaad!” I didn’t acknowledge him. This was puzzling. I seemed to be easily within ear shot. Perhaps I was distracted. My son called out more loudly, “Daaaad! Daaaaaaaad!” Still nothing. Was I mad at him? He would not be dissuaded. Finally, one of the strangers at my table took notice of my son and got me to turn around. As I turned though, my face suddenly transformed into the face of a man my son had never seen before. It was a friendly enough face, but unfamiliar, not a bit like Daddy’s. The hair had been right. The height had been right. The movements, posture, and clothes had all told my son that Daddy was across the room ignoring him. But the face was decidedly wrong. My son let out one more “Dad?”— this one hesitant and confused. Then he made a very sour face and shook his head. He had just received a children’s portion of the uncanny response. Creative nonfiction, by its very nature, is a genre that requires a writer to tell the truth. There is a distinction to be made within that requirement between visible, verifiable truths, which we call facts, and the hidden and elusive truths that cannot be casually reported but are instead discovered through life experience, or the process of writing, or 8 both. Facts (the kind of journalistic details that might be very incompletely captured by a video camera) are the building blocks used by the nonfiction writer to uncover invisible, hidden, or disguised truths that exist within every person and in the world around us. These invisible truths encompass people’s perceptions, associations, motivations and dreams, but also the patterns that play against the backdrop of human events. The intersection between these two different kinds of truth can be a pregnant space for nonfiction writing. The unveiling of a hidden truth sometimes runs in opposition to to our expectations and fact-based sense of the world, the tension created produces certain feelings or responses within us. It is one of those feelings that we call the uncanny In the pages that follow, I will offer a much more nuanced examination of the uncanny as a concept, but at its root the uncanny describes the effect produced when that which is safe, familiar, and inviting coincides or collides with that which is strange, incongruous, and mystifying. A person who encounters the uncanny is expected to be initially unsettled or even horrified. In “Unraveling,” Marjorie Sandor observes how the uncanny response appears in literature, “I don’t think of the uncanny as a literary genre so much as a genre buster, a viral strain” (Sandor 8). I agree, and I think that it is an important distinction. Looking at the history of literature, one might most readily associate the uncanny with the gothic and 19th century ghost stories by writers like Henry James and Edgar Allen Poe. Although that is a good place to start, the concept is by no means limited to this traditionally macabre genre. The uncanny is an element that permeates genre and discipline; it is an ingredient that changes the flavor of the dish, not the dish itself. 9 Strictly speaking, the uncanny does not require the supernatural. Ray Bradbury’s 1950 short story, The Velt,, for example, uses science-fiction technology to create the effect as strongly as any ghost might. To go one step farther, the uncanny is also not confined to literature. Today, there is almost no field of study that is not penetrated by it. The uncanny is a topic of research in philosophy, psychology, anthropology, architecture, and animation, just to name a few. Anthony Vidler’s book The Architectural Uncanny uses examples of the uncanny from literary theory as fixed points from which to view concepts in architecture from a new direction. There is also a baffling subject in the fields of robotics and computer animation known as “the uncanny valley” (Lay). The uncanny valley demonstrates that trying to use technology to create a lifelike automaton or a digitally rendered humanoid character is a fraught enterprise. The closer these figures come to lifelike human appearance, the more we seem hyper-aware of and repulsed by their lack of actual human essence. We can also find examples of the uncanny within popular culture. The uncanny response is the reason people enjoy discussing the similarities in the lives and deaths of President’s Lincoln and Kennedy or playing Pink Floyd’s Dark