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THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY SCHREYER HONORS COLLEGE SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEATH OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEVIN M. FAULHABER Spring 2010 A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a baccalaureate degree in Creative Writing with honors in Creative Writing Reviewed and approved* by the following: Tom Noyes Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Thesis Supervisor George Looney Associative Professor of English/Creative Writing Honors Adviser Craig Warren Assistant Professor of English Faculty Reader * Signatures are on file in the Schreyer Honors College. Abstract This thesis contains a critical preface and a portfolio of fiction writing consisting of six short stories. The critical preface explores the motives and background behind each story, while also explaining psychological and moral values that are emphasized or focused upon during the thesis. Loneliness, the ugliness of the human race, and its propensity for self-destruction are all themes that are delved into via the stories. The thesis is a cyclical progression, beginning with The Boy and the Monster, a dark, surreal fairytale and ending with The Glass Unicorn, named after a child’s prized possession but focused on a father’s search for family and absolution in a ruined world. The stories in between bridge the gap between childhood and parenthood beginning with The Sentry, a story that explores the loneliness and isolation of adolescence in a surreal setting. We Are All Passengers is a companion piece focusing on humankind’s lust for companionship and the pain it brings. Shadowplay focuses on the childish horrors that can creep into our adult lives. The penultimate piece, The Uncanny Valley, is parallel to the destructive excesses of young adulthood. i Table of Contents Abstract i Critical Preface iii The Boy Who Dreamed the Monster and the Monster That Dreamed the World 1 The Sentry at the Beginning of the End of the World 6 We Are All Passengers 25 Shadowplay 35 The Uncanny Valley 48 The Glass Unicorn 60 Academic Vita ii Choosing the Ugly Path in a Beautiful World: A Critical Preface to Death of the English Language The world is not beautiful, therefore it is. Keiichi Sigsawa Human beings are faced with binary choices every day that threaten to unravel their very lives. And yet, we all make them and sometimes we do so without thinking of the consequences, however unforeseen, down the road. Do we take the underpaid job now or hope for something better? Do we try and salvage the relationship or move on? Does this ending work for the story or should I go about it a different way? Is this critical preface achieving its desired aims or is it a bewildering, informal mess? What’s great about fiction is that it is a playground for choice. Here, the consequences are only hypothetical for the reader, while very much real and dangerous for the characters. And that is one of the main reasons why fiction interests me so. My own life could be said to be largely in my hands, in terms of responsibility, but in fact, a million other invisible ripples dictate so many every day events that it’s truly impossible to know what decisions I’m making or really reacting to. In fiction, everything is more pronounced, characters reacting to events: conflict. Characters in conflict reaching for goals: plot. Unlike life, it’s much easier to analyze a character and know what they should do, what choices they should make. It’s easy, because readers have an unfair perspective that the characters are unable to possess. Readers can take themselves out of the story, stop and deliberate, make a strong, rational decision, while the characters are merely slaves to the whims of the here and now, the fictional present. In my stories, my characters are slaves to their own ugliness, unable to move forward with their lives without sacrificing the only part of them worth saving. Besides the idea of choice and its repercussions, another central idea to my thesis is the idea of ugliness and humankind. My work represents a response to what human beings try to hide. Whether it’s their own failings or weaknesses, petty jealousies, or hidden inadequacies, the characters in my iii fiction have made their mistakes in the past, and seek redemption, but are too fundamentally flawed to do it without surrendering to their own vices and inner weakness. It is difficult to fight against our fundamental natures as human beings, and in my experience, many more give up than overcome their faults. My stories have always ridden the edge between realism and something else, whether one could call it science fiction, fantasy, surrealism, or magical realism is up for debate. At their core, I’ve tried to focus my stories on the humanity of the characters and of their conflicts with the world and themselves first, and then introduce the element of surrealism. Surrealism is having the conscious and unconscious world collide and dealing with a world in which the characters all walk on the razor of hyper reality and twisted nightmare memories. Characters will frequently dream about their lives before the story begins, and think about all the mistakes they’ve made; and sometimes, these dreams are the most realistic parts of the stories. They may live in a world filled with scientific wonders and supernatural occurrences, but there is also a distinction that at one time, the world was mundane, and sometimes, the mundane world is the most dangerous place to be. The works that resonate with me the most are the ones that represent more than just the realistic world we live in. They add something fantastic to it, make it interesting and gripping. I find most stories to be like a present, and the best ones, underneath all the trappings of a serious and grounded wrapping, have something imaginative and unexplainable inside. Kelly Link’s story “Catskin,” in her collection Magic for Beginners is one of the primary works that illuminated for me the idea of magical realism, of blending the two genres of realism and fantasy into something considered literary. It was at this point that I discovered there could be a compromise between my own varying styles, and that style wasn’t something to be afraid of, but to embrace. Most of the stories in Link’s collection lean much further over the line into fantasy than my own, but they still iv held value for my own work. Link’s hybrid model is evident in my story “The Sentry at the Beginning of the End of the World” in its use of the strange lighthouse filled with gadgets that don’t quite work, and strange amalgams and inventions of animal life that the Sentry lives off of. The story has a very human core and could take place in this world, yet is filled with so much strangeness that it cannot be considered realism. This fascinates me and has become the primary goal and function of my stories: to walk between genres and create work that blends the two effectively. I hope for the reader to question the realistic aspect of the stories, whether it’s a character’s motivation or actions and accept the more fantastic elements as most are in the background of the story and add to the setting but don’t distract from the plot. My fiction leans on the border of horror at times, such as in the cases of “Shadowplay” and “The Sentry at the Beginning of the End of the World.” This is in part a response to Brian Evenson, whose stories seem to blend the real world with the horrific. What I tried to take away from Evenson was the way he made each story’s world real; each story world plays by its own rules and takes itself seriously during the tale. Each story operates under completely unique rules, and each story is cohesive, moving, and frequently unnerving. The chief inspiration for the rules for the Sentries in “The Sentry…” was a similarly creepy and arbitrary set of rules used in Evenson’s short story, “House Rules,” where three men wake up in a house they cannot escape from. They are confined to a single floor, unable to ascend the stairs that might lead to freedom or perhaps annihilation. The characters realistically deal with their situations but when one of them asks too many questions of his captor and is seemingly punished, that’s when the mystery and the unreal take center stage. The rest of the story is a slow slide into a very dark and very horrible corner, where realistic characters try to come to grips with the evil side of their fantastic world. v My style of blending the real and fantastic often puts me at odds for what is considered “literary” by academic standards, and, perhaps as a result, many of my influences are more aligned with the visual world of movies, comic books, and video games. Brian K. Vaughn, a writer of television shows and the comic book, Y: The Last Man, is one of the models I try to base my own fiction on. In Vaughn’s story, an event occurs that kills every living organism with the Y chromosome, except a young man named Yorrick and his pet monkey, Ampersand. The story starts as a survival tale and it depicts a world in which those who have always been placed as number two in the role of power are now responsible for the fate of the world. Eventually, it also develops into a mystery as Yorrick seeks to find out what caused the event and if the world can live on.

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