University of Denver Digital Commons @ DU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies 1-1-2011 Serial Fictions: A Collection Danielle Rado University of Denver Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons, and the Fiction Commons Recommended Citation Rado, Danielle, "Serial Fictions: A Collection" (2011). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 533. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/533 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Studies at Digital Commons @ DU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ DU. For more information, please contact [email protected],[email protected]. SERIAL FICTIONS: A COLLECTION _________________ A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of Arts and Humanities University of Denver _________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy _________________ By Danielle Rado June 2011 Advisor: Laird Hunt Author: Danielle Rado Title: SERIAL FICTIONS: A COLLECTION Advisor: Laird Hunt Degree Date: June 2011 ABSTRACT This collection of fiction that is not only a compilation of short stories, but a “serial collection”. That is, the stories are organized into series, and these series placed in a series as well, making up the book. The purpose of this organization is to figure out to what extent the arrangement of stories significantly contributes to the reader’s understand of, and engagement with, the particular elements of each story as they are both replicated and modified within and throughout the series. If plot is, as E.M. Forster describes it, the narrative of events with an emphasis on causality, then this arrangement can show how plot can exist in varying forms. Specifically, it can disrupt the cause and effect rationale in favor of a more dynamic associative logic. In this collection, the first series of stories revolves around a set of characters, namely three sisters; the next around a single event, an abduction; and the third around a theme, the individual forging space in the social melee. Traditional story lines can oversimplify the correlative relationship between events—a single story line allows for a single answer—and ignore the complex interactions amongst characters, the stories that contain them, and the consciousness of the reader reading them. In Serial Fictions, aspects of the stories are interchangeable but not identical. The objective, then, is to require a different type of reader interaction than that most often required by the chronological structure; that is, one of participant rather than observer. ii Table of Contents Critical Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1 I. Missing Persons ............................................................................................................. 14 Things to Consider While Locked in the Back of a U-Haul ...................................................... 15 Mitigating Circumstances ........................................................................................................... 24 Lost Self ...................................................................................................................................... 38 Three Endings ............................................................................................................................. 52 I. The Sisters ..................................................................................................................... 56 The Sisters at the Cape ............................................................................................................... 57 The Sisters at the Cape II ............................................................................................................ 74 The Sisters at the Cape III .......................................................................................................... 92 Three Endings ........................................................................................................................... 101 I. Familiar Narratives ...................................................................................................... 107 The Love Song of Goosealot and Henevere ............................................................................. 108 Granola Bars ............................................................................................................................. 118 Homunculus .............................................................................................................................. 130 Three Endings ........................................................................................................................... 143 Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 151 iii Introduction The Serial Killer and Serial Writing When I began this project, I initially thought it would be a collection of short stories that revolve around the figure of the serial killer; not so much the facts surrounding real life serial killers, as society’s perception of and fascination with the general idea of the serial killer. In his book Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture, Mark Seltzer examines how the serial killer, particularly the American serial killer, manifests as an “abnormally normal” symptom of the public/private divide in which private desire morphs into public spectacle. My work revolved around this concept, approaching mundane aspects, such as life insurance policies, through the context of the serial killer. But after writing several stories my interest in the figure of the serial killer began to fade. I began to write stories that felt tonally similar, but lacked the serial killer theme. Rather than try to make the argument that these new stories were somehow serial killer related, I went back to Seltzer’s book and looked for what else may have attracted me to it. I focused on his examination of the role public spectacle plays in the “looping effect”, which is where “public knowledge about kinds of people has a way of interacting with the people who are known about and how these people conceive of themselves” (15). It is the looping effect that transforms individuals in types. For Seltzer, this phenomenon is epitomized in the serial killer, but for me it is an implied commentary on writing, not 1 only when working within a specific genre or formal tradition, but also when working with particular themes, especially ones that may be cliché. The reader brings his or her familiarity with that tradition to the text and therefore shapes it. The writer, as both a writer and reader, cannot help but be influenced by this. Their writing, in turn, adds the public’s knowledge and perception of that type of writing. And so on. My particular mode of inquiry involves the series, since it is through a series that the looping effect is most immediately played out. This is where I finally realized my true interest was all along, not in the killer, but in the seriality of the method through which one examines the reproducibility of type in the public sphere as juxtaposed to the private. In her text “The School of the Dead”, Hélène Cixous states: “All violence has a history. When we arrive at a certain degree of subjective, phantasmic, or sociopolitical violence it both reproduces secondary violence and creates new violence” (47). That is, seriality is inextricably linked to violence, and violence, through incessant reproduction, will find its way to the public sphere. My interest then, lies in writing more about societal experiences and public psychology than personal experiences and private psychology. So I set out to write a serial collection, a collection of short stories that is a series of series. Each series consists of at least three stories of varying length; each story will have a form specific to itself. One series revolves around a group of characters, three sisters; another around a single event, an alleged abduction; and another around a theme, an individual lost in a social melee. These three aspects are commonly found organizing principles for collections. However, unlike a standard collection, the serial collection cannot be simply an accrual of “facts” within the text that reinforce each other’s legitimacy. In his article “Something from Nothing: The Disontological Poetics of Leslie 2 Scalapino”, Jason Lagapa describes Scalapino’s writing as “a serial mode of accretion” that ultimately negates itself (Lagapa 40). Lagapa uses the term “disontological poetics” to express the quality of transience or impermanence in Scalapino’s writing, in which the text cannot be said to exist as “a reified object… [but] an ongoing action or process” (35). Or, as Scalapino says, the text only exists “as occurrence” (qtd. in Lagapa 35). But I believe seriality pushes past this point, as shown in the method of the serial killer, who erases the identity of the individual and rewrites the person and the body as text. That is, reproduction involves negation first and then creation. Through negation, every element undergoes an incessant qualification, and so builds and diminishes simultaneously. These negations, then, open up the field of inquiry from one occurrence to the next, which, in the case of a collection of fiction,