After the Planes

AFTER THE PLANES Timothy Boswell Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2012 APPROVED: Miroslav Penkov, Major Professor Barbara Rodman, Committee Member John Tait, Committee Member David Holdeman, Chair of the Department of English James D. Meernik, Acting Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Boswell, Timothy. After the Planes. Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2012, 343 pp., bibliography, 21 titles. The dissertation consists of a critical preface and a novel. The preface analyzes what it terms “polyvocal” novels, or novels employing multiple points of view, as well as “layered storytelling,” or layers of textuality within novels, such as stories within stories. Specifically, the first part of the preface discusses polyvocality in twenty-first century American novels, while the second part explores layered storytelling in novels responding to World War II or the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The preface analyzes the advantages and difficulties connected to these techniques, as well as their aptitude for reflecting the fractured, disconnected, and subjective nature of the narratives we construct to interpret traumatic experiences. It also acknowledges the necessity—despite its inherent limitations—of using language to engage with this fragmentation and cope with its challenges. The preface uses numerous novels as examples and case studies, and it also explores these concepts and techniques in relation to the process of writing the novel After the Planes. After the Planes depicts multiple generations of a family who utilize storytelling as a means to work through grief, hurt, misunderstanding, and loss—whether from interpersonal conflicts or from war. Against her father’s wishes, a young woman moves in with her nearly- unknown grandfather, struggling to understand the rifts in her family and how they have shaped her own identity. She reads a book sent to her by her father, which turns out to be his story of growing up in the years following World War II. The book was intercepted and emended by her grandfather, who inserts his own commentary throughout, complicating her father’s hopes of reconciliation. The novel moves between two main narratives, one set primarily in 1951 and the other in the days and weeks immediately prior to September 11, 2001. Copyright 2012 by Timothy Boswell ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page AUTHOR’S NOTE ........................................................................................................................ iv PART I: “IT’S UNSPEAKABLE, WRITE IT”: POLYVOCAL STORYTELLING AND THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE Introduction ......................................................................................................................................2 Polyvocality .....................................................................................................................................4 Layered Storytelling.......................................................................................................................27 Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................52 Works Cited ...................................................................................................................................54 PART II: AFTER THE PLANES Chapter One ...................................................................................................................................57 Chapter Two...................................................................................................................................80 Chapter Three...............................................................................................................................109 Chapter Four ................................................................................................................................138 Chapter Five .................................................................................................................................166 Chapter Six...................................................................................................................................195 Chapter Seven ..............................................................................................................................218 Chapter Eight ...............................................................................................................................235 Chapter Nine ................................................................................................................................251 Chapter Ten ..................................................................................................................................271 Chapter Eleven .............................................................................................................................290 Chapter Twelve ............................................................................................................................295 Chapter Thirteen ..........................................................................................................................313 Chapter Fourteen ..........................................................................................................................331 iii AUTHOR’S NOTE I want to thank my committee members, John Tait and Barbara Rodman, and particularly my dissertation director, Miroslav Penkov, who all provided invaluable feedback. I also want to thank my parents for their unending support over the years. Finally, I want to thank my wife Kristina and my son Benjamin for their love, encouragement, patience, and inspiration. Although the characters and circumstances in this book are fictional, many names and locations used in the 1951 Grapevine descriptions are real people and places. However, neither B.T. Vernon Middle School nor its staff exists, and the mayor of Grapevine depicted in this book is a fictional creation and not meant to represent its mayor at the time. iv PART I “IT’S UNSPEAKABLE, WRITE IT”: POLYVOCAL STORYTELLING AND THE LIMITS OF LANGUAGE 1 Introduction In the novel written for my creative dissertation, After the Planes, multiple generations of a family utilize storytelling as a means to work through grief, hurt, misunderstanding, and loss— whether from interpersonal conflicts or from war. Written language, in varied forms, provides a means to both honor the past through remembrance and to move on through connection, comprehension, or healing. The novel, in part due to its subject matter and the events bookending the narrative (World War II and 9/11), also employs what I call a polyvocal narrative; that is, multiple voices take part in the novel, forming an overall picture from their overlapping perspectives rather than a single point of view. For simplicity’s sake, I refer to these two techniques as polyvocality (employing multiple points of view to tell a story) and layered storytelling (layers of textuality—stories within stories, etc.). Polyvocality and layered storytelling complement each other because they both reflect the fractured, disconnected, and highly subjective nature of the narratives we construct to interpret traumatic experience, as well as the necessity—despite its inherent limitations—of using language to engage with this fragmentation and cope with its challenges.1 Polyvocality and layered storytelling present a unique opportunity to grapple with events that are resistant to comprehension through more traditional narratives. Because of this, these approaches are frequently found in works grappling with trauma on a grand scale, such as Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, written in response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. Indeed, both of these approaches are frequently found in twenty-first century American novels; part of this 1 Although trauma studies provide a useful lens with which to view literature engaging with similar subjects— particularly 9/11 and World War II—the complexities of this field lie outside the scope of this paper. I use the word ‘trauma’ in the layman’s sense of personal loss, grief, shock, etc., both in response to common relational trauma (separation from a spouse, death of a child) and historically-contingent trauma such as combat duty in WWII or survival of fire-bombing in Tokyo. 2 tendency, I argue, stems from the events of 9/11 and the resulting cultural response, which in many ways paralleled that following the attacks on Pearl Harbor, with the resulting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as corollaries to involvement in World War II. Literature dealing with both time periods turned to polyvocality and layered storytelling. In this essay, I approach the topic from two directions. First, I consider polyvocality in twenty-first century American novels. My objective is not to provide a comprehensive survey of this approach in literature, but rather to use four novels as case studies to explore the advantages and challenges of this technique from a craft perspective. Although some of these novels do engage with either World War II or 9/11, my focus at this point is on discussing the technique rather than choice of setting. I also discuss how these advantages and challenges affected my own writing process for After the Planes. In the second section, I consider layered storytelling in novels that illuminate the periods surrounding World War II or 9/11 (or both, in Foer’s case, as with my own). In these novels, this

Load more