University of Cincinnati

UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:___________________ I, _________________________________________________________, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in: It is entitled: This work and its defense approved by: Chair: _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences 2006 by Darrin Michael Doyle B.A. Western Michigan University, 1996 M.F.A. Western Michigan University, 1999 Committee Chair: Brock Clarke, Ph.D. The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions: Short Stories Darrin Doyle Dissertation Abstract My creative work focuses on the notion of belief – not religious belief, necessarily, but belief (mistaken or not) in our ability to control the circumstances that shape us: as Wallace Stevens wrote, “It is the belief and not the god that counts.” Thematically, my works feature the following characteristics: elements of the fantastic; dark humor; and working-class protagonists who seek to palliate some unnamable dissatisfaction in their lives and who seek this correction through obsessive behavior that might be either wonderfully healing or terribly misguided – the results are in the eye of the beholder. The tensions between the fantastic and the realistic, between blue-collar and academic concerns, between knowing and not-knowing, between what we internally perceive and the external truth – unresolved oppositions like these are what create the lasting effects of literature, and they are what I strive to cultivate in my writing. Such binaries constitute the mystery and meaning of fiction, and they are, to quote Flannery O’Connor, what “keeps the short story from being short.” DISSERTATION PROSPECTUS..............................................................................................................................2 THE ODDS.................................................................................................................................................................11 TUGBOAT TO TRAVERSE CITY.........................................................................................................................23 BARNEY HESTER ...................................................................................................................................................35 HA-HA, SHIRT .........................................................................................................................................................59 THE HICCUP KING ................................................................................................................................................74 UNDER A SPELL .....................................................................................................................................................92 KALEIDOSCOPE...................................................................................................................................................115 TWO GIRLS, A CONVERSE, A ROCK ..............................................................................................................130 POOR, POOR RALPH ...........................................................................................................................................151 SORES......................................................................................................................................................................169 THE BIG BABY CRIME SPREE..........................................................................................................................190 TEARS, (NOT SO) IDLE TEARS: EMPATHY AND IMAGINATION IN THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM ...................................................................................................................................................................................215 Dissertation Prospectus for Darrin Michael Doyle Committee Chair: Brock Clarke Committee: Michael Griffith Jim Schiff My dissertation is made up of two parts: a collection of short stories entitled The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions fulfills the creative component; the critical component is a scholarly essay called “Tears, (Not So) Idle Tears: Empathy and Imagination in The Rise of Silas Lapham.” I have scheduled my defense for August 2nd, 2006, and will graduate that same month. CREATIVE DISSERTATION The Big Baby Crime Spree and Other Delusions: Short Stories My collection focuses on the notion of belief – not religious belief, necessarily, but belief (mistaken or not) in our ability to control the circumstances that shape us. Thematically, my stories feature all or some of the following: elements of the fantastic; dark humor; and working-class protagonists who seek to palliate some unnamable dissatisfaction in their lives and who seek this correction through obsessive behavior that might be either wonderfully healing or terribly misguided. I have always been drawn toward transformation literature and literature that employs elements of the preternatural, such as Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Edgar Allan Poe’s short 2 stories, and more recent works like the fiction of Judy Budnitz and Aimee Bender, which utilize lyrical writing and inventive metaphors to defamiliarize the mundane. The fantastic is a satisfying mode for aesthetic reasons, but also because it forefronts my theoretical interest in the merging of epistemological and ontological concerns. That is, the fantastic can create, to use Michel Foucault’s term, a “heterotopy” of worlds by thrusting two or more disparate realities into the same story and thereby forcing the characters (and by extension, the reader) to question both our knowledge of the world as well as what designates a “world” in the first place. The result is an unsettling blend of comedy and dark pathos in a setting that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. In my story “Barney Hester,” the narrator is a grown man who, as part of his therapy, is finally committing to paper the experience of losing a childhood friend – the titular twelve-year- old boy who was swallowed whole, in front of the narrator’s eyes, by a neighborhood girl. “Tugboat to Traverse City” tells of a rustic sightseeing boat that becomes engulfed in impenetrable fog while chugging northward on Lake Michigan. When a feverish five-year-old jumps overboard and cannot be found, mania builds among the tourists until most of them, in a bizarre suicidal debauch, also leap into the water. The final remaining group huddles together on the deck, shutting the tragedy out of their minds, passively waiting for the captain to emerge from his quarters, comfortable in their belief that inaction is the only appropriate action. “Sores” deals similarly with issues of faith and action, as a man tries without success to discover the root- cause and cure of unsightly but painless and harmless lesions that gradually and mysteriously cover his body. I believe that fiction’s power derives from its detachment from the known world: “the artist creates, by the energy of his mind…a world that isn’t there, a dream…the deeper his trance and the greater his divorce from ordinary reality, the greater is likely to be the 3 effect of the artist’s work on the reader” (Gardener 203, 204). Kafka’s K. “stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him” (The Castle, 3), and I believe fiction in general – but especially stories that employ the absurd and the fantastic – gives us opportunities to gaze at this “illusory emptiness,” the captivating unreality that in fact has a great deal of substance. Even while I tout the benefits of fantastic fiction, I admire and emulate many writers in the realist tradition, from Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and John Cheever to the so-called dirty realism of Raymond Carver. Carver eloquently describes the potential strength of lean, exact prose: “It’s possible…to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things – a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring – with immense, even startling power” (89). Hemingway makes a similar call, saying, “It is accuracy of perception, not solemnity of tone, that counts” (Douglas 35). While I certainly don’t always apply such a rigidly photographic approach to my own fiction, I do keep these ideas in my mind as I write, recalling the warning of Cynthia Ozick that “Too much metaphor overloads us with softness” (177). Like the aforementioned realist writers, my stories also feature blue-collar, sometimes uneducated protagonists who are confined by the circumstances of their working lives. For example, “The Odds” deals with a thirty-year-old man who lives with his grandmother. The man believes he is gifted at spotting people with a “loser profile” and thus earns his income by betting against such types at pool halls (he doesn’t play; he simply watches, assesses, and bets against the one likely to lose). When his grandmother has a brain aneurysm and needs surgery, the man decides that his only chance to break a long line of genetic bad luck (his dad and two of his uncles have died of various diseases) is to wager

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