THE CAPITAL of ELSEWHERE: PLACES, FICTIONS, HOUSTONS a Dissertation by CLIFFORD WALLACE HUDDER Submitted to the Office of Gradua
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THE CAPITAL OF ELSEWHERE: PLACES, FICTIONS, HOUSTONS A Dissertation by CLIFFORD WALLACE HUDDER Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, David McWhirter Committee Members, Juan Alonzo Emily Johansen Jonathan Smith Head of Department, Maura Ives May 2018 Major Subject: English Copyright 2018 Clifford Wallace Hudder ABSTRACT This study examines the manner in which fictional works illuminate the complex identity of place by investigating authors associated with a single American city, Houston, Texas, focusing chapter length studies on four: Donald Barthelme, Rick Bass, Farnoosh Moshiri, and Tony Diaz. Its methodological framework is the “geocritical” approach, wherein, as stated by Bertrand Westphal, “[t]he study of the viewpoint of an author or of a series of authors . will be superseded in favor of examining a multiplicity of heterogeneous points of view, which all converge in a given place, the primum mobile of the analysis.” This multifocal approach reveals Houston as a place of unusual juxtapositions formed by freeway culture, fluidity of categories due to a lack of zoning regulations, a “timelessness” resulting from constant bulldozing of the past, and a powerful concern for market forces owing to a laissez-faire attitude towards business and regulation, brought together in what architect Peter Rowe labels the city’s “ever-present and unvarnished capacity for destabilization and shape-shifting.” Variations of the place-experience of Houston based on the four authors’ heterogeneous viewpoints are examined, and potential drawbacks of the geocritical model in identifying the nature of place through the lens of literature are explored. ii To Kazumi and Dylan iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee chair, Dr. David McWhirter, and my committee members, Dr. Juan Alonzo, Dr. Emily Johansen, and Dr. Jonathan Smith, for their guidance and support throughout the course of this research. Thanks also go to my friends and colleagues and the department faculty and staff for making my time at Texas A&M University a great experience. I’m especially grateful to Walter Buenger, Michael Collins, Angie Cruz, Susan Egenolf, Lucia Hodgson, M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Jerome Loving, Janet McCann, Claudia Nelson, Sally Robinson, Chuck Taylor, Lowell Mick White and Jennifer Wollock. I would never have been able to track the details of this process from a distance without the frequent assistance of Paulette Hoelscher. Thanks to my friends and colleagues at Lone Star College – Montgomery for their encouragement over many years of effort, especially President Rebecca Riley, Vice President of Instruction James McGee, my Dean, Barbara Buchanan, my other Dean, Brandy Harvey, Simone Andrade, Andrea Bacorn, Romana Cortese, Ron Heckelman, Norseman Hernandez, Martina Kusi-Mensah, Mary Lasco, Lana Myers, David Pyle, David Wickham and David Zimmermann. I’m grateful for the time offered to me by Tony Diaz and Farnoosh Moshiri for personal interviews, without which this project would have been impossible. Thanks for the support of friends Natasha Alvandi, Alan Ainsworth, Sylvia Berg, Diana Bourdier, David Samuel Levinson, Cassandra Tomchick, and Randall Watson. Thank you all. iv CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES Contributors This work was supervised by a dissertation committee consisting of Professor David McWhirter, Professor Juan Alonzo, and Professor Emily Johansen of the Department of English and Professor Jonathan Smith of the Department of Geography. All other work conducted for the dissertation was completed by the student independently. Funding Sources There are no outside funding contributions to acknowledge related to the research and compilation of this document. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................ ii DEDICATION .......................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................... iv CONTRIBUTERS AND FUNDING SOURCES ...................................................... v TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................... vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: THE CAPITAL OF ELSEWHERE ..................... 1 Endnotes – Chapter I .......................................................................... 32 Works Cited – Chapter I .................................................................... 33 CHAPTER II “I WANT TO GO SOMEWHERE WHERE EVERYTHING IS DIFFERENT.” DONALD BARTHELME, HOUSTONIAN ................... 38 Endnotes – Chapter II ........................................................................ 87 Works Cited – Chapter II ................................................................... 92 CHAPTER III “TO LOOK AT THE SNOW LIKE A CHILD, OR A TEXAN.” RICK BASS, HOUSTONIAN ............................................ 98 Endnotes – Chapter III ....................................................................... 131 Works Cited – Chapter III .................................................................. 134 CHAPTER IV “WE’RE ALL REFUGEES IN A WAY.” FARNOOSH MOSHIRI, HOUSTONIAN ..................................................... 140 Endnotes – Chapter IV ....................................................................... 180 Works Cited – Chapter IV ................................................................. 186 CHAPTER V “HOW DO I MAKE MY COIN? I COINED A PHRASE. SOMOS LIBROTRAFICANTES.” TONY DIAZ, HOUSTONIAN .................. 192 Endnotes – Chapter V ........................................................................ 229 Works Cited – Chapter V ................................................................... 231 vi Page CHAPTER VI CONCLUSION: SPACE CITY ........................................................ 237 Endnotes – Chapter VI ....................................................................... 253 Works Cited – Chapter VI ................................................................. 254 vii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: THE CAPITAL OF ELSEWHERE Yet Houston was no monolith; it was, as one of its writers would say, a whiskey and trombone town, openly in conflict with itself, and its very disorder had encouraged a rough and open democracy. Willie Morris – North Toward Home This study examines the manner in which fictional works illuminate the complex identity of place. It investigates authors associated with a single American city, Houston, Texas, focusing chapter length studies on four of these: Donald Barthelme, Rick Bass, Farnoosh Moshiri, and Tony Diaz. As a methodological framework the dissertation utilizes what Bertrand Westphal and others have come to call the “geocritical” approach, wherein “[t]he study of the viewpoint of an author or of a series of authors . will be superseded in favor of examining a multiplicity of heterogeneous points of view, which all converge in a given place, the primum mobile of the analysis” (Westphal Geocriticism 122). Since the spatial turn in humanistic studies inaugurated by theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, Michel Foucault and others, “place” has come to be seen not as a static and unchanging dimension, but a fluid product created by a process of social relations. It is a product, however, that produces. As ecocritic Barry Lopez puts it: “The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual is affected by land as it is by genes” (in Buell 83). Literary studies tend to focus on those interior landscapes, emphasizing the artistic 1 representations authors produce. In this study such products, and the narrative strategies they perform, will serve as a means for better understanding the “character and subtlety” of the exterior spatial milieu from which they arise. The current impulse to investigate spatial issues in the humanities is most often traced to experiential developments of the post-World War II era when dominating influences arose such as acceleration of travel and the resulting interconnectedness of locales once considered distant; globalization in its various forms, including financial; new ways of considering the spatial due to digital communication, social media, and paradigms such as cyberspace; and many other alterations to experience that express what Marxist geographer David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity (1990) termed “time-space compression” (284). For scholars, geocritic Eric Prieto notes, this compression results in a realization that while “every era is, in its own way, a transitional era,” current developments may be characterized by “an uncommonly rapid pace of cultural and technological evolution”: Demographic upheaval, migratory circulation, economic liberalization, technological innovation, environmental change, and all the other motors of geo- cultural flux have disrupted many of the practices that have traditionally given us a sense of belonging to a place or community, and they have done so in a spectacularly short period of time. These transformative processes have necessarily generated new modes of spatial organization. (Literature Geography 8) Harvey, in 1996’s Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, indicates how spatial metaphors have entered the current era’s modes of communication.