University of New Mexico UNM Digital Repository English Language and Literature ETDs Electronic Theses and Dissertations 6-25-2010 Blood Heist Dan Darling Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds Recommended Citation Darling, Dan. "Blood Heist." (2010). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/50 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Electronic Theses and Dissertations at UNM Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Language and Literature ETDs by an authorized administrator of UNM Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. i ii BLOOD HEIST BY DAN DARLING BA, English, College of Wooster, 1999 DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico May 2010 iii by ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of The University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico iv Blood Heist Dan Darling BS, English, College of Wooster, 1999 Master of Fine Arts, Creative Writing, University of New Mexico 2010 Abstract A novel of fiction. John Stick, along with his two best friends, Spartacus Rex and Leon Flowers, rob a blood bank with the intent to sell the blood in Mexico. On the way, the ice cream truck that they have converted to transport the blood breaks down, and they become stranded in the desert. Stick notices that one of the bags of blood belongs to his ex-girlfriend, Cryopathria Rex, with whom he is still in love. Stick tries to take the blood back to Albuquerque out of guilt. Rex and Flowers stop him. The three men have en escalating feud, which leads to Flowers and Rex tying Stick to a tree and soaking him with several bags of blood and leaving him to die. Flowers and Rex ride south on a team of ostriches that Flowers has stolen from Crazy Patti LeBeau. Stick is rescued by a woman from Mexico named Alma. Together they pursue Flowers and Rex. On the way they encounter an alpaca farm, an Apache policeman named Chuck, the chupacabras, a vengeful Patti LeBeau, before they finally confront Rex in the Rio Grande gorge on the border of Texas and Mexico. The novel explores themes of masculinity, trauma, betrayal, friendship, and the American-Mexican border. It is constructed with particular attention to character construction and imagery. It fits into the broad category of Post-Western literature. v Table of Contents Preface: Synthesist Writing . iv Blood Heist Chapter 1: The Giant . 1 Chapter 2: The Brine Shrimp . 4 Chapter 3: The Scrapyard Dream. .12 Chapter 4: How to Catch a Brown Recluse . 20 Chapter 5: Cry . 29 Chapter 6: The Ostrich Rider . 52 Chapter 7: Positive Energy. 66 Chapter 8: The Blackjack Chicken . 78 Chapter 9: Broken Promises. 90 Chapter 10: The Fire . 102 Chapter 11: The Cottonwood Tree . 111 Chapter 12: Trapped . 116 Chapter 13: Alma and the Tandem Bike Pilgrimage . 125 Chapter 14: Mescaline Popsicles and the Chupacabras . 143 Chapter 15: Marika . 165 Chapter 16: The Internet Van . 171 Chapter 17: The Blood Heist . 182 Chapter 18: Flowers . 195 Chapter 19: The Flood . 202 Chapter 20: Uncle John . 213 Dan Darling/ Critical Preface vi Synthesist Writing: An Assessment of Contemporary Literary Production Since the turn of the new millennium arguments in the world of art, philosophy, and literature have surfaced across the Western world claiming that the postmodern era has passed. According to a wide range of thinkers, the days of literary production utilizing irony, relativism, and deconstruction to destabilize the grand Western narrative of history are over. Concurrent with declarations of the “end” of the literary movement that characterized American literature since World War II is a scramble across fields of academia, literature, and art to name the new trend. So far these names include late-postmodernism, post-postmodernism, reconstructivism, performatism, pseudo-modernism, remodernism, alter-modernism, pragmatism, critical realism, neo-realism, new-sincerity, stuckism, minimalism, maximalism, image-fiction, and hybrid fiction —none of which has yet taken predominant hold. While the names vary, examination of the various schools of thought behind them reveals common trends in their description of current artistic and literary production. To the end of deciphering these trends, this preface is a survey of surveys: it contains findings from several books that have amalgamated fiction, criticism, and theory into whole studies of “post- postmodern” writing; it utilizes critical articles that focus on a particular writer, movement, or trend; it also paraphrases a welter of chatter from the web, gathered from theorists, critics, anonymously authored online encyclopedias, radical artistic groups, museum curators, and bloggers. Though I am not particularly qualified as an expert of post-postmodern literary Dan Darling/ Critical Preface vii production, I have managed through these sources to get a strong sense of contemporary discourse on this issue. My goal is not necessarily to weigh in on who is right and who is wrong —indeed, contemporary writing is so diverse that those terms do not apply—but rather to identify overall trends and extrapolate the demands they make on literary craft that I may apply to my own work. To add further dimension to my survey of post-postmodern theories, I will discuss the work of four novelists—E. Annie Proulx, Salman Rushdie, Cormac McCarthy, and Luis Alberto Urrea—who have been dubbed post-postmodern, and juxtapose their work with one of the most often cited postmodernists: Thomas Pynchon. Finally, to add further theoretical context I will apply the theories of Jean-Francoise Lyotard, Immanuel Kant, and Italo Calvino, as they pertain to the craft of fiction. My study focuses attention on two particular craft elements: image and character. Image has come to the forefront of literary craft primarily due to materialist causes. Over the past half century, with the rise of television and film, Western culture has become increasingly permeated with visual imagery. In the past twenty years our transformation into an image-laden culture has accelerated logarithmically: television has become even more entrenched and pervasive, while computers and the internet have exploded into a virtually infinite image-based alternate reality. This is not a negative trend. In fact, it allows the contemporary writer a unique opportunity to connect with a readership trained in reading visual rhetoric through vivid, apt, and unique images. Our transition from postmodern to post-postmodern culture is also rooted in a surge in focus on the individual in literature. Postmodern fiction’s agenda is often to highlight the unreliability of a singular narrative, implying that the perspective of a single individual— Dan Darling/ Critical Preface viii especially a power-holding individual—is imperfect and relative; thus, often postmodern writers create conflict between individuals representative of different groups. Pynchon, for example, was less interested in resolving the internal conflict of Gravity’s Rainbow’s Slothrop than he was in tracing the complex network of conflict between colonized and colonizer, powerful and powerless. The focus was, thus, not on the individual, but on identity groups. Our culture has experienced a surge in individualism in the past twenty years, fueled in large part materially. Just as the internet has created a culture accustomed to image-based communication, it has also created a culture wherein the “reader” has unprecedented power in cultural production. Not only does the reader participate in the creation of commercial texts— such as call-in television shows—but the reader can also create texts expressive of herself as an individual—e.g. Facebook profiles—and distribute them globally via the internet. To connect with such a reader, who arguably is encouraged to individuate herself more now than during many other periods in history, obviating traditional identity groups, a writer must locate the conflict of story internally within a character. This implies not only a shift in the locus of conflict, but the creation of a rich character who seems as complex as a real person, with a point of view close to that character’s consciousness—and thus a departure from the radicalized omniscience of Pynchon-esque postmodernists. In this way post-postmodern writing is a return to Modernism, with its exploration of the individual psyche; it is no coincidence that many of the attempts to name post-postmodernism imply a return to that era. The remainder of this essay will focus on post-postmodernist fiction that draws strength from a conjunction of image and character. The first section will utilize Proulx and Rushdie to illustrate the use of imagery to structure narrative and craft characters; the latter half will address Dan Darling/ Critical Preface ix point of view and ethnic relativism in the works of McCarthy and Urrea as manifestations of New Western literature. I have chosen these particular authors because of the influence they have had on my own writing; also, since my novel is a work of New Western literature, I’ve included craft-focused discussions of that genre. “Post-postmodernism” is an unwieldy—and farcically idiosyncratic—term. Though the purpose of my study was not to develop my own definition and nomenclature for contemporary literature, nor even to deem one name appropriate over others, I find myself drifting toward dialectical terminology. The patterns in post-postmodern discourse indicate a recursion to modernism in its tying a search for truth to the consciousness of an individual, and a simultaneous adherence to postmodern lessons of cultural multiplicity. In this way, post- postmodernism can be seen as the resolution of dialectical conflict: if modernism served as a thesis, and postmodernism as an antithetical reaction to it, then post-postmodernism appears to serve as a synthesis of the two.