All the Things I've Been Richard Helmling University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected]

University of Texas at El Paso DigitalCommons@UTEP Open Access Theses & Dissertations 2010-01-01 All the Things I've Been Richard Helmling University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Helmling, Richard, "All the Things I've Been" (2010). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 2498. https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd/2498 This is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ALL THE THINGS I’VE BEEN A NOVEL RICHARD HELMLING Department of Creative Writing APPROVED: Jeffrey Sirkin, Ph.D., Chair Daniel Chacon, MFA Jonna Perrillo, Ph.D. Patricia D. Witherspoon, Ph.D. Dean of the Graduate School Copyright © by Richard Helmling 2010 Dedication For Claudia, who survived it. “The love story is the tribute the lover must pay to the world in order to be reconciled with it.” -The Lover’s Discourse Roland Barthes ALL THE THINGS I’VE BEEN by RICHARD HELMLING, B.A. THESIS Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Department of Creative Writing THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO December 2010 Acknowledgements I want to extend my thanks to all my peers in the MFA program at UTEP and online across the globe who have helped me grow as a writer during my time studying alongside them. Special thanks go to the members of my committee from whom I have learned so much (and in such different ways). vi Table of Contents Introduction..................................................................................................................................viii All the Things I’ve Been...................................................................................................................1 References....................................................................................................................................181 vii Introduction In the spring of 2009, I wrote a short story titled “Freshman Composition” as an exercise in intertextuality for a Postmodern fiction class. In this story, the narrator becomes disassociated from reality and allows tropes and plot elements from literature to consume his consciousness. He copes with his professional and personal disappointments by imagining himself transposed with different protagonists from Victorian and Romantic literature. I was dissatisfied with this first effort as it amounted to little more than a literarily themed Walter Mitty. I wanted to explore a plot driven by a narrator who went beyond simply escaping his reality through literature. I wanted to create a narrator who actually fashioned his own reality with these elements of fiction so that the final work would act as an interrogation of the process through which an individual’s conception of reality is constructed. My second effort was a short story titled “All the Things I’ve Been,” which preserved little more from “Freshman Composition” than this central concern with intertextuality as a means of defining identity and the original narrator’s impulse toward vengeful rage. This second attempt features a narrator who has withdrawn into a subterranean lair beneath an urban center, where he maintains a liminal existence. He imagines himself separate from the reality of the world above him, even as he frequently interacts with it, and he reshapes his perceptions of that world and his own confused memories of his past life both consciously and unconsciously through his readings of the literature he has hoarded in his basement. This draft functioned much more satisfactorily for me, but it also began to open spaces that I felt were worth greater attention. I decided that the ideas in “All the Things I’ve Been” warranted a fuller exploration and resolved to expand the short story into a novel-length piece structured in a similar fashion and dealing with the same underlying story. It may seem obvious that a novel that grew out of work for a Postmodern fiction class would situate itself within a Postmodern context, but that was not a placement I was immediately comfortable with, even as I started early planning for the project. Obviously, Postmodernism has developed a viii reputation as a particularly difficult paradigm to characterize. Hutcheon’s sentiment that “labels are always comforting, but often also castrating” (5) seems a particularly apt caution in trying to define a Postmodern context for any contemporary work of fiction. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot argues that, “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” The bearing of his argument on a Postmodern tradition rife with, if not dominated by pastiche and intertextuality is obvious. Julie Sanders offers a concise paraphrasing of this common lament, saying, “Nothing new, nothing original, be it in the domain of art, music, film, or literature, is possible anymore. We come too late to do anything unique” (157). According to these writers, the weight of history creates for an individual artist a sense of despair at the lack of novelty, at the inability to create an existence of any consequence in a society engineered to meet the needs of post-industrial capitalism’s cruel and inexhaustible logic. Eliot, of course, wrote before the onset of this malaise, but his thesis anticipates it. He writes that, “Some one said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.” Definitions of Postmodernism that frame the paradigm in terms of this relationship to the past and the products of popular culture seem particularly castrating, leaving only a sense of what Jameson called “depthlessness” (12). In The Postmodern Condition, though, Lyotard utilizes a lexicon to articulate the boundaries of Postmodernism in a way that is inclusive of the thematic territory covered by All the Things I’ve Been and, rather than limiting, offers a scaffold to incorporate a wide array of thinking about consciousness and narrative. Lyotard identifies narrative as a type of knowledge, distinct from the rational and empirical pretensions of scientific knowledge (7). Under Postmodernism, the metanarratives that formerly dominated Western thought have been delegitimized (37), allowing for a plurality of “language games” that can exist outside the traditional boundaries dividing fields of scientific knowledge (39-40). As a result of this erosion of metanarratives, Lyotard argues that the individual’s sense of place within a grand narrative is also lost. The “self does not amount to much,” but each individual does exist “in a ix fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile” (15). Individuals become nodal points through which the language games of lesser narratives are negotiated. Lyotard describes the power of the individual to alter the structure of this narrative knowledge, asserting that “no one...is ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and position him at the post of sender, addressee, or referent” (15). The function of narrative for Lyotard is to define the nodal point at which one finds himself--to both explain past behavior and rationalize subsequent actions. My interest lies in examining the mechanics of these contextual language games, of these narratives that define us. In my early thinking about my novel, I found myself connecting this role of narrative to Cognitive Science and Meme Theory, both of which attempt to couch themselves within the language and legitimation strictures of scientific knowledge. Cognitive Science holds that narrative is the fundamental currency of human thought (Turner 4) and that all “higher” thought can be reduced to expressions and permutations of narrative knowledge. On the other hand, Meme Theory describes the transmission of ideas using a Darwinian model, describing discreet, transmissible ideas as “memes.” Those ideas that are most successful, that confer some sort of motivational advantage on their “hosts” will be more likely to be adopted by others and then be propagated further (Lynch 8-9). These quasi-scientific models offer useful lenses to view the moment Lyotard references, the moment I wanted to explore in my novel, when an individual is a node in the exchange of narrative knowledge. Lyotard argues that individuals are “not entirely powerless” at these points of intersection between infectious narrative memes and the unconscious, but Cognitive Science and Meme Theory insist that the individual’s power is bound by a number of involuntary processes, suggesting that the power of the individual at a nodal point over the narratives that “traverse and position” him is difficult to wield constructively. All the Things I’ve Been depicts a narrator suspended in just such a nodal state--in fact, the narrator operates in this capacity at a number of different levels. The text itself represents what Chatman would call the “discourse” of the x narrative, which is comparable to Lyotard’s metanarrative. For Chatman, the term “story” refers to a series of events contingent on elements he calls existents, but “plot” represents the rendering of these story elements through discourse (43). It is in the rendering of story as plot that an author emphasizes incident, sequence,

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