ABSTRACT Title of Document: THE RAMPARTS SUBLIME: A NOVEL Heather Marlene Zadig Master of Fine Arts 2012 Directed By: Professor Howard Norman Department of English The prevailing concerns throughout this work of fiction are the questions of Who is family? and Where is home? It is a narrative which explores questions of identity in the context of modern American cultural mobility, wherein the boundaries of identity have been variously blurred, blended, and occupied by the forces of modernity and globalization. The narrative seeks to examine the usefulness of such boundaries within individual human relationships and, in particular, explores the potential for the blues as an art form to foster human relationships that are familial in nature, not in spite of its historical context but rather because of it. That the narrator himself is uncomfortably self-conscious of his own narration is representative of the novel’s preoccupation with the problems of white discourse on race and cultural identity and the limits of language in general in attempts to explore and transcend such issues. THE RAMPARTS SUBLIME: A NOVEL By Heather Marlene Zadig Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts 2012 Advisory Committee: Professor Howard Norman, Chair Professor Maud Casey Professor Emily Mitchell © Copyright by Heather Marlene Zadig 2012 Table of Contents Table of Contents ........................................................................................................ ii Epigraph ...................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 ..................................................................................................................... 2 Chapter 2 ................................................................................................................... 12 Chapter 3 ................................................................................................................... 30 Chapter 4 ................................................................................................................... 40 Chapter 5 ................................................................................................................... 46 Chapter 6 ................................................................................................................... 60 Chapter 7 ................................................................................................................... 68 Chapter 8 ................................................................................................................... 78 Chapter 9 ................................................................................................................... 86 Chapter 10 ............................................................................................................... 102 Chapter 11 ............................................................................................................... 108 Chapter 12 ............................................................................................................... 124 Chapter 14 ............................................................................................................... 135 Chapter 15 ............................................................................................................... 138 Chapter 16 ............................................................................................................... 153 Chapter 17 ............................................................................................................... 166 Chapter 18 ............................................................................................................... 179 Chapter 19 ............................................................................................................... 183 Chapter 20 ............................................................................................................... 191 Chapter 21 ............................................................................................................... 206 Chapter 22 ............................................................................................................... 216 Chapter 23 ............................................................................................................... 219 Chapter 24 ............................................................................................................... 225 ii Chapter 25 ............................................................................................................... 233 Chapter 26 ............................................................................................................... 242 Chapter 27 ............................................................................................................... 258 Chapter 28 ............................................................................................................... 261 Chapter 29 ............................................................................................................... 268 Chapter 30 ............................................................................................................... 279 Chapter 31 ............................................................................................................... 307 Chapter 32 ............................................................................................................... 317 Chapter 33 ............................................................................................................... 322 Chapter 34 ............................................................................................................... 324 Chapter 35 ............................................................................................................... 331 Chapter 36 ............................................................................................................... 335 Chapter 37 ............................................................................................................... 337 Chapter 38 ............................................................................................................... 343 Chapter 39 ............................................................................................................... 350 iii Epigraph There are loved ones in the glory Whose dear forms you often miss. When you close your earthly story, Will you join them in their bliss? Will the circle be unbroken By and by, Lord, by and by? Is a better home awaiting In the sky, Lord, in the sky? You remember songs of heaven Which you sang with childish voice. Do you love the hymns they taught you, Or are songs of earth your choice? You can picture happy gath'rings Round the fireside long ago, And you think of tearful partings When they left you here below. One by one their seats were emptied. One by one they went away. Now the family is parted. Will it be complete one day? from “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”, hymn by Ada R. Habershon, 1907 1 Chapter 1 Grams was dead, and the ghosts of long-dead redwoods were rising up from the forests to welcome her into the afterlife. At least, that’s how it appeared to me as I made the drive up the 101 from SFO to the Lost Coast of California, the region of my birth and boyhood, to make it home for the wake and funeral. Admittedly, I was in a daze from the news and from waking up several hours before dawn to catch the first flight out of D.C. to get there, so my mind was suggestible at best due to the lack of sleep. I never could get any shut-eye on a plane, something too public about it I guess. I’d heard it had been an unusually dry spring out West, which was confirmed by the hillsides pocked with charred patches of forest from the smattering of recent early wildfires throughout the region. Though a brief shower had brought momentary relief overnight, it wasn’t enough to put out all the fires, and now I was greeted on my journey home by the unlikely pairing of the swirling mists typical of mid spring and the seemingly similar and yet fundamentally disparate wisps of smoke undulating among the water vapor, so closely intertwined that they seemed to be in rapt conversation with one another, in a dance together, though they were anathema to each other’s existence. These were the ghastly apparitions which welcomed me home for the first time in over a decade, and they gave me the feeling that I should expect a reckoning when I arrived. What I found as I pulled up to the homestead, which, being a mile away from anybody, was in this case not a euphemism, was G-pa, bent over some old jalopy out by the barn as always, and the pup I had nursed from a bottle after finding it whimpering near its dead mother on the side of a road the last summer I’d been there years ago. Now a feeble old dog, she was white in the face and barking cautiously from the porch at my 2 approach as she would for any stranger. And who could blame the poor creature; I had been away for so long. It had been almost as long that G-pa had had anything to say to me whenever I’d called and talked with Grams about how things were going back home, and how things were going with me out in the world. He’d never gotten over the fact that Mom had moved us to the Central Valley after my father’s untimely