O Dio Che Bella: a Novella Project
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O Dio Che Bella: A Novella Project by James Harder B.A, University of British Columbia, 1991 Project Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences © James Harder 2018 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Fall 2018 Copyright in this work rests with the author. Please ensure that any reproduction or re-use is done in accordance with the relevant national copyright legislation. Approval Name: James Harder Degree: Master of Arts Title: O Dio Che Bella: A Novella Project Examining Committee: Chair: Gary McCarron Associate Professor, Communication and Graduate Chair, Liberal Studies Program Sasha Colby Senior Supervisor Associate Professor, Department of English and Chair, Graduate Liberal Studies Program Tom Grieve Supervisor Associate Professor, Department of English Emily O’Brien External Examiner Associate Professor, Departments of History and Humanities Date Defended/Approved: November 20, 2018 ii Abstract The question—what happens to emotionally repressed, distracted, detached, freedom- loving Anglo-North American visitors who come to Italy and actually encounter the alleged freedom that Italy offers?—is examined by means of research-creation—fiction writing: in the form of a novella, a synthesis of major GLS themes—combining artistic expression and scholarly investigation using a bricolage method of constructing objects from everyday materials by quoting from and alluding to texts: including the Prometheus Myth, Freud, and Mudford, and seventy others from GLS course syllabi. Part one shows the disorienting influence of Italian culture on the tourist; part two shows the effect of this on the visitor’s memory—seeking refuge in the everyday in thought and action can’t prevent the assault of the past on the present, and by the end the visitor’s interior world is radically changed. Theoretical influences on the novella are discussed in the preceding Statement of Intent. iii Table of Contents Abstract.............................................................................................................................iii Table of Contents..............................................................................................................iv Statement of Intent............................................................................................................ v Major Sources of Engagement...................................................................................... v Peter Mudford, Memory and Desire: Representations of Passion in the Novella...... v Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents .......................................................vi The Prometheus Myth, using Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound.................................vi Niccolò del’ Arca’s Compianto sul Cristo Morto, with notes from Campanini and Samaritani ............................................................................................................... viii Other Major Written and Verbal Sources...................................................................ix Method and Rationale ..................................................................................................xii Research and Creation.............................................................................................xii The Separation of Protagonist and Narrating Voice .................................................xii The Bricolage Method ............................................................................................. xiii Plot Timeline.................................................................................................................xv The “O Dio Che Bella” Song as Objective Correlative............................................ xvii Part One........................................................................................................................... 1 Part Two......................................................................................................................... 44 Bibliography.................................................................................................................. 79 iv Statement of Intent This project, an annotated novella, grew out of three sources: a) a short story submitted as a project for summer 2016’s LS 819 travel study course—Italy in the Ancient and Modern Imagination, b) the readings I undertook for a summer 2017 directed reading course on the form and scope of the novella, and c) subsequent readings of GLS written and verbal texts since the fall of 2015. The novella is set in Italy because it grew out of my experiences in Italy during LS 819 and out of a playful hope of nudging my way into conversation with other texts in the canon of narratives starting with those from the Grand Tour and continuing to the present day. I wanted to create a work about a character whose life is changed by his visit to Italy. In this novella, protagonist Peter Stone is subject to anxiety and he resists examining possible causes of this, which reside in his past. What follows are a summary and rationale of sources of engagement for this project, a summary and rationale for my working method, and an overview of events in the plot of the novella. Major Sources of Engagement Peter Mudford, Memory and Desire: Representations of Passion in the Novella In terms of the form of this work, Peter Mudford, in Memory and Desire: Representations of Passion in the Novella, speaks about the attributes of the novella: desire with absence, a web of forgetting and remembering—a deluded main character succumbing to motives not transparent.1 The protagonist is powerfully narcissistic,2 searching for the unmet other in himself and yet is hindered by lack of awareness and indifference.3 We see all of this in the callous unconcern Stone shows toward those who would be close to him. Mudford asserts that in the novella events isolate the character who is gripped by a desire for a self-transcendence marked by extreme states of feeling seen through belated moments of lucidity.4 In Part Two of this novella, Stone is isolated 1 See Mudford, p. 2. 2 Ibid, p. 5. 3 Ibid, p. 18. 4 Ibid, p. 26. v in Bologna and in his agitation is compelled to experience memories of his forgotten past. Memory is perhaps important to many characters in fiction, but given the significant role of memory in Stone’s life, the novella is the most appropriate form with which to explore it in this project. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents The city of Rome and the role of memory are two elements at the heart of this novella: much of this story takes place in Rome and protagonist Peter Stone is troubled by both memories he doesn’t realize he has, and memories he doesn’t want to experience. Memory is about both time and place. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud discusses the physical and temporal topography of Rome in relation to those aspects of the mind.5 Rome is a place not just of history but also of memory. And just as the physical Roman ruins of various historic periods are accessible to us today, so are our memories of times past. Freud asserts that “In mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish…everything is somehow preserved.”6 He briefly discusses excavated sections of the Servian Wall.7 And during his absent-minded exploration of the Forum where the earth allows the past to re-emerge, Stone begins to experience something of an unwitting and unwilling excavation of his memories. I set Peter Stone’s place of birth and childhood residence in the city of Vancouver in South Vancouver’s Fraserview Heights Neighbourhood. He regards this neighbourhood as recently established in comparison to Rome. And in this environment, it is as if his memories are as temporally remote as the Etruscan ruins of Rome, and locked in a place as cold, arid, and remote as the floor of an ocean trench: and in his visit to the Forum, it is as if in ancient Rome Peter has discovered a heat vent, an upwelling and life-giving source around which life, and memories, can thrive. The Prometheus Myth, using Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound In “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” TS Eliot discusses using myth in fiction to “manipulate the continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity…to give a shaped significance to the anarchy of contemporary history.”8 I used a myth to help 5 See Freud, p. 296. 6 Ibid, p. 295. 7 Ibid, p. 296. 8 See Eliot, p. 130. vi shape this novella, which traverses, for the frequently disoriented protagonist, back and forth between past and present. PB Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound discussed in the LS 819 course readings led me to use the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus as a major source for this novella. Aeschylus’s figure of Io, transformed into a cow, stung and pursued by a gadfly, is one model after which I build my protagonist. In the novella, Peter Stone encounters cows transposed as vocabulary in an Italian language exercise, a brand name, and the figure of an ornamental doorstop. In Shelley’s retelling, which refers to Prometheus’s future torment, the eagle’s beak is dipped in Jupiter’s poisonous saliva. Io’s stinging in the Aeschylus play and Prometheus’s poisoning as discussed in association with the Shelley text relate to Peter Stone’s suffering from cellulitis as a result of an insect bite in this novella. Other elements link the novella to the Prometheus myth as well. In the Aeschylus play, the earth shakes; in the novella, the earth shakes from an earthquake, which occurs