She's Not There

She’s Not There by Karen W. Bridges A creative project submitted to Sonoma State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English Committee Members: Stefan Kiesbye Noelle Oxenhandler May 4, 2018 i Copyright 2018 By Karen W. Bridges ii Authorization for Reproduction of Master’s Project Permission to reproduce parts of this project must be obtained from me. I do not approve the reproduction of this project either in part or in its entirety. Date: May 4, 2018 Name: Karen W. Bridges iii She’s Not There Creative Project by Karen Winona Bridges ABSTRACT She’s Not There is a collection of short stories that will unsettle the reader. Each story is grounded in a theme of isolation and disconnection. It begins with a prologue that will set the tone of betrayal, the pursuit of something or someone lost, and urgent longings for connection with other people that always seem to remain just out of reach. Subsequent stories probe deeper into these motifs—a man is followed by an ethereal and tortuous woman. Another woman, curious and undone by grief, turns to technology with hopes of healing with devastating consequences. A wife must insist on her own reality when her husband returns from an overseas trip seven inches shorter. The idea of a constant self, the process of memory, the notion that we know what is real, our ability to connect with other people—all of these dissolve as the characters encounter profound existential crises in everyday situations. iv Table of Contents Introduction 1 Works Cited 21 Prologue 22 Strange Cities 27 It’s a Good Life For Night Taking 38 The Hanged Man 60 Six Days in April 77 Seven Inches 92 The Lost Hour 114 v 1 Introduction of Project When I entered the program, I was a secret writer. I began my undergraduate career as a dual art and art history major, but switched to anthropology as soon as I took a linguistics class. Language had always fascinated me (I was a French minor, as well) and I was drawn to its intricacies, mechanics and evolution. I earned a BA in Cultural Anthropology, which gave me a broad and extensive education in human nature, and addressed a lot of the same questions that fascinate writers: where do we come from, why do we do what we do? While I was not studying literature or creative writing directly, I was still writing in my free time and accumulating knowledge that enriched my writing, but I kept my creative work to myself. I was drawn to Sonoma State’s graduate program because it was one of the few that offered an English degree and the opportunity to study literature as well as creative writing. In the eight years that had passed between getting my undergraduate degree and admittance to the program, my reading and writing was entirely self-directed. My stories, several short ones and a few attempts at novels, had never been shown to anyone. I thought my focus would be on nineteenth century English literature; I thought I would write a novel. But by the end of my first term in the program, everything had changed. I was introduced to Modernist literature and authors. The support and feedback I received in workshops bolstered my confidence, instilled an appropriate amount of humility, and helped me find a voice in genre and form. Throughout the next two years, my writing continued to develop and every class I took exposed me to literature I would never have read otherwise, and through that reading came ideas that influenced my work. 2 What follows is She’s Not There, a collection of short stories that is more than the sum of its parts. While they comprise a cohesive work with common themes, they also display my growth as a writer, and a spectrum of influences from Chaucer to Virginia Woolf. Cultural, literary, and linguistic theory also greatly influenced my work. Structuralism and post-structuralism, psychoanalytic theory as well as gothic themes, from Lacan, Derrida, and Kristeva, helped me consider my work on a technical level. I see my work, with its broad influences, as part of a variety of literary traditions but also something new. I want to create something unique, subversive, and quietly disruptive. It isn’t shocking or obvious, but my hope is that it will unsettle, disquiet, and linger with an audience long after the pages are turned. Themes Isolation and disconnection from society; guilt and grief The root for this dominant theme is personal experience, but developed and nuanced by Modernist theory and writing. As a child, I moved around frequently, and I continued (and continue) to move frequently as an adult. Answering the question, “Where are you from?” requires a complex explanation. Beyond my personal experience, the contemporary debate about technology and social media, whether it actually connects us or distances us from each other or a sense of reality, and its effects on mental health interests me. Modernist literature, heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, also addresses the issue of isolation, and the limits of knowing another person or one’s self (indeed, the very idea of a self is questioned). 3 This theme is the most prevalent in my work and grounds every story in my collection. Every main character either lives alone or is experiencing a profound disconnection with a spouse. Characters like Gladys in “Six Days in April” and Andrew in “The Hanged Man” or the narrator in “It’s a Good Life for Night Taking” blame themselves to varying degrees for their inability to have successful relationships. All the characters experience a childhood trauma, and for Andrew these traumatic fissures are fueled by religious guilt to produce a sense of isolation so profound as to be paralyzing. Time: Overlap of past and present The Modernist’s preoccupation with time and the way we experience it led to innovative narrative forms, such as stream-of-consciousness. The adoption of standard time and time zones, artificial lights, and the industrial revolution led to a disconnect in the experience of time. (Greenblatt, 2056) The disorienting feeling persists today. Virginia Woolf’s genre-defying novel Orlando addresses this disconnect: This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known that it should be and deserves fuller investigation… It would be no exaggeration to say that he would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man of fifty-five at least. Some weeks added a century to his age, others no more than three seconds at most. (72-73) Experienced time rarely seems to fit with the linear model that governs our lives to such a great extent. Memories can also affect our experience and perception of time, and the science of memory and neuropsychology have always fascinated me. When we access memories, we alter them slightly—like editing a draft of a story (Schiller). Whenever we 4 remember or access that memory, it’s never the original version. We’re accessing the slightly altered, most recently saved “draft” of it. We are, in a sense, continually rewriting our own stories all the time. The act of remembering has so much in common to the act of writing, it’s difficult to not include this as a prominent theme in my stories. I am also fascinated by how technology and artificial intelligence might be affecting memory, or at least our concept of it. Lately, my phone has started sending me notifications: You have a new memory! Intrigued and slightly terrified that my phone has the audacity to tell me what my memories are, I discovered that it has been, apparently on its own volition, creating montages of the photos I take and setting them to music. An alarming “memory” was a series of photos of my boyfriend (my phone now recognizes his face), set to poignant, “sentimental” music as though it were a collage you might have seen at his funeral. Essentially, my phone processes information about me, runs it through algorithms and regurgitated into information that might shapes how I people view the world and perhaps even how they change how I process memory. The way that we use technology to discover more about how we perceive the world, while simultaneously using it to access our experiences and impress new ones upon us captivates and unsettles me all at once. The story where these themes of time disconnect, technology, and the way that memory and perception work are most evident is “It’s a Good Life for Night Taking”. The narrator feels the past encroaching on her every moment in the present. Her obsessive rumination over her past, as well as the experiences and dreams of others that are impressed upon her by watching their “memory videos” (accessed via data harvesting), causes a fissure in her conception of time and memory. By the end of the story, she can no longer distinguish between past and present, 5 her memories or those of others. She experiences the present in the grief of her loss of her husband and child, as well as the past in the conviction that another woman’s baby is her child, simultaneously. This entire story is told in the present tense to underscore and emphasize the narrator’s disconnect with past and present. For her, the past is immediate and her grief and trauma is just as visceral as it was the moment it first occurred. Time has not healed her wounds. “Evacuation Orders” also incorporates the theme of time.

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