“Dear Humans,” Stories: an Examination of Unusual Narrative Voices in Postmodern Fiction

University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2014-04-30 “Dear Humans,” Stories: An Examination of Unusual Narrative Voices in Postmodern Fiction Adams, Hollie Adams, H. (2014). “Dear Humans,” Stories: An Examination of Unusual Narrative Voices in Postmodern Fiction (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25524 http://hdl.handle.net/11023/1453 doctoral thesis University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY “Dear Humans,” Stories: An Examination of Unusual Narrative Voices in Postmodern Fiction by Hollie Adams A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH CALGARY, ALBERTA APRIL, 2014 © Hollie Adams 2014 Abstract “Dear Humans,” the creative portion of the dissertation, is a collection of eighteen discrete short stories that make use of a variety of narrative voices and strategies, both traditional and unusual. The stories present creative reactions to (and often rejections of) classical narratology as it was put forth by structuralist narratologists, such as Gerard Genette and Gerald Prince. Several of the stories were also inspired by the work of current narratologists in the postclassical subfield of unnatural narratology, including Jan Alber and Brian Richardson, who examine non-mimetic narrative strategies in experimental fiction. They argue that since fictional narrators are not bound by the physics and logic of the real world as we know it, they need not resemble human-like storytellers and thus should not be evaluated using mimetic-based classification systems. Thematically, the stories comment on the vulnerability, awkwardness, and paranoia of being human. Several stories project future worlds in which humans must cope with environmental crises, the effects of technology, and staggering unemployment rates. These futures seem hopelessly bleak: the animals in Banff National Park are now extinct, little girls wish for iPhones rather than ponies, graduate degrees are required for all entry-level positions, computers have become sentient. However, the characters continue finding beauty in the everyday, the absurd, the tragic. They try to become better humans. Above all, they ask to be loved. The critical afterword, “You, We, and Other Oddities: An Examination of Unusual Narrative Voices in Contemporary Fiction,” presents a brief history of narratology, ii introduces its taxonomy, and discusses its evolution from its classical to its postclassical phase. The afterword then summarizes the major tenets of unnatural narratology and puts that theory into practice in a discussion of contemporary “unnatural” fiction, concentrating on texts narrated in second person and first person plural perspectives. Unnatural narratology is then used to examine the stories in “Dear Humans,” suggesting the importance of distinguishing between non-mimetic narration and narration which is unusual for other reasons. Finally, I argue for the continued relevance of the field of narratology. iii Preface This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. iv Acknowledgements 1. A huge thank you to my wonderful supervisor Professor Suzette Mayr for her guidance, inspiration, insight, and patience (and also for threatening to make me eat twelve beef-steak tomatoes). 2. I thank the members of my committee Dr. Harry Vandervlist, Dr. Christian Bök, Professor Anne Fleming, and Dr. Brian Rusted. 3. I acknowledge the financial support of The University of Calgary and The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 4. I am also indebted to the Department of English at the University of Calgary, especially Anne Jaggard and Barb Howe whose doors were always open to help navigate the fiery hoops of paperwork. 5. To my fellow grad students and officemates, thank you for your friendship and your feedback. Special thanks to Jess Nicol, Jonny Flieger, Sandy Pool, and Rod Moody- Corbett. You guys made all the difference. 6. To my family—I love you, I thank you, and I hope you stop reading this now. 7. To Brian, for all the things, all the times. v Table of Contents Abstract ii Preface iv Acknowledgements v Table of Contents vi Dear Humans The Documentary We’ve Been Making for Fifty Years . 1 Like That But Times A Million . 11 Project Description . 18 How to Meet People in the New Millennium . 22 How to Survive . 30 Plastic Shopping Bags . 52 Rapture-Bombing . 55 Brilla . 74 Buttercup . 92 Talking About the Weather . 96 Frequently Asked Questions . 106 Natural Wilderness . 111 Liking It . 135 The Meek . 146 The Charges . 167 vi Honey-Do . 170 9:34. 181 Dear Humans . 183 Afterword: You, We, and Other Oddities: An Examination of Unusual Narrative Voices in Contemporary Fiction ! 1. Theoretical Frameworks . 184 2. Theory in Practice . 220 3. The Unusualness of “Dear Humans”. 240 4. Concluding Remarks . 261 Works Cited . 266 vii The Documentary We’ve Been Making For Fifty Years The film opens with an eye-level shot: a forest in Western British Columbia. Though we didn’t expect the viewer to immediately recognize this forest as belonging to Western British Columbia, we hoped the overcast sky, the thickness of the moisture in the air, the matchstick red cedars in all their vertical glory would suggest something of the Pacific Northwest, but we conceded the film quality was poor: grainy and black-and-white on account of we started making this film in the 1950s on a shoestring budget. Cut to an evening shot of our campsite. Six canvas upside-down V’s in an imperfect circle around a hip-high fire. Frank roasting a hotdog on stick. The hotdog has split from the heat into four sections which have each begun to curl away from the center like the hat of a court jester. When he notices the camera is on him, he puts the stick between his legs and performs a thrusting gesture to indicate that this thin, knobby stick with an explosion of hotdog at its end is somehow also his penis. Sue had wanted to cut this scene, calling it gratuitously crude, but the rest of us agreed it showed the good- natured spunk of the film crew, though perhaps, if truth be told, we only said so due to we had, of late, become a tad scared of Frank whose wife had just taken the kids and up and fled to her parents’ place in Nebraska on account of what she called his irrational rage issues. Frank insisted Val wouldn’t know rage if it slapped her across the face, that he was only enthusiastically reinforcing his authority in the face of constant disrespect, but we had all witnessed his neck vein pulsing like an angry earthworm that had been buried alive. This being, of course, before he found God. 1 After the shots of Frank and the hotdog got the green light we all started hamming it up for the camera: Barry using his binoculars small end out, Helen reading a guidebook to British Columbia’s wildlife upside down, Jack taking a running leap over the fire, Buzz taking a running leap into the fire, then asking us to please cut the scene in which he, on fire, rips off his shorts, also on fire, and plants his bare ass in the dirt to do a sliding motion very much akin to that of a baby before discovering its legs. At first we planned to oblige Buzz and cut the scene, but then Barry convincingly argued that Buzz’s soft, moon-white backside mildly aflame added an amount of pathos that should not be underestimated, and none of us wanted to be accused of underestimating pathos. What the viewer would see next is approximately three days’ worth of tracking— following footprints, examining feces, studying where the flora, and perhaps even the fauna, may have been upset by a six to ten foot mammal—condensed into a three-minute scene. It had been our intention to use these three minutes to present the viewer with a series of interesting facts and figures on past sightings via Barry narrating in his soothing baritone. But before we got around to it, all of our early footage was destroyed. There was the suggestion of recreating this scene, using modern editing technology to make it appear to have been filmed on an antique camera, but after Barry died we seemed unable to come to a consensus about which of our research was credible enough to be included anyway, never mind who should be the one to lend their voice now that Barry’s baritone was out of the question. At what would have been approximately the six minute mark, the camera shakily pans among the trunks of looming pines until a large, shaggy creature comes into view in 2 the top righthand corner of the frame. The camera zooms in, and had we reached the editing stage, ominous music we planned to steal from a Hitchcock film would begin to play. What is now identifiably a sasquatch is holding a squirrel by its tail and beating its head against a rock. It (the sasquatch) stops to scratch its (again, the sasquatch’s) hindquarters, then resumes with the squirrel though certainly it (the squirrel) died quite a few bashings ago.

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