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East Tennessee State University Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University Electronic Theses and Dissertations Student Works 12-2004 The Meaning of the Moment: A Collection of Short Stories. Jonathan David Benton East Tennessee State University Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.etsu.edu/etd Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Benton, Jonathan David, "The Meaning of the Moment: A Collection of Short Stories." (2004). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 973. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/973 This Thesis - Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Works at Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Meaning of the Moment: A Collection of Short Stories A thesis presented to the faculty of the Department of English East Tennessee State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in English by Jonathan Benton December 2004 John Morefield, Chair Dr. Darryl Haley Dr. Fred Waage Keywords: Creative Writing, James Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, Epiphany ABSTRACT The Meaning of the Moment: A Collection of Short Stories by Jonathan Benton This thesis consists of three short stories in very different genres but tied together by a intensely personal look at the lives of its protagonists culminating in epiphanies. One of these epiphanies is intended solely for the reader, but in two cases, the reader and character gain the insight. “The Tears of Angels” looks at the effect one person in a moment, even a stranger, can have on the protagonist’s life. “Climbing Heaven and Gazing on Earth” focuses on the haunting power of history and the need we as humans can feel to share a story, to make sense of it, no matter how personal. In “To Set It Right,” I take history in a different direction, giving it a voice and a power to reach from the past. In all of the stories, the epiphanies serve to point towards meaning and enlightenment in different ways. 2 CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 2 Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 4 2. THE TEARS OF ANGELS ...................................................................................... 16 3. CLIMBING HEAVEN AND GAZING ON EARTH ................................................ 24 4. TO SET IT RIGHT .................................................................................................. 41 WORKS CITED .............................................................................................................. 67 VITA ………………… .................................................................................................... 68 3 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In an attempt to find my place in the annals of short fiction, I reflected upon my literary influences. Without a doubt, my favorite writers, since I began serious study of literature, have been James Joyce and Flannery O’Connor. Joyce’s well-known contribution to the world, the literary epiphany, has found its way into my work. While my aim has never been as lofty as Stephen Dedalus’, to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” (the smithy of my soul seems dark and cold all too often, and I’m not sure where I’d begin looking for the conscience of my race), my intention has been to bring my characters to a defining instant that crystallizes the meaning of the moment. When looking at the idea of an epiphany, it may be instructive to examine the word in some detail. The word epiphany originated as a “festival commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles in the persons of the Magi,” used for the first time around 1310 (Simpson 333). It came to take on the religious meaning “a manifestation, striking appearance, esp. an appearance of a divinity” (Simpson 333). By the time Joyce got through with the word, though, the modern [Postmodern notwithstanding] short story would never be the same. Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man describes the epiphany as a part of his esthetic theory: The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony . a spiritual state . which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani . called the enchantment of the heart. (Joyce 231) 4 Stephen goes on to say that he is using “beauty in the wider sense of the word, in the sense which the word has in the literary tradition” (231). Joyce includes examples of this type of epiphany in Portrait, but the word is broadened even further in Joyce’s other writing. For instance, the epiphany in Joyce’s story “The Dead” comes when Gabriel Conroy realizes he does not have the passion of Michael Furey, that he has never loved his wife or anyone as Gretta’s old flame loved her. Preeminent Joyce biographer Richard Ellman writes: The epiphany was the sudden ‘revelation of the whatness of a thing,’ the moment in which the commonest object . seems to us radiant.’ The artist, [Joyce] felt, was charged with such revelations, and must look for them not among gods, but among men, in casual, unostentatious, even unpleasant moments. (83) An important word here is unpleasant. Certainly Gabriel’s epiphany comes in a most unpleasant moment, attempting to be intimate with his wife who is thinking of an old lover. The epiphany is multi-faceted, able to show many faces of the human experience. For my part, the epiphany has shown itself in calculated ways which I have plotted from the outset and also come as a relative surprise to me at times, which I suppose should not be surprising itself, as I’ve always been drawn to the stories with startling revelations of character saved for the end. When I look back at my favorite stories, whether they be Poe, Maupassant, Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King,” Jackson’s “The Lottery,” the common thread tends to be a strong and jarring ending that has been painstakingly prepared by the author. In many of these cases, the ends include an epiphany; if not the traditional, Joycean epiphany, still an epiphany of sorts. And when to this list is added the bulk of Joyce’s writings, and numerous O’Connor stories such as “Revelation,” “A Good Man is Hard to 5 Find,” “The Enduring Chill,” and “Good Country People,” the common thread becomes even stronger and more pronounced. Flannery O’Connor had her own special brand of epiphany. To Joyce’s standing definition O’Connor added the aspect of grace, offered to her characters in that all-important instant. She once remarked that she needed to return her “characters to reality and [prepare] them to accept their moment of grace,” (112) adding “I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil" (118). In “The Tears of Angels,” the first story in this thesis, my epiphany mirrored that thought of grace. I set out to write a story with a theme in mind but was not entirely sure how to go about it. I wanted to portray the effect one person can have on another, even without knowing, possibly, in the smallest and seemingly most inconsequential of moments. The players in such moments usually don’t know the import of their actions, and at times even the benefactors or recipients are unaware of the change they are making. In addition to the theme, I started with a piece of music (the muse does have a good singing voice, after all). I had become intrigued by a symphony whose dramatic qualities I couldn’t help noting. Later I learned that the symphony was Mahler’s unfinished Tenth, but as time went by I thought more and more about writing a story to it. Armed with a theme, and music to create an atmosphere to write by, I sat at my desk in search of a character with a story to tell. I knew I wanted the story to be dark, so I had a tone or effect to shoot for (Poe would have been proud. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their text An Approach to Literature, however, argue that “by very definition all fiction must have a unity,” or “totality of effect,” not just the short story, my chosen medium) (29). To that end, the 6 character that I create in “Tears” is a little more than obsessed with death, he is afflicted with it. The protagonist has had a traumatic childhood filled with the deaths of everyone he holds dear. From this childhood he becomes a bitter young man who shuts himself off from the world, literally unable to see the beauty in anything, rather seeing death and decay wherever he looks. O’Connor mentions the fact that some characters have more “capacity” for grace than others, speaking of the Misfit versus the Grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (111). In keeping with this idea, and knowing that traditionally speaking, there is a direct correlation between the effectiveness of a tragedy and the height from which the protagonist has fallen, my protagonist had to sink to the lowest depths possible to allow for the greatest capacity for grace. So this malady, earlier referred to as his affliction, becomes in one respect symbolic of his attitude toward the world but also possibly a very real condition of at least the mind, and at least to him. Like Poe, whose characters seem to have an affinity to opium, the affliction could have its root in the supernatural or be a byproduct of some explainable outside source grounded in the physical world.

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