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Contemporary Documentary Fiction UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:August 27, 2007 I, Stephen Francis Criniti, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in: English and Comparative Literature It is entitled: Navigating the Torrent: Documentary Fiction in the Age of Mass Media This work and its defense approved by: Chair:Dr. Tom LeClair Dr. Stan Corkin Dr. Brock Clarke Navigating the Torrent: Documentary Fiction in the Age of Mass Media A dissertation submitted to The Graduate School Division of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in the Department of English and Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences 2007 by Stephen F. Criniti B.S. Wheeling Jesuit University, 2000 M.A. University of Dayton, 2002 Committee Chair: Thomas LeClair, Ph.D. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the role of documentary fiction within contemporary media culture. Through the authors’ inclusion of documented historical events/personages and their critical mediation of these documents, the writers show an awareness of the mediated nature of historical knowledge—including a consciousness of their own act of novelistic mediation. As a result, I argue that contemporary documentary fiction, through its recognition of the inevitability of mediation and the challenges it brings to entrenched cultural notions, is best equipped to thrive in the media-saturated marketplace. In order to explore the variety of ways contemporary documentary fictions “navigate the media torrent,” I have paired the texts according to similarities in form and mode of mediation. Each chapter examines the authors’ novelistic renderings of history against dominant nonfictional accounts in order to analyze the authors’ mediations of and challenges to hegemonic conceptions of that history. Before moving to the pairs, however, I briefly examine the methodology of E.L. Doctorow’s The March, ultimately dismissing it as outdated. The first dyad, then, includes Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle and Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, which emphasize the imaginative nature of memory in order to influence and even alter their communities’ collective memory. In the second pairing, René Steinke’s Holy Skirts and Charles Johnson’s Dreamer utilize a fictional biography form to revise popular conceptions of their biographical subjects, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Martin Luther King, Jr. respectively. Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days and Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues challenge American mythology by representing their iv characters’ searches for—and inability to find—Truth. The final pairing includes Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance and William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt. Sorrentino takes media distortion as his critical target, and Vollmann, with a grand encyclopedic scope, encompasses all the modes explored here. For this reason, I argue for Vollmann’s novel as a kind of ur-contemporary documentary novel, encapsulating in a single novel the myriad forms of mediation. Because of these responses to the “media torrent,” I contend that documentary fictions are our best contemporary fictions and are ultimately our best hope for the continuance of a potentially endangered genre: literary fiction. v vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I certainly would not have been able to navigate the torrent that is a dissertation project without the help of a significant number of colleagues, mentors, and friends. I would first like to thank Tom LeClair for being exactly the advisor and mentor I needed. He has been equal parts encouraging and challenging, and always at the exact right moments. Ultimately, this project would not be what it is without his encouragement, practical advice, and seemingly innumerable careful readings. Because of Tom, the completion of this project has been a rewarding and, dare I say, enjoyable experience. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Stan Corkin and Brock Clarke. Stan was instrumental in helping me to build the theoretical and historical knowledge that serves as the necessary scaffolding for the critical readings I offer here. Throughout this project, Stan managed to “keep me honest” in terms of my historical understanding. Any depth to that understanding is the result of Stan’s influence. Thanks also to Brock for his careful reading and helpful suggestions during the late stages of this project. I am also grateful to the Charles Phelps Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati. The Taft Center’s generous award of a year-long fellowship afforded me the chance to produce the first draft of this manuscript. Many of my University of Cincinnati colleagues also played important roles in my completion of this project and my development as a scholar. Thanks to the English department’s graduate faculty—most especially Lee Person, Amy Elder, and Beth Ash—for helping to lay the vii scholarly foundation upon which this dissertation was eventually built. To Siusan Durst of the Modern Languages Department, thanks for training me in the reading and translation of Spanish, a skill which was invaluable in researching the Julia Alvarez section of this manuscript. And to my fellow graduate students, thanks for creating both a challenging and convivial environment in which to grow as a thinker and a person. Special thanks to Kelcey Parker, Alex DeBonis, and Julie Gerk-Hernandez for your companionship and camaraderie as we all worked to navigate this torrent together. Also, thanks to Kristin Czarnecki for recommending Alvaerz’s In the Time of the Butterflies and for providing a polished and professional example of what a UC graduate student could be. Aside from simply introducing me to Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues and Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle, John Whitehead, of Wheeling Jesuit University’s Fine Arts department, has also been a constant mentor whose opinion and advice I deeply respect and cherish. John has always been, and continues to be, both an amazing mentor and a great friend. Finally, my deepest appreciation goes to my family. I owe so much of who I am—not only as a scholar, but more importantly, as a person—to all of you. I cannot thank you enough for all the love and support you have given me throughout this process. To my, as yet, unborn baby: eight and a half months ago, you set for me the firmest nine-month deadline possible. You have been an inspiration, and I cannot wait to meet you, little one. Lastly, and most importantly, to my wife Mary Beth: there is no way to categorize the impact you have had on this project and on my life. Your patience has been boundless, and you always seemed to know when I needed support, encouragement, or a little (or sometimes not-so-little) push. Overall, I learn more from you every day than any Ph.D. program could ever teach me. My life is better every day because you are a part of it. I could not have done it without you. viii The Julia Alvarez portion of Chapter 2 and the Mark Winegardner portion of Chapter 4 appeared in slightly different form in Modern Language Studies and Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction respectively. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE 2 INTRODUCTION Contemporary Documentary Fiction and the Manipulation of Mediation 5 CHAPTER 1 “It’s Always Now”: History as Analogy in E.L. Doctorow’s The March 45 CHAPTER 2 Re-Collections: The Revision of Collective Memory in Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle and Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies 68 CHAPTER 3 Using the Fusion: The Role of Fictional Biography in René Steinke’s Holy Skirts and Charles Johnson’s Dreamer 137 CHAPTER 4 Unnatural History: Myth and Historical Discourse in Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days and Mark Winegardner’s The Veracruz Blues 194 CHAPTER 5 A Play of Contradictions: Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance, William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt, and “The New Nonfiction Novel” 246 WORKS CITED 310 2 PREFACE Any author who sets out to consider “contemporary historical fiction” is going to run into some necessary definitional and categorical decisions. A brief note is in order to clarify my process of selecting the texts for this study. First, it should be noted that the “oldest” novel considered here, William Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt, was published in 1990. Therefore, for the purposes of this study, the term “contemporary” can be taken to mean “written after 1990.” As a result, important documentary novels of the ‘70s and ‘80s by Robert Coover, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, and others have been excluded. In an effort to discover and comment upon new and worthy “contemporary” writers, I have also chosen to leave out post-1990 novels that have already received a large body of criticism such as Don DeLillo’s Libra and Underworld, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, and Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods. It should be noted that the writers I have selected also range in reputation from the well respected to the largely unknown. In the case of the more established authors, I have, again, chosen to comment on texts that have not yet received an overabundance of scholarly attention (such as Vollmann’s The Ice-Shirt or Johnson’s Dreamer). In the forthcoming pages, much attention is devoted to the term “historical” and the idea of what constitutes what I call “documentary fiction.” At this point, suffice it to say that I have considered only texts that include specific documented historical people or events. Thus, novels that may be more broadly considered “historical fiction” because of a strong connection to an historical era or a larger cultural history (like the history of slavery or imperialism) have also 3 been excluded from this study.
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