A Collection of Fiction Marilyn Thomas West?
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QUARTET IN BLUE; A COLLECTION OF FICTION by MARILYN THOMAS WEST?ALL, B.A., M.A. A DISSERTATION IN ENGLISH Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved Chairperson of the Committee Accepted Deaffof the Graduate/School December, 1998 ©1998 Marilyn Westfall ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Let me grateftiUy acknowledge Texas Tech University's Department of English, Creative Writing Program for giving me time and a "place" to create this manuscript. I thank Drs. LesUe Jill Patterson and WilUam Wenthe for serving on my dissertation committee and for commenting on my manuscript, and Dr. Sharon Nell for serving as th( Graduate School representative at the dissertation defense. I thank particularly Dr. Douglas Crowell for his editorial advice, encouragement, and efforts on my behalf as committee chairperson. I thank the Graduate School of Texas Tech for providing grant money that fundec this project during the summer semesters of 1997. Ms. Barbi Dickensheet of the Graduate School deserves special mention for her help with formatting the dissertation. I am very grateftil to Jewel Mogan, Dr. Robert Leahy, and Leonor Murphy, long standing members of my writing group, for their editorial advice and encouragement. I thank Dr. Liz Davidson for her feedback on the effects of psychological trauma and her books on female psychology that informed "From the Diary of Cacnumaie." Dr. Joshua Mora deserves special mention for his editorial assistance with Spanish translation and transcription. I thank the artist Temple Lee Parker for her good spirit and support via the Internet. Also I vsdsh to thank particularly Russell Imrie, web-wizard for Indian Canyon' "Virtual Lodge" at http://bob/ucsc.edu/costano/. His encouragement and appreciation were invaluable to me. I greatly benefited from long discussions with Mase Lewter about Juh Kristeva's theories and other theoretical and literary issues, all of which played into this manuscript. I credit her friendship with making this writing possible in many ways. ii Special thanks go out to my husband Dr. Peter Westfall and my daughter Amy WestfaU for their patience and love. HI TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 n. "THE BLUE LADY" 14 m. "FROM THE DIARY OF CACNUMAIE" 45 IV. "'MARGARET': A COMPOSITION" 156 V. "CARRO" 194 BIBLIOGRAPHY 223 i\ CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION When an author introduces her or his own work a caveat is in order. "Trust the tale not the teller," D. H. Lawrence warned, and I invoke his maxim on this occasion, as construct a premise as to why these three stories and novella happened to the page at all. In essence, Quartet in Blue is an extended meditation on CaUfomia within bounds that defme fiction; the resulting stories, however, are disciplined by history. For me, the collection serves as a dramatized spiritual history of California from 1776 to 1998. The two designated years mark the founding of a particular California rehgious mission and the author's creating an account of her visit to that site, events which occasion these stories. A reader, I assume, might desire my response to at least three questions. How did Quartet in Blue originate? Why stylize a meditation on CaUfomia by the applying mles for fiction and supplying historical information? Why compress over two himdred years of history into four divisions? A reader might also hope for a playbill including the dramatis personae and precis of the action. Both the questions and the playbill seem fair requests, and I am willing to provide avenues a reader needs to engage with the fiction. I can map the collection's development retrospectively to a time four years ago when I drafted a brief romance about Cahfomia: a pairing of opposites occurred outside grocery store; the yoking simultaneously sparked hostility and desire. This story is not included within the quartet, but in writing it I heard tones that attracted me. One often encounters the concept about a writer finding her or his 'Voice." That was not my discovery. Rather I found myself enjoying the verbal arrangements that developed as 1 tmed language to my own experience, which was fragmented, not singular. I discovered a "male" and a "female" voice; within these two other voices erupted, from forces (cultural and famiUal) that informed gender. "Male" and "female" clashed, ftieling the fiction's energy. The story also divided into an extradiegetic voice, that of a narrator describing the vectors—^the dynamic movements—of the couple's inner play and interplay. This missing fiction is the fissure through which Quartet in Blue emerged. The various stmctures that the story introduced to me shape the present collection. Quartet in Blue is arranged as a vocal polyphony. The language itself, I hope, moves with enough dynamic force that a reader might experience its course as vectors. The visual imagery incorporated throughout the novella and stories models vector space: daggers, swords, thorns, and "spiritual darts" pervade the text, as does the spiked aura that designates holiness for saints, the Blessed Virgin, and Christ. By analogy I suggest that the human is differentiated by language, as is the superhuman—^the godly or demonic. Our verbal traditions ordinarily invest the supernatural with invasive powers that propel human activity. Who is devilish or saintly? Only a vocal polyphony ensures that several perspectives occupy readers, thereby allowing them to fashion informed answers to any question. The vocal arrangement of Quartet in Blue resonates from Cahfomia history. Probably for several thousand years California's native population spoke at least one hundred languages, by the estimates of linguists and anthropologists. The Cahfomians lived in small, autonomous groups, which today we classify as tribes or tribelets. The groups tended toward unique expression, befitting their independent status. Malcolm Margolin in The Way We Lived, a collection of Cahfomia Indian myths, reminiscences, stories, and songs, says regarding California aboriginal societies: The people we call "Native Cahfomians" actually belonged to over five hundred independent tribal groups. Such diversity boggles the modem mind, overtaxing our systems of categorization and nomenclature. Consequently, we modems have tended toward generalization. We refer, for example, to the "Porno" as if there had once been a Pomo tribe or a Pomo culture. Before the coming of the whites, however, the Pomo were several dozen independent tribal groups—small nations, as it were—each with its own territory and chief Pomo groups who hve( in the interior valleys differed widely in customs, beliefs, and languages from those who hved along the coast. The major justification for grouping such divers( people under a single name is that the languages they spoke ... are linguistically related and of common origin. (3) The diversity among California natives encouraged me to experiment with multiple voice and viewpoint while composing Quartet in Blue. Dismptions whhin the collection figure in part from California's colonization firsi by the Spanish and then by emigrant Americans. From approximately 1769-1833, the Spanish Entire financed a chain of missions situated along the California coastline from present-day San Diego to the San Francisco Bay area. Franciscan priests and the Spanish military administered the missions as well as army outposts known as presidios, for the purposes of subduing and Christianizing Indians. Because the mission chain included twenty-one colonies, I have hmited my focus to a particular rehgious community, that of San Francisco de Asis, also known as Mission Dolores. I was intrigued by the dual names, which suggest confhct in mterpreting the mission's significance. The Franciscan: originally founded the site near a rivulet that they named after Our Lady of Sorrows, La Nuestra Senora de los Dolores. The mission itself, however, was named for St. Francis who founded the Franciscan Order. Notable for his optimism and love of poverty. humanity, nature, poetry, and humor (he referred to his own body, for example, as "Brother Ass"), Francis is the antithesis to Our Lady of Sorrows, who is usually depicted as consumed by grief, with daggers or swords piercing her revealed heart. The fact the mission's popular name, Dolores (sorrows), supplanted that of Francis suggests a collapse in Franciscan fehcity. Dolores' fifty-eight year history marked five thousand deaths for natives—at a minimum. Many died from outbreaks of European diseases, others from the punishments inflicted for behavioral infractions, such as attempted escape. Prior to colonizing Cahfomia, the Franciscans had estimated that they could acculturate Indians to European Christianity within ten years. In Quartet in Blue, the story "The Blue Lady" and the novella "From the Diary of Cacnumaie" follow the Spanish invasion into native realms and demarcate numerous interpretations—including those of historians—about the resuhs. While writing these two fictions particularly, I incorporated the dynamics that define baroque art. The Spanish designed New World churches and religious art in the baroque style, to various degrees of ornamentation. The church at Mission Dolores includes a baroque reredos, a molded screen behind the ahar, lacquered with gold and decorated by statuary. The elaborate designs that characterize the baroque force a viewer to examine an artwork from diverse angles. Author Umberto Eco comments on this aspect of the baroque in The Open Work, a theoretical discourse on writing: Baroque form is dynamic; it tends to an indeterminacy of effect (m its play of sohd and void, light and darkness, with its curvature, its broken surfaces, its widely diversified angles of inclination); it conveys the idea of space being progressively dilated. [...] Now if Baroque spirituahty is to be seen as the first clear manifestation of modem culture and sensitivity, it is because here, for the first time, man opts out of the canon of authorized responses and fmds that he is faced (both in art and in science) by a world in a fluid state which requires corresponding creativity on his part.