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The Weightless Machine University of Texas at El Paso DigitalCommons@UTEP Open Access Theses & Dissertations 2016-01-01 The eiW ghtless Machine Justin David Stone University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Stone, Justin David, "The eiW ghtless Machine" (2016). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 967. https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd/967 This is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE WEIGHTLESS MACHINE JUSTIN DAVID STONE Master’s Program in Creative Writing APPROVED: José de Piérola, Ph.D., Chair Jeff Sirkin, Ph.D. Helen Foster, Ph.D. Charles Ambler, Ph.D. Dean of the Graduate School Copyright © by Justin David Stone 2016 THE WEIGHTLESS MACHINE by JUSTIN DAVID STONE, BA THESIS Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Department of Creative Writing THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO May 2016 Table of Contents Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv Critical Preface ................................................................................................................................ 1 THE WEIGHTLESS MACHINE ................................................................................................ 29 1. Christmas Familyless ................................................................................................................. 31 2. Hot Tub Baby Machine .............................................................................................................. 43 3. There’s been an accident ........................................................................................................... 56 4. The Last Christmas .................................................................................................................... 82 5. Missouri’s Secret ....................................................................................................................... 94 6. Black Ice .................................................................................................................................. 110 7. Fit the Pitch ............................................................................................................................. 121 8. Figures and Figures ................................................................................................................. 135 9. Benjie Steps In It ..................................................................................................................... 148 10. HTBM: Piss Ship ................................................................................................................... 160 11. Gil T-S ................................................................................................................................... 165 12. Rope Swing ........................................................................................................................... 174 13. The Grand Armada ................................................................................................................ 182 14. La Femme Banal .................................................................................................................... 196 15. Blue Movies ........................................................................................................................... 210 16. I Was Just Joking ................................................................................................................... 219 17. All of the Grid ....................................................................................................................... 233 18. PRODUCTION Strikes Back ................................................................................................ 243 19. Yes ......................................................................................................................................... 247 iv 20. Little Tramps ......................................................................................................................... 254 21. Atlantis W. Hollywood .......................................................................................................... 259 22. Dawn Saboteur ...................................................................................................................... 260 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 279 Vita... ........................................................................................................................................... 287 v Critical Preface Central to the poetics behind my thesis novel The Weightless Machine is Orhan Pamuk’s suggestion that to write and read a literary novel means to “[look] at the world through the eyes, mind, and soul of the novel’s characters” (The Naïve and Sentimental Novelist 60). Such a novel employs the narrative mode Gérard Genette calls focalization (189). To read or write a novel focalized through one or more of its characters, is, as Pamuk describes to “see the universe…through [that character’s] sensations and, when possible, through [her] words” (NSN 60). However, Pamuk cautions, this does not mean the primary subject of the literary novel is “the personality and morality” of the protagonist; rather, it is the “life of the protagonists, their place in the world, the way they feel, see, and engage with their world” (NSN 60). What this means in a practical sense is a novel wherein every carefully selected vivid detail and narrative technique—indeed every formal decision—is “composed to reflect the thoughts, emotions, and perceptions of the figure within it” (NSN 11). To do so gets at what I have come to see as an essential concern of the literary novel: To explore and produce questions concerning what it means to be a particular human being in a particular time and place. Thus my novel The Weightless Machine makes use of what Genette calls a fixed focalization (189) at a very close distance (162); everything passes through 22-year old Crystal Smith. The goal is a narrative universe both experienced and rendered—being via the deeply interconnected mind and body— by Crystal. I write with a joy for formal play and discovery, a conscious awareness of discourses and framing—what Pamuk calls a sentimental-reflective novelist. At the same time I write to create a world that effectively persuades the reader as Vargas Llosa describes (25), a self-consistent, 1 compelling, detail-driven fictional dream per Gardner (The Art of Fiction 26)—what Pamuk calls the naïve novelist. I aspire to, as Pamuk describes, a synthesis of these approaches—“being both naïve and reflective at the same time” (NSN 12)—conscious of both form and technique, both structure and meaning. In my first semester at UTEP Dr. José De Piérola, whose influence runs throughout this poetics, said something I have kept in mind ever since: When we write we are either challenging or reinforcing a discourse; the need, then, is to become more aware of the discourse. I have tried to create a novel that is in dialog with aspects of the historical form as well one that explores and questions some of the sociocultural discourses of my time. In this critical preface I will identify the central narrative techniques of my novel as well as their intentions. One of the most important things I have learned is the necessity of a conscious, deliberate, deeply considered poetics. Thus the goal of this critical preface is to frame my present poetics as a developing novelist as well as the poetics of a particular, developing novel. A central concern of my poetics in The Weightless Machine is that the reader experiences the real-time experiences—the being—of Crystal Smith. Thus I wish to achieve an intimacy between reader and Crystal, which begins with an intimacy between the third-person narrator and Crystal. I agree with Mario Vargas Llosa the narrator is “the most important character in any novel” (42), and have thus spent much time developing the novel’s narrator/Crystal intimacy. A central question of the modern novel is how to best render the inner life of character. The primary technique I use to elicit Crystal’s inner life is the free indirect style. As has been well documented, the free indirect style first notably appears in nineteenth-century fiction, initiated by Jane Austen and developed by Gustave Flaubert. In the early twentieth-century Modernists such as Virginia Woolf employed the free indirect style to create formally daring, figural-based novels. Today writers such as Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, Francine Prose, and Ian McEwan 2 continue to find formally and thematically innovative uses of the free indirect style, pushing the boundaries of fiction. Dorrit Cohn uses the term “narrated monologue” but calls this technique “a transformation of figural thought-language into the narrative language of third-person fiction,” a first-person directness with the added advantage of the third person removal to render both conscious and unconscious
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