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Grace Before the Fall A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Geri Lipschultz June 2012 © 2012 Geri Lipschultz. All Rights Reserved. 2 This dissertation titled Grace Before the Fall by GERI LIPSCHULTZ has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Zakes Mda Professor of English Howard Dewald Interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 Abstract LIPSCHULTZ, GERI, Ph.D., June 2012, English Grace Before the Fall Director of Dissertation: Zakes Mda Grace Before the Fall is an annotated novel that follows a flaneuse on her journey toward love and social activism. It is set in a pre-9/11 New York City, during a week in the summer of 1980. Geri Lipschultz, in her critical introduction, confronts both the instability and the virtual death of a text (drawing on Robert Scholes and Gayatri Spivak), as well as its revival in the hands of a contemporary reader. Lipschultz positions herself as a new reader in her revision/revival/revitalization of an old text—whose title, contents, and structure have been altered from their original construction thirty years past. She documents her course of revision, which begins with a rupture, itself a consequence of her impulse to investigate the etymology of selected words. Part of her work is an interrogation of the nature of revision itself, which might boil down to the adage offered by Heraclitus: You cannot step into the same river twice. Lipschultz observes that her novel’s initial modernist influences, namely Joyce and Nabokov, have been decentered by the ethos of the postcolonial/postmodern novel, given her changing reading preferences. Her introduction invokes both a personal and a civic history. It introduces the reader not only to the text but also to a paratext that resembles storytelling at times, offering knowledge gleaned only after the fact—for example the way AIDS was ravaging New York without its having a name—and investigates how that retrospective knowledge positions itself for any reader. The 4 revisions within the text, she writes, have provided portal-like openings for character and setting, much as do architectural renovations. The paratext offers historiographic, geographic, and etymological asides—and memoir—whose purpose is to document the passage of time and the metamorphosis of a city. Lipschultz paints these changes with nostalgia and a sense of loss. She argues that the annotations are not essential. They are there at the reader’s discretion—placed as endnotes—as the novel, now situated within a magical realist context, articulates its theme of love and nature in conflict with the powers that be. Approved: _____________________________________________________________ Zakes Mda Professor of English 5 Dedication In memory of my parents 6 Acknowledgments There are many people to acknowledge in a book whose gestation is more than thirty years. I begin with my director, Professor Zakes Mda, whose patience, compassion, guidance truly directed the revisions. There would be no book without Professor Mda: I would be scrambling for eternity in the no-fly-zone of revision without ever finding a place to safely land. Another member of my committee, Professor Janis Butler Holm offered me a feminist reading of the book, along with the kind of support that kept me in life when graduate school seemed like a series of Herculean trials. For the latter, I have many others to thank, including Dominika Adamova, Marlene de la Cruz Guzman, Alison Stine, Lana Oweidat, and Libby Whitley, as well as my east coast contingent— Claudia Liu, Maryellen Rothberg, Janice Buckner, and Jacqueline R. Slater. I would also like to thank Professor Ghirmai Negash, whose class in Critical Theory forced me to re-examine my well honed belief that theory was irrelevant. It feels wrong to omit those whose faith in me seemed instrumental when it was time to leave New York, to head out to Ohio, with our cats and dog, with my then-ten-year old daughter in tow—namely Helen Dagavarian, Louie Skipper, Dennis Sampson, Eric and Cheryl Olsen, and Tina and Robin Bourjaily—and even he who gave me his blessing but thought I was crazy, namely David Calicchio. I must also mention John Irving for his willingness to write me yet another recommendation, this time for graduate school, when it became terribly clear that an M.F.A. from Iowa was simply not enough. I am grateful to the other members of my committee, including Professors Dinty W. Moore, Miriam Shadis, and Sherrie Gradin—who provided instant and good- humored, if occasionally devastating feedback, when I dearly needed it, and who 7 promised me that I would understand Judith Butler. Additionally, I would like to extend my appreciation to Professors Marsha Dutton, Darrell Spencer, Joan Connor, Mark Halliday, and J. Allyn Rosser. Also, I’d like to thank Professor Josephine Bloomfield, in whose class my unwitting, if reluctant first step toward this dissertation was taken. I must also thank Barbara Grueser, for her welcoming voice and endless goodness. I offer a final thank you to my husband, Erwin J. Wong, my children—David and Eliza Wong, and to my sisters, Judith Gampel and Debora Fields. 8 Table of Contents Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3 Dedication………………………………………………………………………….……...5 Acknowledgments............................................................................................................... 6 Resurrecting Grace Before the Fall: Why Kiss the Corpse ................................................ 9 “Once upon a time and a very good time it was…” ....................................................... 9 On Revision as Revival ................................................................................................. 14 Her/story with Literary Influences ................................................................................ 21 On the Phantasm of Structures: Hybridity, Text, and Voice ........................................ 36 Meditation on a Kiss ..................................................................................................... 46 Works Cited ...................................................................................................................... 52 Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................... 55 Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................... 90 Chapter 3 ......................................................................................................................... 118 Chapter 4 ......................................................................................................................... 140 Chapter 5 ......................................................................................................................... 167 Chapter 6 ......................................................................................................................... 194 Chapter 7 ......................................................................................................................... 222 Chapter 8 ......................................................................................................................... 238 Chapter 9 ......................................................................................................................... 268 Chapter 10 ....................................................................................................................... 308 Chapter 11 ....................................................................................................................... 355 Notes ............................................................................................................................... 377 9 Resurrecting Grace Before the Fall: Why Kiss the Corpse “Once upon a time and a very good time it was…”1 When I originally wrote the book that follows, I was aware that I was listening to voices. I was beset by voices. That’s how it goes. That’s how it went. A writer writes a novel. Like Shakespeare’s Gloucester, she sees it feelingly. She hears voices. Things occur to her. A plan arises, a strategy forms. All the while, she’s writing. She does what she must, most of which comes instinctively, because it’s there. Things snowball. She throws in her good friend, although this friend is so obviously morphed no one would know. It’s like fried rice—filled with leftovers and spiced for taste. It used to be that spices were used to extend the life of rotting meat, to cover up smells, to kill the bacteria, but now it’s for taste. The writer seasons the book to her taste. She’d already created the perfect man. She’s been doing that in every novel she’s ever written. Oh, if only she could find such a man! She finds herself laughing and crying—fool that she is. Well that’s how it was for me when I originally wrote this novel thirty years ago. I lived to write this book, especially when it took off, for me, in the spring and summer of 1981. Like my character, Grace Rosinbloom, I had my own little studio in Greenwich Village. It wasn’t easy to secure an apartment in Manhattan, and I had to work hard to pay for it, as I tried to make a life there for myself. For a while, I worked part-time