A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of The
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What Are You Going to Do with the Rest of Your Life? 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 Kelly K. Ferguson May 2014 © 2014 Kelly K Ferguon. All Rights Reserved. 2 This dissertation titled What Are You Going to Do with the Rest of Your Life? by KELLY K. FERGUON has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Dinty W. Moore Professor of English Robert Frank Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT FERGUSON KELLY K., Ph.D..May 2014, English What Are You Going to Do with the Rest of Your Life? Director of Dissertation: Dinty W. Moore This dissertation is comprised of two sections: a critical essay entitled "Postmodern Persona Creative Nonfiction" and an essay collection, "What Are You Going to Do With the Rest of Your Life?" "Postmodern Persona in Creative Nonfiction" examines the use of multiple personas within nonfiction. For writers working within the era of Postmodernism, the self-identified fractured self often requires a multi-voiced persona to best explore complicated issues. The critical essay then examines these personas as they manifest in Truman Capote, Alison Bechdel, Janet Malcolm, and D.J. Waldie, as well as in the author's own work. "What Are You Going to Do With the Rest of Your Life?" contains essays that examine notions of identity and self as affected by sense of place, race, education, job status, and external appearances. The essays juxtapose personal experiences and external events in the goal of creating narrative. 4 DEDICATION For Polly Jean Harvey and sweet, buttery biscuits 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to members of my dissertation committee: Michael Gillespie, Eric LeMay, and Janis Holm. I extend a special shout out to my director, Dinty W. Moore, whose direct, effective feedback and delicious chili helped me professionalize this dissertation. I would also like to express my gratitude to the professors at Ohio University who have enriched my experience here: Joan Connor, Darrell Spencer, Jeremy Webster, Sherrie Gradin, Marsha Dutton, Mark Halliday, and J. Allyn Rosser. Thanks to Barbara Grueser, Barbara Duncan, and Daphne Metts, who were always patient and gracious no matter how many times I lost my keys or ran in the department office panicking about the copier. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3! Dedication ........................................................................................................................... 4! Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................... 5! Postmodern Persona in Creative Nonfiction ....................................................................... 7! References ............................................................................................................. 41 PBR and a Shot ................................................................................................................. 43! Yankee by Birth: Southern by the Grace of God .............................................................. 45! Experiments in Living Chemistry ..................................................................................... 68! Full .................................................................................................................................... 82! Hello, May I Help You? .................................................................................................... 89! Dancing Like a White Girl ................................................................................................ 98! What Are You Going to Do with the Rest of Your Life? ............................................... 110 Ballad of the Lost Generation X ..................................................................................... 125! Second Best ..................................................................................................................... 140! Sure as Kilmanjaro Rises Like Olympus Above the Serengeti ...................................... 162! Appendix A: Know Alabama .......................................................................................... 177! 7 POSTMODERN PERSONA IN CREATIVE NONFICTION In “Saying Good-bye to ‘Once upon a Time,’ or Implementing Postmodernism in Creative Nonfiction,” Laura Wexler argues that contemporary nonfiction is ideally suited to telling difficult stories because of the contemporary author’s recognition of fractured truth (26). With the advent of postmodernism and its bedrock principle of subjectivity, the concept of Moses climbing Mt. Sinai to receive stone tablets went out, to be replaced by the understanding that positionality—based on class, race, gender, sexual orientation, cultural background, etc.—effects perception. This awareness makes writing nonfiction as if it were objective text flat at best, or even disingenuous. More interesting and more authentic is to complicate the issue. As an example, Wexler gives the relatively recent outing of Thomas Jefferson’s sexual relationship with Sally Heming. Given Jefferson’s role in forming the United States viewed against the country’s history of racial conflict (among other issues), a mono-narrative could only come up short (28). Post-Heming, the singular narrative of Founding Father frayed; to pretend otherwise now rings false. Writing about Jefferson afterwards requires accepting multiple points of view and embracing intricacy. Luckily for the genre, nonfiction is well placed to thrive within the complications postmodernism has brought. Going back briefly to Michel de Montaigne, it’s worthwhile for us to examine how the famed essayist’s role in the development of nonfiction set the stage. Montaigne explored topics ranging from bad breath to dishonesty, but always in the context of exploring the workings of his own mind, and he often reflected on the 8 reflexivity of his own thinking. In The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay, Carl Klaus discusses how Montaigne in “Of the Affection of Fathers for Their Children” observes that, as he writes, the mind of the author (himself) who began the essay is not the same as that of the person writing later—the very act of writing altered his mind (15). Montaigne explored the digressions of his thoughts, preferring to wind up contradicting himself than to turn around. Throughout his self-portraits he records his process and the problems therein of simultaneously observing and writing about oneself. In his work the essayist demonstrates how nonfiction offers a unique situation in which to explore the inner workings of the author and the self, as well as a way to convey these inner workings to readers. Montaigne, while he marveled over his many selves as they manifested, would not, of course, have categorized himself as a postmodern writer. The terminology did not yet exist. For writers today, postmodernism and its perspectives are nothing new. So what of the contemporary writer, for whom positionality and self-reflexivity as precepts have been givens for years now? In “The Postmodern Memoir,” Hugh Ryan considers authors who have grown up reading postmodern works, who have long accepted the unknowability of objective fact. For these authors, the fractured self is a starting point. As a result, nonfiction writers have been “consciously creating books in which the unreliable narrator is themselves” (2). If truth is contingent based on context, then so is the truth about the self. 9 The potential of the nonfiction author’s fractured self, while great, requires a deft hand. In the end, choices must be made, for a fractured self does not exempt the author from writing comprehensible prose. The goal remains to communicate. To fall back on Lee Gutkind’s definition of creative nonfiction, the writer must have "the ability to capture the personal and the private and to make it mean something significant to a larger audience, and to provide intellectual substance that will affect readers—perhaps even to incite them to action or to change their thinking—in a compelling and unforgettable way" (179). Awareness of positionality does not mean the writer can pass nonsense off as a concept. Given the above considerations of nonfiction in the postmodern literary world, examining personas in American nonfiction is a useful strategy for navigating inroads of craft and literary criticism. While dividing nonfiction into subgenres—biography, autobiography, memoir, essay—helps better define genre, the excitement in nonfiction lies in the multiple voices inhabiting the persona—the chorus that nonfiction writers build to create a unified work. These voices create a framework for our understanding of postmodern nonfiction, by defining tactical approaches authors use in creating sustainable personas. One hallmark of contemporary nonfiction is the exchange within its subgenres. While straight biography, autobiography, and memoir (for instance) are still being written and published, many authors combine genres, or, to be more accurate—juggle, amalgamate, morph, splice, and reconfigure —to offer up a verb sampler of the 10 possibilities. A pioneer in nonfiction mixology was Truman Capote, author of In Cold Blood. Perhaps Capote’s assertion that he invented what he termed the “nonfiction novel” was more hubris than fact,