ASLEEP IN THE ARMS OF GOD Kevin M. Clay, B.A., M.A. Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS December 1999 APPROVED: Barbara Rodman, Major Professor Lee Martin, Committee Member James T. F. Tanner, Committee Member and Chair of the Department of English Lynn Eubank, Graduate Chair of the Department of English C. Neal Tate, Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Clay, Kevin M., Asleep in the Arms of God. Doctor of Philosophy (English), December, 1999, 228 pp. A work of creative fiction in the form of a short novel, Asleep in the Arms of God is a limited-omniscient and omniscient narrative describing the experiences of a man named Wafer Roberts, born in Jack County, Texas, in 1900. The novel spans the years from 1900 to 1925, and moves from the Keechi Valley of North Texas, to Fort Worth and then France during World War One, and back again to the Keechi Valley. The dissertation opens with a preface, which examines the form of the novel, and regional and other aspects of this particular work, especially as they relate to the postmodern concern with fragmentation and conditional identity. Wafer confronts in the novel aspects of his own questionable history, which echo the larger concern with exploitative practices including racism, patriarchy, overplanting and overgrazing, and pollution, which contribute to and climax in the postmodern fragmentation. The novel attempts to make a critique of the exploitative rage of Western civilization. TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE: ASLEEP IN THE ARMS OF HISTORY INTRODUCTION 1 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS OF GENRE 3 THE TEXAS LITERARY TRADITION 11 HISTORICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL BASE 16 RACISM AND OTHER EXPLOITATIONS 19 POLITICS, FUNDAMENTALISM, AND POSTMODERNISM IN TEXAS 23 CONCLUSION 29 ASLEEP IN THE ARMS OF GOD PART ONE: 1901 41 PART TWO: 1917 103 PART THREE: 1918 165 PART FOUR: 1925 227 ASLEEP IN THE ARMS OF HISTORY: A CLOSER LOOK AT ASLEEP IN THE ARMS OF GOD Introduction The following short novel, Asleep in the Arms of God, is set in north Texas, in the early years of the twentieth century. The main character is Wafer Roberts, the scion of a prominent farm family in Jack County’s Keechi Valley. The story is told almost wholly from his point of view. Wafer is born in 1901, at the century’s turn. Born into one kind of world, a nineteenth- century world, he finds himself, upon his somewhat premature majority, in another sort altogether; a world that refuses to be still, a twentieth century world. That world is, of course, the direct predecessor of our own, materially in transition from nineteenth century certainty, to an angst-ridden indeterminancy that we, a century later, find easily, or uneasily, familiar. In Texas as elsewhere, there were a few stops along the way of that transition—we might take the Somme, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Hiroshima, and My Lai as more-or-less representative ossuaries, occupying prominent points in the broader itinerary. Other, more local monuments to the industrialized style of prosperity, and the ethical vacuum it creates, include Port Arthur and Beaumont, on the Texas gulf coast, their fragrant perfumes wafting ever inland. Still others, elsewhere, Three Mile Island, Love Canal, or the now near-dead inland sea of Russia, the Aral. Or perhaps a certain petrochemical plant in north Fort Worth, that I myself know well, consisting of 20 acres or so of land, seared so violently by pollution in the last few decades, that I doubt the Thirtieth century since Christ will see a sprig of grass there, much less the Twenty-first— representative all, with still more unmentioned besides. They exist because they are profitable, and in that word—profitable—we find the first clue to the mentality that makes them possible. It 1 2 is the same mentality that makes of that “ethical vacuum,” noted above, a cultural norm. There are less dramatic instances of the sort of thing I am talking about. The lives of women in my parents’ generation—the generation about which I am here writing—were often marked by the same kind of exploitative behavior, and they still are much too often today. Certainly, in the relatively recent and even ongoing history of the struggle of African Americans and other ethnic and economic minorities for civil rights, we find epic stories of resistance to exploitation. Yet all of these exploitations are far from exceptional. Notable or not as matters of history, they are actually woven, more-or-less undetectably, into the fabric of our daily lives. They exist much less in the extraordinary, and more in the ordinary. We live embedded unbeknownst in the midst of vast ecological displacements, little short of the catastrophic, just as we lived, and live, embedded in the moral sloth of segregation. Things in my parents’ day were not so different from now as it may seem. Undeniably, such things are difficult to separate, strand from strand; it requires to do so something like R.G. Vliet’s “high linguistic and intuitive capabilities . to probe and release . individual and community psyches” (qtd. in Texas 105); “individual and community psyches” that have survived just such upheavals and dislocations. I hope to do that in the present work, and do it in such a way that the specific context of Texas will become representative of much more than itself merely, while also remaining true to the specific place and time. The present work is a short novel. It is written as a sort of inversion of the early Victorian/late Romantic “novel of sensibility,” where emotions are heightened and exaggerated, in order to increase the drama and emphasize the message. But this is a novel of insensibility. Rather than the challenge of heightening emotion, and exaggerating it, the problem here is how 3 to get it across without the characters themselves ever showing or stating it clearly, or indeed, ever being particularly aware consciously that they even have emotions. There is a kind of meanness that results, that has evolved in Texas (and probably elsewhere, too) from just such determined resistance to introspection. In Texas, it has now a stature approaching the institutional. It is visible in the much-much-worse-than-curmudgeonly utterance of assorted pundits and politicians, and I mean to show it in this novel. I mean to portray the origins of it, and the personal and social cost. Preliminary Questions of Genre The original conception of this story was very different from its final form. I had intended to write a novella, of no more than 50,000 words, and a series of six or so short stories, some of them completed in advance, all related to the history of one or two families settled in Jack County, Texas, in the region of the Keechi Valley, from about 1901, right up into the 1990s. But the story of the novella, encompassing the first quarter of the twentieth century, grew exponentially under my hand, topping out initially at better than 73,000 words. I was obliged to do away with both the planned and the completed short stories, and obliged also to rethink the genre in which I was writing. A novella, something like the “beautiful and blest” nouvelle of Henry James (Irwin 13), is defined by Holman and Harmon as a term “particularly applied to the early tales of Italian and French writers—such as the Decameron of Boccaccio.” The novella is of interest to students of English, because many English writers used Italian and French works as sources, and also because it is among the primary forms giving rise, in the eighteenth century, to the modern novel (Holman & Harmon 325). The term is applied also to a type of short novel developed in 4 Germany in the nineteenth century. More directly from the English—again according to Holman and Harmon—there is the “work of prose fiction of intermediate length between the short story and the novel” (321). “[The] novelette displays the compact structure of the short story with the greater development of character, theme, and action of the novel,” for example, “Melville’s Billy Budd” (324). An authority of more direct concern to the present project, Katherine Anne Porter, has this to say in the introduction to The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter: Please do not call my short novels Novelettes, or even worse, Novellas. Novelette is a classical usage for a trivial, dime-novel sort of thing; Novella is a slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything. Please call my works by their right names: we have four that cover every division: short stories, long stories, short novels, novels . [They] seem very clear, sufficient, and plain English. (vi) All of which is perfectly fine (and perfectly “plain English”) but I wonder if she meant to consign the work of Boccaccio to the status of the “slack, boneless,” and “affected,” much less Melville to the status of a “trivial, dime-novel sort of thing.” Melville’s valedictory The Confidence-man has so much resonance, after all, with Porter’s own novel, Ship of Fools. She is also somewhat at odds with Holman and Harmon, who put the novella much closer to the neoclassical Renaissance than they do the novelette. With the term short novel, I think she really refers to the sort of thing that Henry James did in The Turn of the Screw—very much novella or novelette- like; certainly, she elsewhere lionized James1. But she does not define her terms rigorously, content merely to dismiss an imprecise nomenclature for equally ill defined terminology of her 5 own.