And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth… 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 Jackson E. Connor June 2011 © 2011 Jackson E. Connor. All Rights Reserved. 2 This dissertation titled And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth… by JACKSON E. CONNOR has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Darrell K. Spencer Professor of English Benjamin M. Ogles Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT CONNOR, JACKSON E., Ph.D., June 2011, English And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth… (191 pp.) Director of Dissertation: Darrell Spencer This dissertation is divided into two sections: an essay considering contemporary mythologies and a novella. Approved: _____________________________________________________________ Darrell K. Spencer Professor of English 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3 Artificial myth ..................................................................................................................... 5 And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . ....................................................... 27 A Prologue .................................................................................................................... 28 . Monday . ............................................................................................................. 40 5 ARTIFICIAL MYTH The last time I worked full-time for a blue-collar crew, one of the guys – Dave’r, shaped like a tee-shirt stretched too far at the waist, hanging low over baggy jeans too tight through the thighs – said of me, “Degirt1, that boy don’t have no common sense.” And I had three simultaneous reactions. One: hurt, because I wanted to be respected by my numbnut monkey peers. Two: pride – I don’t want anything he’s got. Three: epiphany: this was the first time I had ever thought of common sense as subjective. Cleaning all three filters on the quickie saw when it sputtered to a stop was obvious to Dave’r, because he’d done it before, hundreds of times – or something very similar, while I knew next to nothing about oil, gas, or air filters. Common sense, to me, suggests something more akin to: you’re always going to be in debt if you spend half your skimpy paycheck at pool league each Wednesday, and he’s probably not going to be able to lottery his way out of it. Turns out, in the year I worked on that particular crew, I never developed their common sense (nor did I want to) (though I desperately wanted to). I quit that crew to move to Utah to go back to school to learn how to write. Common sense became a different phenomenon in grad school. Mostly I was expected to have better manners, to talk badly about novels I used to like, and to know with certainty the difference between difference and différance. Between paradigmatic and syntagmatic. Between text and work. Nor did my new peers have any better understanding of how an internal combustion engine works. 1 A derogatory laugh of Western Pennsylvania. 6 It would take another several years before I learned to talk about “common sense” as a social construction. As it turns out, what is common to us is often that which we have learned, rather than that which is natural or necessary. It’s common sense that one should not eat raw pork, that one should not mix bleach and ammonia, that one should wear a rubber – our culture privileges these notions such that they become as necessary and irreducible as the Coriolis Effect, inertia, geocentricism. In the meantime, I have learned that ideas such as “common sense” are socially constructed notions. I believe that, in many ways, history, society, and culture have replaced biology: ideologies often make design look natural such that humans become convinced that these designs have always been here, will always be here. (Or, at least, I believe that biology and society are so bound up that they are almost indistinguishable at times.) And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . reflects this belief, for if there is one thing at the heart of the text, it’s the human struggle to live in a world that society has invented / is inventing, a world that this same society constantly strives to convince us is natural and necessary. The text is a cosmos that resides in what Tzvetan Todorov calls The Fantastic, never letting on to the reader whether the events are marvelous or uncanny. In the open pages, for instance, Pedascule drives along the winding roads of a green spring-like Pennsylvania December. This weather could be the result of an unseasonably late fall or an early spring, an unheard-of warm winter, perhaps some early effects of global warming – any of which would indicate the text is uncanny, explained through the unusual physics of the world at large. Or this could be a December that the Whacky and 7 Obtrusive Poet God has set before Her or His Creation just to screw with it. We never know. By creating a world that is slightly different (physically, historically) from the one the reader knows, the text forces its characters and readers to consider contemporary American myths – of masculinity, class, money, language, beauty, common sense – all these and many more come into question through what Roland Barthes calls a demystification process. A much more obvious example of how the textual cosmos is different from the world in which the reader lives is the cultural moment that acts as an objective correlative to the fulcrum within the text. In “Tuesday” around noon, two enormous planes fly into two very tall towers in New York City. Though the text never signifies them as such, it is clear that a relationship exists between these towers and the historic Twin Towers that collapsed 11 September 2001. Unlike the historic collapse of The Twin Towers, the event occurs closer to noon in And the Mountains Labor and Bring Forth . .. Presenting and undermining this culturally pivotal moment in American history is one way the text prepares its readers to engage in the creation of new myths to counter old myths. It makes the extremely familiar somewhat strange. It shows its hand as artifice. And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . .: An Artificial Myth The two sections of Roland Barthes’s classic text Mythologies work together to expose the nature of contemporary mythologies. In twenty-eight short essays on contemporary culture, Barthes attempts to give concrete examples of twenty-eight cultural moments that are often taken as natural rather than as constructed. The essays address topics from professional wrestling to toys to plastic and are meant to look beyond 8 the surface-level reading of such events and to consider the ways contemporary French folks read these symbols as inherent and permanent rather than as artificial symbols designed (even if unknowingly designed) by contemporary culture to maintain the status quo by creating a manageable truth. In the preface, Barthes writes, “The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history” (Barthes 11). For instance, in his discussion of “Striptease,” he notes that “Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked” (84); what then is sold to the public is the “delicious terror” of nudity. What sells to the public is twofold. First, the owner sells the idea that sex sells. Second, the owner sells the idea that what customers are buying is, in fact, sex. Meanwhile “the decor, the props and the stereotypes intervene to contradict the initially provocative intention and eventually bury it in insignificance” (84). The decor, props, and stereotypes are designed to appear natural, necessary, erotic in themselves, but what they are is an effect of history. The contemporary culture pays to be convinced that these erotic displays are not cultural but biological in origin. Thus, when the woman is naked – all the accoutrements stripped away – nothing is left but the self, which is no longer sexualized because the artificial structure is stripped away. This entire act constitutes the myth, the structure of striptease passing itself off as a natural form. In “Myth Today,” the second section of the book, Barthes attempts to systematize the topics he discusses in the first section. Through this process, he uncovers the ways 9 cultures (specifically 1960s France but all societies by extension) learn and teach themselves to believe in cultural signs or myths as natural, and he posits that the only way to counteract this influence is through the subsequent creation of conflicting artificial mythologies. The first step that Barthes takes in his discussion of the development of cultural myths is to talk about myth as a system of language. He writes, “But what must be firmly established at the start is that myth is a system of communication, that it is a message [. .] it is a mode of signification, a form” (109). The importance of the formal nature of myth is that considering it as such, rather than as “an object, a concept, or an idea,” helps to expose its artificial nature, helps us to understand that it is designed rather than inherent. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of addressing a myth is convincing others that it exists in the first place. “All men are created equal,” for instance, creates an American myth, such that for one to suggest that all men are not, in fact, created equal would be equivalent to challenging “The Declaration of Independence.” If, that is, we suggest that all men are not equally encouraged to pursue Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness under the Constitution, we can easily be pointed back to “We hold these truths to be self- evident .