EXPOSURES _______________ A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English University of Houston _______________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts _______________ By Alexandra Naumann May, 2018 i Acknowledgments Thank you to Alex Parsons for kindly approaching this project with open-mindedness regarding the content of the novel which at times grows dark; with patience toward narrative irregularities; and with generosity in providing a thoughtful reading of character arc. Thank you and gratitude to Roberto Tejada whose two classes brimmed with curiosity and wonder and who is a model and guide to me as a human and thinker. Thank you to Chitra Divakaruni and Amber Dermont for generously reading on my committee, to Giuseppe Taurino who has always supported me in the program, and to my CWP peers from whom I learned a great deal. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................................... III TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................................... IV PREFACE.................................................................................................................................. V EXPOSURES ............................................................................................................................. 1 iii Preface It is my aim to provide a context for this short novel in order for the reading experience to be more enjoyable and for the departures from narrative convention to be more permissible. Exposures employs sentence fragments, stream of consciousness, lyric interludes, roving omniscience, shifts in verb tense, and figurative language, but it is a realist novel invested in character. I am going to praise books and art in equal measure in this preface. Libraries and museums are the last public spaces of secular worship intended to bring humans together in quiet reflection on the fundamental questions preoccupying the thinking mind: What is love? What is goodness? What is transcendence? Tell me truth. Performing arts, ones with high admissions fees and acquired tastes, eschew access in favor of cachet. But you could very reasonably expect to read a beautiful book at the library for free. Books are democratic and provide us with the happy illusion that if we only keep reading we can live all lives. Art, meanwhile, forces us to confront the distance between dream and reality. We cannot inhabit art in the same robust multisensory way as a novel, a form that tasks its audience with imagining. Virginia Woolf’s use of stream of consciousness and language in To the Lighthouse made a deep impression on me as a reader. Notably, Woolf combines stream of consciousness with roving omniscience. In a fresh way, Rachel Cusk communicates her characters’ impressions and thoughts in language, too. Interiority interests me as fiction, unlike visual mediums, excels at capturing thinking. While Poppy’s character arc (trapped in the house; escaped from the house - trapped mentally; committing the ultimate betrayal - consummating the ultimate love; returning to confront her true self in the house - released mentally) shape the novel, other perspectives exist beside hers. Poppy’s perspective overwhelms one’s tolerance for melodrama without a balance of other sensibilities to temper her heightened reactions. Recently, a spate of novels documenting love affairs from women’s perspectives have appeared, and two in particular accomplish everything I should wish to iv accomplish: Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry and Sally Rooney’s Conversations With Friends, written with blasé attitudes and fluid sentences. Though I am currently the same age as the author of the aforementioned book, perhaps I do not have the wherewithal to grapple with Poppy’s character, or, more accurately, perhaps I do not have the appropriate narrative sensibility as mine eschews ironic distance in favor of earnestness and lyric intensity. James Salter’s novel Light Years, which ranges between past and present tense to make manifest on a line-to-line basis the warp of time and index Viri’s decline, provided me with a model for shifting between verb tenses with intention. At different points in the writing process, I attempted to migrate the whole project into the past tense, but, ultimately, it became clear that certain paragraphs needed to remain in past tense, others in present tense. Similarly, the codeswitching between English and Spanish captures the linguistic fluidity prevalent in the foreign space Poppy inhabits out of birthright and of her own accord as an adult. Junot Diaz, grotty and jubilant in his phrasings, was a model for peppering Spanish into fiction. As much as linguistic frisson and texture fuels my work, Mavis Gallant’s embedding of meaning in imagery and Eudora Welty’s reckless figurative language were formative for me as a writer, as were the love and wisdom that suffuses their characterizations; they see straight into the hearts of their creations. In a similar vein, Clarice Lispector’s galvanic wildness and disfiguration of language excite me, as do her uncanny insights into longing and love. “I am not an intellectual,” Lispector writes, “I write with my body. Coherence, I don’t want it anymore. Coherence is mutilation. I want disorder.” While I sympathize with Lispector’s words, I hope for coherence, especially in fiction. Moreover, this is the area I most seek to improve: clarity, order. Still, the natures of these characters warrant a complicated presentation of ethics that shirks definitiveness in favor of mutability and supplants order with variability. v More recently, I encountered Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel The End of the Days, which weaves together different versions of the same story, entangling novel form and human fate. The book is a masterclass in maintaining believability and emotional stakes while manipulating the familiar architecture of the novel. Admittedly, an over-reliance on imagery and metaphor causes shabbiness in scenes and skittish pacing in my novel(a). In more recent drafts, I have attempted to loosen the language of this book, which at times reads overly pressurized, unpalatably so. I have always admired aphoristic writers like Henry David Thoreau, who writes sentences with bold, unsubstantiated claims about the broader world and in doing so foregrounds his narrator. The earnestness of Thoreau’s writing and his crotchety antipathy toward society fill me with joy. His is a vision of nonconformity no longer possible, hemmed in as it is by his limited conception of American society, but his insistence on transcendence, his reverence for nature, and his search for a nuanced vessel of the divine in the everyday remain touchstones for seeking habitual grace. I often prefer essays over fiction. There is a quality to certain fiction which announces itself as fiction: e.g.,“Tom strode out of the room,” that I find irritating. In contrast, the essay never purports to tell anything but the truth and never degrades itself by communicating via stilted fiction language, which is at best boring and at worst enervating. John Berger, Adam Gopnik, Zadie Smith, Rebeca Solnit, Geoff Dyer and Marilynne Robinson all write beautiful essays. I often turn to essays over fiction because essays wear their heart on their sleeve, to borrow a cliché, and risk vulnerability without the ironic distance afforded by fiction. I love the intimate voice that characterizes the essay form, a voice that gives one the impression that the narrator is speaking directly to the reader, foregrounding the author’s attempt at communication and displaying vulnerability much to the reader’s pleasure. Essayists pivot frequently between literature, art, life, and the historical record—all are beautiful, all are painful. I love the name dropping in essays and the abundant references to other vi artists and writers that tangles one further in a web of reading and discovery. I love the way essays make one feel actively involved in a human conversation spanning centuries recorded in books. These writers account for literary influences but equally important to this project are artistic influences. There is no time I feel as attendant to being a subject in relation to other entities hemmed in by my own witnessing of their existence as when I am standing before a piece of art in a hall with high ceilings, purposefully high ceilings so as to allow sufficient headspace for the volume of flighty thoughts and aspirations released in response to a confrontation with beauty. I have never felt more known and knowing than when standing before art (be it literature, performing, or visual) and perhaps this is what people mean when they refer to the sublime. I do not know, but think, we are awed by an experience of beauty when we deem a creation lasting and infinite: the sky, the ocean, the Grand Canyon, an enormous marble amphitheater, or a masterpiece painting. This makes the erosion or human marks visible in great works of art all the more appealing—the cigarette ash in a Jackson Pollack (how breath and smoke track time) or the demarcation of geological eras in the Grand Canyon (how wind and sand track time) or the abraded stone longing for the missing arm on a female torso from antiquity. That we can go to a museum and see a Mark Rothko in the same context as an Ancient Greek statue of Aphrodite, a Mayan calendar, or an Egyptian Fayum portrait startles us not so much as the kindred reactions they all spark as objects of devotion. At the Museum of Fine Arts there has long been a zesty abstract painting by Willem de Kooning on the first floor, and, recently, they placed a work of similar size, color, and abstraction by Elaine de Kooning, his wife and fellow painter, on the adjacent wall. The paintings reside in the same corner and the images communicate with one another as one imagines the artists communicated as lovers and friends. You recognize that the one could not have existed without the other, that these paintings exist in erotic interrelation. What is spoken in one is responded to in the other.