PASSING FIGURES A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the Graduate School At the University of Missouri-Columbia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy By Gregory J. Dunne Dr. Scott Cairns, Dissertation Supervisor December 2012 The undersigned, appointed by the dean of Graduate school, have examined the Dissertation entitled PASSING FIGURES Presented by Gregory J. Dunne, A candidate for the degree of doctor of philosophy, and hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. Professor Scott Cairns Professor Martin Holman Professor David Read Professor Maureen Stanton DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to the poetry immortals of my life – the poets, friends, teachers, and family members who have shown me a way into poetry, especially my father, Jeremiah Dunne (1927- 2009), my mother, Ann Flaherty Dunne, my wife, Kikuchi Kae, and to our children Emi, Jyoji, Airi, and Arisa. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am sincerely grateful to the kind, patient, and inspiring support of my dissertation director Scott Cairns, who believed in my vision from the start and helped to guide me towards a realization of that vision. I would also like to acknowledge the critically important contribution that Maureen Stanton made towards helping me complete this endeavor. I benefitted immensely from her generous support, advisement, and teaching, from start to finish. I am thankful to David Read whose close reading and challenging comments helped me to improve my writing and to examine more closely, and critically, the creative impulse behind it. I would like to thank Martin Holman who, as an accomplished translator of Japanese literature, challenged me with my Japanese translations and suggested I read additional works of Japanese literature, works that stimulated me creatively, and works that ultimately allowed me to shape this dissertation. I would like to thank the poets, David Wagoner, Cid Corman, David Jenkins, Nance Van Winckel, Richard Jones, Tod Marshall, and Gary Metras, who have inspired and encouraged me for many years. I am grateful to Mark Patterson at the University of Washington who thrilled me with his teaching of Thoreau many years ago. And last, but not least, I wish to thank my parents, friends, colleagues, and families, in both the United States and Japan, on whom I have depended on for so much and from whom I have drawn inspiration, support, and nourishment. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Critical Introduction 1 Chapter 1/Setting Out 13 Chapter 2/Steps Along the Way 31 Chapter 3/West 74 Chapter 4/The Journey Itself: Basho & Thoreau 198 Chapter 5/Getting the Secret Out of Cid Corman 223 Chapter 6/Graces 251 Chapter 7/Father 277 Chapter 8/Quiet Accomplishment 319 Chapter 9/The Air of Pegasus 335 Chapter 10/Children 375 Vita 381 iii Critical Introduction To Passing Figures Shards Glinting in the Dust “True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world.” Patricia Hampl Passing Figures is a memoir written in both prose and verse. It is a contemporary memoir and as such it strives to take an idea of the self and to examine it by exploring memory imaginatively. The contemporary memoir traces its origins back to earlier forms of nonfiction writing: the autobiography, the slave narrative, and the confession. All of these traditional forms share certain defining characteristics, namely, an author writing about his/her own past and telling a truthful story. Characterizing these forerunners further, we might say that they contain a sustained effort to provide a truthful record of an individual’s life through first-person narration. Contemporary memoir, while including the above characteristics, differs from these earlier forms in the manner in which it engages with experience and memory, in order to shape a new understanding of the self in the world. Vivian Gornick gives us perhaps the most fruitful definition of contemporary memoir, calling it, “a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape 1 experience, transform event, deliver wisdom (Gornick, SS 91). Among other things, Gornick’s definition works to disabuse the reader of the fallacious notion that the self is the major concern of memoir. The “self” found in memoir, as she defines it, is importantly referred to as an “idea.” This understanding of the self in memoir accurately reflects our inability to fully apprehend the term, or agree on a definition of the term as it is used in memoir. It is a contested term, a term that is unclear, and as such inviting of exploration – for the “idea of the self” to be explored through the act of writing. Contemporary memoir does not assume that the life being examined need necessarily be an established public one. In a sense, anyone’s life can be the stuff of memoir, provided that life is sufficiently examined. To quote from Gornick again: “Modern memoir posits that the shaped presentation of one’s own life is of value to the disinterested reader only if it dramatizes and reflects sufficiently on the experience of ‘becoming’: undertakes to trace the internal movement away from the murk of being told who you are by the accident of circumstance toward the clarity that identifies accurately the impulses of the self . .” (SS 93). Memoir, as defined here, is a form that is open and inviting to all regardless of age, background, history, race, or gender. In modern times, it is perhaps our most democratic literary form. That it to say, it is not requisite for the writer to be a person of public status, or of wealth or power – a person of influence. It doesn’t matter who writes the memoir, what matters is that that the writer is able to dramatize and reflect sufficiently on the experience of becoming. When we understand contemporary memoir in this way, we come to appreciate how the form has become so popular. Anyone, in theory, can try to 2 write it, and more importantly, any reader can go to memoir and find something of wisdom within it, a rewarding story of the writer’s journey into becoming. We are, by some accounts, now living in the age of the memoir. Some commentators lament this, finding in it confirmation that we are living in what Christopher Lasch has called a “culture of narcissism,” a self-absorbed culture. Such people bemoan literature’s turn towards what they perceive to be solipsistic concerns. If Gornick’s definition of memoir is fully considered, however, it is hard to find such critical concerns convincing when applied to the memoir, per se. Gornick understands the significance of memoir’s popularity in a positive light. She sees contemporary memoir as having evolved into a more inclusive form and away from exclusivity, a form that celebrates the plurality of voices within literature today: “Everywhere in the world women and men are rising up to tell their stories out of the now commonly held belief that one’s own life signifies. And everywhere, civil rights movements and the therapeutic culture at large have been hugely influential in feeding the belief. In this country alone forty years of liberationist politics have produced an outpouring of testament from women, blacks, and gays that is truly astonishing” (Gornick, SS 91). Thus, although contemporary memoir shares many characteristics with traditional forms of autobiographical writing – an author writing about their own past and telling a truthful story through first person narration – there is a significant difference in the manner in which contemporary memoir utilizes experience and the idea of the self to shape a story. Gornick understands the idea of self in memoir to be “under [an] obligation to 3 lift from the raw materials of life a tale that will shape experience.” I want to stress that Gornick sees the tale itself, which is lifted from the raw materials of life, to be what shapes experience in memoir. In other words, according to Gornick, the memoirist comes to understand something of her life, and perhaps a very provisional understanding at that, through the story, the tale, that she is bringing forward. I understand the act of lifting and the act of shaping, that Gornick refers to, as acts that involve the imagination: the memoirist making something of experience, of memory. It is important to attend to the manner in which Gornick speaks to the issue of truth in memoir and the role she sees the imagination playing in it for in doing so we are able to distinguish memoir from other forms of autobiographical prose – to understand how it actually works: “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events: it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters: what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened” (Gornick, FG 135). This statement registers a critical distinction that sets the contemporary memoir apart from the earlier forms of autobiographical writing, which did tend to emphasize, “what happened to the writer.” In the past, autobiographies tended to be written by well-known individuals in positions of power and influence. In work such as this, what happened to the writer was naturally considered of great importance. In a similar sense, the significance of slave narratives, aside from their social value of providing firsthand accounts of the brutality of slavery, rested squarely 4 upon the fact that writers were recounting the actual details and conditions of their lives.