FAR HILLS 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 Jennifer C. Dunning August 2006 This dissertation entitled FAR HILLS by JENNIFER C. DUNNING 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 Abstract DUNNING, JENNIFER C., Ph.D., August 2006, English FAR HILLS (210 pp.) Director of Thesis: Darrell K. Spencer This dissertation consists of a collection of short stories, many of which foreground the relationship of character to place. A number of the stories are set in Ellisville, Ohio, a fictional town with similarities to Athens and surrounding southeast Ohio towns. The critical introduction explores the use of omniscient narration in contemporary short fiction. Drawing on the ideas of Walter Benjamin, from his essay “The Storyteller,” the introduction considers how the presence of the storyteller’s voice in fiction might shape narrative. Approved: Darrell K. Spencer Professor of English Acknowledgments I would like to thank the Ohio University English Department for the opportunity to spend four years thinking about writing, teaching, and literature. I would especially like to thank Darrell Spencer, Joan Connor, and David Lazar—Darrell, for sharing with me his ideas about stories, for giving me new ways to think about stories; Joan, for her keen insights into story architecture; David, for the gift of the essay. I am grateful to all those people in Ellisville who shared their lives with me (and whose mailing addresses might be Athens, Amesville, Albany, Shade, Ohio) and to the wildflowers and trees and rocks and creatures of southeastern Ohio which, like Ginnie, I can’t yet imagine not living among. Finally, thank you to my family, my husband Steve Longfellow, my parents, and my children, Claire, Rachel and Tim, for their patience, generosity, suppport. A few of these stories have been published or accepted for publication in literary magazines, for which I’m very grateful—“Reva” in CutBank, “Appliance Repair” in Beloit Fiction Journal, “Tenderloin” in Harpur Palate, “Live Another Year” in Short Stories Bimonthly. for Steve, without whom these stories wouldn’t be 6 Table of Contents Page Acknowledgements............................................................................................................. 4 In Defense of Omniscience: The Voice of the Storyteller.................................................. 7 Far Hills ............................................................................................................................ 48 Soup Kitchen..................................................................................................................... 63 Sky Lab Summer............................................................................................................... 80 Commuting ....................................................................................................................... 95 Appliance Repair ............................................................................................................ 114 Reva ................................................................................................................................ 124 Dogwoods ....................................................................................................................... 137 Live Another Year .......................................................................................................... 151 Tenderloin....................................................................................................................... 163 The Far............................................................................................................................ 175 Slump Rock..................................................................................................................... 195 7 In Defense of Omniscience: The Voice of the Storyteller The use of limited points of view has become standard in contemporary fiction, so much so that other options are infrequently discussed. In this essay I hope to present a more balanced view. I want to explore how the limited point of view, meaning narration that communicates only the thoughts, perceptions, and opinions of a single character, tends to be used in contemporary fiction and how the strategies employed might shape or even limit stories. Second, I want to explore examples of omniscient narration and consider how the overt presence of the storyteller might shape stories. I offer these ideas as a perspective that might be presented alongside more standard ideas about using limited points of view in fiction writing classrooms. Third-person Limited Narration Craft books on writing fiction devote much attention to the problem of point of view and, implicitly or explicitly, tend to promote the use of limited points of view over omniscient narration. Janet Burroway, in her popular introductory text Imaginative Writing: the Elements of Craft, for instance, advises writing students that limited omniscience is “the usual” perspective for third-person narration today: “In the twentieth century it became usual for ‘the author’ to assume the more modest capability of the limited omniscient, able to go into one character’s mind and to tell us objectively what, if 8 we were present, we would be able to perceive for ourselves, but not to leap from the mind of one character to another” (52). Burroway’s discussion proceeds to set an example of what she terms third-person limited omniscience side-by-side with an example of omniscient narration, a passage from Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley. I will discuss Burroway’s characterization of omniscience later in the essay. Here I want to note that what Burroway presents as typical of third-person limited is actually only one end of the spectrum. She cites a passage from a contemporary work of fiction in which, as she says, “‘the author’ is an unvoiced presence, seeing and remembering through the character’s eyes. It is the character himself looking back who ‘realizes,’ ‘feels,’ and ‘smells’” (52). Lynna Williams terms this technique “third-person unified” and distinguishes it from “third person limited.” Third- person unified, she says, is narration in which the point-of-view character is the consciousness of the story (117), while third-person limited blends the character’s perspective with objective narration (120). My interest here is not in terminology so much as what the conflation of the two ends of the spectrum indicates about contemporary fiction1. In third-person narration, fiction conventions allow the voice of the narrator, an essentially expository voice that tells the reader what happens, to be blended with the vocabulary, syntax, and thoughts of a point-of-view character, a convention known as free indirect discourse. But this technique encompasses a broad range along which the character’s voice may be more or less evident in relation to the narrator’s voice, in other words, the range of Williams’s 1 Burroway’s treatment of third-person narration does go on to discuss objective narration, which she describes as a journalistic stance (52-53) rather than as narration that moves between character and narrator’s voices as in Williams’s breakdown. 9 “third person unified” in which character voice predominates through her “third-person limited” in which the narrator’s voice can have a strong presence. Contemporary fiction is diverse and there are exceptions to every trend. However, in literary journals generally, stories in which character voice predominates are very prevalent. In Best American Short Stories 2005, the majority of third-person stories employ narration that privileges character voice over narrator’s voice. Perhaps the most extreme example, is Cory Doctorow’s ingenious story “Anda’s Game,” a story that takes place largely in the virtual world of an online game. The story opens in the voice of a narrator, but moves quickly into narration heavily infected by the vocabulary and syntax of the point-of-view character, an adolescent girl: Anda didn’t really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar. She was twelve, and up until then, she’d played a boy-elf because her parents had sternly warned her that if you played a girl you were an instant perv-magnet. None of the girls at Ada Lovelace Comprehensive would have been caught dead playing a girl character. In fact, the only girls she’d ever seen in-game were being played by boys. You could tell, cos they were shaped like a boy’s idea of what a girl looked like: hooge buzwabs and long legs all barely contained in tiny, pointless leather bikini- armor. Bintware, she called it. (223, my italics) The narration employs invented words and slang typical of adolescents, italicized in the passage; syntax, too, as the paragraph progresses, becomes more characteristic of teenagers. From the middle of the opening paragraph on through the story, the narration remains close-to-character. 10 For contrast, consider the overt presence of the narrator’s voice in the following passage from Flaubert’s story “A Simple Heart,” at the point in the story when Félicté has just learned of her beloved nephew’s death: Liébard looked at her and sighed. Mme Aubain was trembling slightly. She suggested that she should go and see her sister at Trouville, but Félicité