DOWN AND OUT: A NOVEL J. Andrew Briseño Dissertation Prepared for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS May 2015 APPROVED: Miroslav Penkov, Major Professor Javier Rodriguez, Committee Member John Tait, Committee Member Jack Peters, Interim Chair of the Department of English Costas Tsatsoulis, Interim Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Briseño, J. Andrew. Down and Out: A Novel. Doctor of Philosophy (English), May 2015, 299 pp., references, 8 titles. A creative dissertation consisting of two parts: a novel and a critical preface. The critical preface, titled “Novel without Falsehood” deals directly with David Shields’s Reality Hunger, touching on issues of reality as it pertains to truth, writing, fiction, and contemporary culture. The novel is entitled Down and Out and follows the fortunes of a small town in Arkansas before, during, and after its sole source of employment ceases to exist. Copyright 2015 by J. Andrew Briseño ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page PART I NOVEL WITHOUT FALSEHOOD: REALITY HUNGER AS ART AND CONCEPT ........................................................................................................................................ 1 Works Cited ........................................................................................................ 28 PART II DOWN AND OUT: A NOVEL ........................................................................... 29 Pilot .................................................................................................................... 30 Season 1, Episode 2: Queen City of the Mountain .................................. 42 Season 1: Episode 3: The Greatest Daddy in Logan County ................... 56 Season 1, Episode 4: Everything Will Be Alright ...................................... 75 Season 1, Episode 5: The Date .............................................................. 83 Season 1, Episode 6: Steve Lynch: Fish Master...................................... 96 Season 1: Episode 7: The Anniversary Miracle ..................................... 106 Season 1, Episode 8: Fr. William and the Fire Sermon ......................... 120 Season 1, Episode 9: Thanksgiving ....................................................... 133 Season 1: Episode 10: It’s a Wonderful Town ........................................ 142 Season II: An Old Hope .................................................................................... 155 Renewal ................................................................................................. 155 Season 2, Episode 2: Down 'N' Out at the Pawn Shop .......................... 167 Season 2, Episode 3: The Fishmaster Goes on Tour ............................. 179 Season 2, Episode 4: Martin’s Resume ................................................. 187 Season 2, Episode 5: Keeping On ........................................................ 195 Season 2, Episode 6: Sweeps ............................................................... 201 Season 2, Episode 7: The Gun on Stage ............................................... 212 Season 2 Episode 8: The Gun on Stage Part 2 ..................................... 221 Season 2 Episode 9 The Shot Heard Down the Road ........................... 237 Season 2, Episode 10: You Can Never Go Back ................................... 249 Season 2, Episode 11: Right in the Eye ................................................. 258 Season 2, Episode 12: It Means the End of a Thing .............................. 270 Season 2, Episode 13: Aftermath .......................................................... 289 iii PART I NOVEL WITHOUT FALSEHOOD: REALITY HUNGER AS ART AND CONCEPT 1 “The novel is dead. Long live the anti-novel, built from scraps” (327.115)1. So writes David Shields in his manifesto Reality Hunger. When I first read these words I was ready to fight over it, largely because at that point I had only recently realized that the project I'd been working on would become my first novel, and thus also this—my dissertation. Even before I had finished reading Reality Hunger, I was planning to use this preface to wage that war, to directly address Shields's arrogant declarations and to prove him wrong by force of logic and example. And yet now, writing that preface, I find that my relationship to Reality Hunger has evolved. I no longer want to fight David Shields, and I'm not even sure that I can or even should try to prove him wrong. In reading and rereading this text in preparation for writing this preface, I found that close study of Reality Hunger led me to reconsider the book entirely. The subtitle asks us to consider this as a manifesto, but I argue it to be something altogether different and surprising. To explain this argument, I first have to explain the book which is no easy task. Reality Hunger proves impossible to pin down. The book is divided into 26 chapters labeled a through z and each chapter is in turn divided into subsections of varying length. The majority but by no means all of these subsections are not originally Shields's words; rather they are brought together from a huge variety of sources including other literary theorists, journalists, philosophers, comedians, movies, misremembered conversations—in short from everywhere. These varied fragments quite often contradict or counteract each other. For instance, in one section Shields 1 Reality Hunger is broken up into hundreds of small sections; I will use these section numbers as well as page numbers throughout in the format (section.page). 2 writes “The novel isn't dead,” contradicting the quote with which I began (56.22). He claims that fiction and nonfiction are essentially the same thing in sections 3 and 31 only to assert that nonfiction writing is a superior evolved form of writing in sections 65, 133, 180 and elsewhere. Beyond such direct contradictions his collage format means that there are no single definitions for words like truth, fiction, nonfiction, reality, documentary, etc. This means that to address this unconventional work will require an unconventional approach in several ways. I mean to discuss Reality Hunger and the issues it brings up in an organic manner; that is, to begin with analyzing the text itself in more depth and to let findings of that analysis suggest how best to proceed from there. In so doing, I hope to more accurately frame and describe Reality Hunger, to thus be able to suggest what this book means in terms of writing generally and the novel specifically. In the end I plan to connect these thoughts to my own novel which this preface is meant to introduce. To read Reality Hunger is to be confused or rather to accept a certain baseline level of confusion as normal. The sections do not flow together so much as cast shadows against one another, creating meaning from their juxtaposition as much as from their content. There are no transitions and no attempt to make them. Each section is themed but not unified. An example: 53 Suddenly everyone's tale is tellable, which seems to me a good thing, even if not everyone's story turns out to be fascinating or well told. 54 Plot is a way to stage and dramatize reality, but when the presentation is too obviously formulaic, as it so often is, the reality is perceived as false. Skeptical of the desperation of the modernist embrace of art as the only solution, and 3 hyperaware of all artifices of genre and form, we nevertheless seek new means of creating the real. 55 Barbara Kruger was a painter, but her day job was photo editor at Glamour. One day she could no longer tolerate the divide between the two activities, and her artwork became the captioning of photos. 56 Painting isn't dead. The novel isn't dead. They just aren't as central to the culture as they once were. (22) In a single page, Shields discusses plot, the growing story-telling agency of contemporary society, a photo editor at Glamour and the current state of painting and the novel. Certainly there are connections to be drawn here; the first passage's assertion of the benefit that more stories are tellable, when considered in light of the second passage's claim that we are seeking the real while becoming wary of the artifice of plot seem to suggest that art should (and does) spring from everywhere as a natural response to the decoupling of novels (and presumably other fictions) and “the culture.” Perhaps like Barbara Kruger, the new artists will make their life their art. Yet at the same time it could be that Barbara Kruger is an example of a story that is not fascinating or well told, that her art of captioning of photos in Glamour is meant to exemplify the consequences of everyone telling their story. Or it could be that the brief narrative about Kruger is meant to demonstrate the exhaustion of plot discussed right before it, a quick example of how unbelievable all stories sound. In any case, the meaning that is built from reading this section is variable and requires interpretation. Like every collage, it depends on implied connections in the mind of the audience that the author likely never imagined. And of course this is one page from one section, meaning that to truly interpret this short passage we should 4 certainly consider the passages immediately before and after and the ones next to those, and on and on. Thus to try to argue against Reality Hunger is either to argue only against a gerrymandered sliver of the text or to argue against one's own interpretation of the text as a whole. This led me to reconsider the book and how it is meant to function. In so doing,