Ink A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts Daniel J. Dominowski May 2014 © 2014 Daniel J. Dominowski. All Rights Reserved. 2 This thesis titled Ink by DANIEL J. DOMINOWSKI has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Patrick O'Keeffe Assistant Professor of English Robert Frank Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT DOMINOWSKI, DANIEL J., M.A., May 2014, English Ink Director of Thesis: Patrick O'Keeffe The process of writing in the first-person perspective is that of haunting a narrative, as the narrator is unable to interact with the story, only to observe and interpret it. The fiction that follows is presented in this style to explore the notion of not confessing but attempting to justify, or at very least explain, past actions. The work is an exploration of trying to justify a feeling of guilt felt in a particular moment by unfolding the past and providing context. Moreover, it is an exploration of the precise nature of the guilt and what has caused the narrator to feel this way. 4 DEDICATION For Michelle. 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the faculty of the Ohio University English Department for their dedication and care in pushing me to excel as a writer. I would like to specifically thank Patrick O’Keeffe, Joan Connor, Amritjit Singh and Albert Rouzie for their patience and guidance. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3 Dedication ........................................................................................................................... 4 Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................... 5 Critical Introduction for Ink: Narrative Ghosts ................................................................... 7 Ink ..................................................................................................................................... 20 7 CRITICAL INTRODUCTION FOR INK: NARRATIVE GHOSTS As a fiction writer, I am especially drawn to the way in which a first-person narrator can simultaneously appear and not appear in a narrative, how a narrator can produce ghosts out of things that were once tangible and real and how it becomes possible for a narrator to haunt his or her own story. For example, the narrators in William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, Charles Baxter's Believers and Alice Munro's Child's Play haunt their stories as much as they tell them. Their hauntings transform mundane moments into moments that are complex and satisfying. These ghosts color the simplicity of a particular moment that would otherwise be insignificant and make it a defining moment, not only for the narrator but for the human condition and what it means to be human. That moment’s context is provided through the events that lead to it or even proceed from it. The narrator must provide this context through layers of his or her own interpretation, the how’s and why’s, the concrete details that create the world, the people involved in the story. Longer forms of storytelling, such as novels, novellas and long short-stories, allow for a more nuanced and complex significance to emerge out of a single moment—a defining moment for the narrator, particularly in the first-person—than shorter forms, which rely on discovery through a smaller slice of life. Take, for example, the key moment in William Maxwell’s short novel So Long, See You Tomorrow: The narrator, having navigated through a detailed and vivid imagined recreation of a sordid affair and the violence that erupted from the alleged affair in his hometown during his youth, arrives at a moment in which he passes another boy in the hallway at school. Early on, he tells us, “I very much doubt I would have remembered 8 for more than fifty years the murder of a tenant farmer I never laid eyes on if (1) the murderer hadn't been the father of someone I knew, and (2) I hadn't later on done something I was ashamed of afterward” (6). Maxwell’s narrator believes this boy is the son of the man who was murdered in the small town that they lived in and upon a moment of recognition, he chooses not to acknowledge him, not to say anything. It becomes a devastatingly minor event but one that lingers in his mind and forces him to explain the history of what becomes the central moment in the novella. This moment of inaction is deeply affecting to Maxwell's narrator-character. Because of the narrator's present-tense interjections, his hauntings, the reader understands the context from which the narrator believes he knew the boy and the events that, even though they are imagined due to a lack of first-hand knowledge, lead to the boy and the narrator-character arriving at the same place and time. Moreover, it provides a way of understanding what it means for the two boys to not only not interact or speak, but to continue on without even acknowledging one another. The narrator is struggling with the shame of one particular moment; the rest of the narrative exists to understand why he would feel that at all and to specify the exact nature of the shame. This moment is acknowledged by the narrator as being deeply significant to his sense of self, as being meaningful. Without the winding narrative of his youth, the imagined events of the murder, which is based on limited factual evidence, the moment is insignificant. Even with the provided context, it is still nothing—it is simply a moment— yet it somehow breaches into a liminal space where it is also something. While it is an external moment that happens—the boys exist in a hallway and pass one another, there is 9 a physical, tangible, meaningless moment—the meaning is created within the narrator- character alone. It is a part of his self, a constellation of memories, dreams and speculation from which meaning seems to spontaneously emerge. The catalyst for this emergence is an off-chance encounter with someone from his past. Maxwell’s story is presented as a faux-memoir, but over half of the narrative is simply imagined, pieced together from fragments, conjecture, and speculation. Even the moment of passing the other boy in the hallway is unconfirmed: he does not know if it is indeed the boy of the murdered man in his hometown. “This memoir—if that's the right name for it—is a roundabout, futile way of making amends,” Maxwell's narrator tells us (6). He saw someone who he believed to be the same person and it sparks a need in him to articulate that moment's meaning, synthesized with his speculations, conjectures and daydreams to produce an awareness about the world he inhabits. That moment somehow becomes the moment in which he considers his role as a human being, as a self that constructs its own meaning—as a self that both exists and does not simultaneously, that creates itself from nothing, a self that feels shame. It is a moment that is haunted by a past that may or may not have even existed but is real enough to the narrator-character that it is the basis for who he is, and what meaning he experienced in that moment. This moment has led the narrator to years of therapy, shaped him in ways he cannot articulate fully. He tells us that it is a moment that he “keep[s] reliving in [his] mind, as if [he] were going through a series of reincarnations that end up each time in the same failure” (133). The moment, intrinsically meaningless, gains importance right then: he cannot escape it. It is focused but fleeting, but the impact that it imparts is one that haunts the narrator, 10 provokes him to tell the events of the story, to seek amends. And it is still on-going—the story has not stopped for the narrator—the meaning is still developing and undefinable, continually being reinvented. The embodied, or experienced, meaning is, of course, unsayable; the narrator can only present the situation, not what the situation means. Experience does not translate into language perfectly; to make matters worse, memory is fallible and fluid. Because of the constraints imposed by language, the narrator must invent a narrative that is not merely about his or herself but is a crucial and fundamental aspect of his or her self. He or she is attempting to appropriate language in such a way as to reveal the hidden self that is impossible to expose. Meaning, however, can emerge from an effective narrative, but it cannot be abstracted and defined. It is a ghost in the linguistic machine; the revealed experiential meaning must suffice. The narrator is a ghost in his or her own narrative; he or she is there, able to observe but not interact. That distance is where the story has developed and become coherent inside the inaccessible and hidden mind of the narrator—it has become marked with his or her personality, acquiring the trappings of his or her flaws, quirks, vices and virtues. That distance comes through as a retrospection, a reflection. The moments where the narrative speaks from the present indicates a need to evaluate a particular moment and its context in relation to who the narrator is, was, and is possibly becoming. For example, Charles Baxter, in an interview, says that the present tense would be most useful when “the characters aren't particularly good at remembering their pasts and aren't planning much for the future … when [they’re] living in a kind of blanked-out perpetual present, 11 when they are living ahistorical lives” (103). Conversely, it could be said that a narrators who focus on the past and resists the present are stuck perpetually in the past, unable to move forward or accept the present as a logical progression from their past, if it is even their past at all.