Toadman and Other Encounters A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English & Comparative Literature of the College of Arts and Sciences by Peter Grimes M.F.A. University of Florida August 2011 Committee Chair: Michael Griffith, M.F.A. i Abstract Toadman and Other Encounters is a collection of short fiction exploring the boundaries of human experience, at times experienced by the reader through narrative boundaries. Questions about what makes us human are framed and echoed by questions about what constitutes a story. In one essay and nineteen stories, Toadman and Other Encounters describes and portrays encounters between humans and each other, humans and animals, humans and texts, meanwhile underscoring these encounters with the encounter between narrative and non-narrative modes, distinct moods and tones, conflicting voices and points of view. ii iii Acknowledgements ―Toadman‖ (Winner: AWP Intro Journals Prize) appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review. ―The Progress of Tongues‖ will appear in Packingtown Review. ―Town and Gown‖ appeared in Gulf Stream. ―A Bad Man, Speaking Poorly‖ appeared in Lake Effect. ―Victoria‖ (Second Prize: Spring 2010 Narrative Story Contest) appeared in Narrative. ―Head Game‖ (Finalist: Mississippi Review Prize) appeared in Mississippi Review. ―Le Mot Faux‖ appeared in Mid-American Review. ―Transplant‖ appeared in Harpur Palate. ―El Sudor de la Rubia‖ appeared in Jelly Bucket. ―The Backbone of Peoria‖ appeared as ―A Taste of Home‖ in Reed Magazine. ―A Literary Approach to the Third Problem‖ appeared in Copper Nickel. ―Rockville Is Not Like This‖ appeared in Brand. iv CONTENTS What‘s the Story? A Writer Learns to Read ...................................................................................... 1 Toadman ....................................................................................................................................... 37 The Progress of Tongues ............................................................................................................... 60 Town and Gown ............................................................................................................................ 68 A Triangle Theory ......................................................................................................................... 72 A Bad Man, Speaking Poorly ...................................................................................................... 114 Night Patrol ................................................................................................................................. 117 Victoria ....................................................................................................................................... 136 The Witches of Haddonfield ........................................................................................................ 152 Head Game ................................................................................................................................. 179 Trash ........................................................................................................................................... 184 Le Mot Faux................................................................................................................................ 209 Transplant ................................................................................................................................... 222 Two Fences ................................................................................................................................. 229 El Sudor de La Rubia .................................................................................................................. 240 Lord of the Castle ........................................................................................................................ 249 The Backbone of Peoria .............................................................................................................. 268 A Literary Approach to the Third Problem ................................................................................... 273 The Storyteller............................................................................................................................. 275 Rockville Is Not Like This .......................................................................................................... 289 v WHAT‘S THE STORY? A WRITER LEARNS TO READ Introduction Of utmost importance to writers of short fiction is, not surprisingly, an understanding of what a short story is. Many great short story writers have done just fine following an intuitive understanding of the form to decide when they have read or written a complete story, but it can‘t hurt a writer‘s appreciation or practice of the genre to struggle with achieving a definition of the genre. In this essay I first give a brief overview of the debates surrounding short story definition; next, after considering Wolfgang Iser‘s theory of reading, I observe and comment on my own reading of two identical texts, one presented as a short story and the other presented as the third chapter of a novel-in-stories; last, I draw conclusions about what my reading experiment contributes to discussions of Iser‘s theory of reading and of short story definition, as well as about its usefulness to short story writers. The Essence is in the Story: Text-based Definitions For as long as critics and practitioners of the short story have endeavored to define that literary form, they have done so by comparing its textual features to that of the novel. Edgar Allan Poe, in ―The Philosophy of Composition‖ (1846), explains that short literary works like poems, by virtue of being readable ―in a single sitting,‖ must be treated as forms distinct from works not so readable (69). Only by satisfying this necessary condition of one-sitting readability, can a work also achieve a unified effect, which Poe regards as crucial to short literary works: ―If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression—for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world intervene . .‖ (69). Though Poe doesn‘t speak explicitly of novels and short stories here, we see the beginning of the dichotomy 1 that serves later critics who try to define these forms in relation to each other. Brander Matthews, in his 1882 article ―The Philosophy of the Short-Story,‖ picks up on Poe‘s unity dictum by applying it to prose. Distinguishing between the ―Short-story‖ (roughly equivalent to our modern sense of short story) and the ―mere story which is short,‖ Matthews contrasts the novel and the short story in a manner that has proven seminal to short story theory: ―The difference between a Novel and a Short-story is a difference of kind. A true Short-story differs from the Novel chiefly in its essential unity of impression‖ (73). In other words, Matthews is arguing that there are particular features or traits in the text itself that distinguish a short story from other genres, most notably the novel. Bold and scientific as this line of definition might appear, Matthews predictably runs into trouble (so far as more recent literary theory is concerned) when he sets out to list these traits or qualities. He says, for instance that unlike short stories, novels must deal principally with love, thereby mistaking a perceived contemporary trend in novels with a quality of the form itself (74). (Notice here that he doesn‘t actually list a positive trait regarding subject for short stories; rather he relies upon pointing to the novel‘s dissimilar trait.) Although other traits that he mentions are more palatable to some modern critics of the short story, such as the idea that something must ―happen‖ in a short story whereas nothing need ―happen‖ in a sketch (77), his Aristotelian project of definition through the listing of (sometimes) positive, essential traits is called into question by the times when one of his ―essential‖ items doesn‘t match one of a different definition. Nevertheless, his instinct to locate the definition of a literary genre in its textual traits (or lack of those traits), which might or might not be perceived by a reader, has persisted into critics‘ definition of the short story well into the twentieth century. Almost a century after Matthews, in his introduction to Short Story Theories (1977), Charles E. May calls for a new type of short story definition: ―What is needed is a theory in the modern sense, starting not from external elements of form or even various classes of subject matter, but rather from 2 the underlying vision of the short story, its characteristic mode of understanding and confronting reality‖ (12). Although May here calls for a short story definition that doesn‘t limit itself by fruitlessly compiling lists of positive, essential traits discoverable in the text, the definition he offers in place of such definitions shares these basic characteristics. In ―The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction‖ (1984), May defines the short story in terms of the type of human experience it depicts. By focusing on the type of experience depicted, he seems to be attempting to identify an ―underlying vision‖ unique to short stories, thereby doing away with the trait-list approach, but he does not differ