Thesis Preface

Since my graduate thesis is technically a novel, I have to provide a scholarly preface to come before it in the stack of pages I'll be turning in soon. This isn't the kind of thing I would normally post except I think it does a fair amount of explaining my process and growth as a writer since moving to San Francisco. To a point, it also deconstructs the novel in a way that I think makes sense to people who may read it and not pick up immediately on the art informing the shape of the text. Lord knows I wouldn't pick up on it if I hadn't done the research myself beforehand.

Preface

 

            Before coming to the University of San Francisco, I knew that my writing style bent a little to the odd side of things. I was never pleased with endings that made the reader feel good or explained away every last detail to the reader. Sometimes questions are best left hanging in the air to be asked over and over again with no resolve forthcoming. Multiple readings often give us new contextual clues or highlight different nuances previously passed over. This is one of the many joys of re-reading certain books or authors.

            What I did not know, however, was the level of playfulness that could be achieved in telling a simple story through complex characters. The writing skills at my disposal were severely lacking when I arrived in San Francisco and my first project, while intriguing to me personally, was full of serious errors.

A novella told in four sections, my first project followed the life of a man from infancy to his death in old age. The first section, his early years, were told in the second person point of view, as if the reader were the man and the book was a photo album being shown to him for the first time as he learned about his parents. The second section was told in a completely objective setting told in pure dialog: the main character as a teenager engaged in multiple conversations with his therapist. The third section showed the main character as a young adult, in his prime and working as a professor, told from the omniscient third person point of view.  The final act felt appropriate in the close first person point of view, giving the reader direct insight into the ruminations of an elderly main character dealing with Alzheimer’s.

The idea was that I wanted to work on expanding my skill as a writer by utilizing the different viewpoints available to me. There were so many skill sets I lacked coming in to the program that I wanted to strengthen as many of them as possible. By my second semester, I had an idea for a novel that would allow me to really flex some authorial muscle and help me deal with many of the writing inadequacies that remained. That novel is what you hold in your hand now.

“Impasto” began as a story involving only the inanimate objects in a museum, the ones that are rarely given voice and often overlooked or misinterpreted by the casual viewer. The pieces I chose were based on a purely aesthetic level; if what I saw spoke to me in some way, then surely the pieces would speak to the reader as well. Far from being well-versed in the art world, I knew I had to do a ton of research on each of the paintings I chose. I also knew that I would be riding a fine line since I was making new fiction (a novel) out of already established fiction (the art itself). If I couldn’t find information on a specific painting (intended metaphors, intended meanings, etc.), I then examined the backgrounds and philosophies of the artists themselves. Ultimately, the goal was to honor the already created work with the work I hoped to produce myself. I wanted to stay as true to the original ideas found between the frames as possible.

This created a strange moral quandary for me. Was I, in fact, stealing an idea from someone else or was I simply building an homage? I reasoned that since the art form of the novel was different that I was creating something new because it was in a textual form rather than a canvas and acrylic form. The beauty of this entire researching process is that the paintings actually feel like characters. They have emotions, they have things at stake that mean a great deal to them, they exist as living things. This realization of course led to them all having their own ways of “speaking” to the reader.

Marcel DuChamp was famous for his “Nude Descending A Staircase,” but he was also famous for turning objects found on the street into art without having done anything to them but sign his name across them. This dissociation from his painting led me to the father/son relationship in “A Muse” while presenting the text of the story in a journal or diary form, one of the most private and emotionally revealing forms for young people for many decades.

In “Revolution/Revelation,” Max Ernst gives us a painting of him being carried by his father. This is his direct response to the moment in the Bible of Mary carrying Jesus. By taking the biblical cue, I formed a creation story told in the same kind of biblical and textual format to link the ideas together. After all, if these paintings exist, their existence must come from somewhere. A creation myth for them was an absolute necessity and Ernst’s painting was the impetus for the telling.

In “Chorus,” we see the two female figures of de Chirico’s surreal women side by side. As soon as I saw this piece, I knew that they would act as a kind of explanatory section; they were the clarifiers, the semi-objective observers standing watch over the museum. In order to set them apart from the other sections, I felt a poetic form was necessary here. Both women speak on their own for single lines before coming together in the middle of the page and speaking together for three lines. If there is a fog upon the reader by this point, these two are placed there so that they may lift it.

The paintings informed certain parts of the novel’s plot. They also informed much of how I viewed them “speaking” on the page to the reader. In expanding outward from the standard textual format of a novel or short story and playing with the myriad ways language allows, I believe I am able to present this thesis as a multi-faceted kind of literary tapestry that explores many of the limits of both the imagination and the use of formatting in order to tell the richest story possible.