Tide mark : shame in short fiction : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Creative Writing at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
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2021
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Massey University
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This thesis comprises two sections: a critical section analysing two works of short fiction by George Saunders and Kristen Roupenian respectively, and a collection of short stories entitled: Tide Mark. Both sections interrogate the presence of the affect of shame in the context of short fiction, taking the view that shame is an inevitable materialisation of the tension between content and form. In the critical portion of the thesis I read "Puppy" by George Saunders and "Look at Your Game, Girl" by Kristen Roupenian. I discuss both these fictions in the context of narrative theory, looking to Adam Zachary Newton's Narrative Ethics for a model of reading as an ethical encounter. I interrogate the presence of shame in these fictions through affect theory, specifically as theorised by Timothy Bewes' The Event of Postcolonial Shame and Kaye Mitchell's feminist theorising of shame in Writing Shame: Gender, Contemporary Literature and Negative Affect. Both critics argue that the presence of shame in narrative is an event in which the ethical encounter of reading and writing is disrupted. My argument is that shame is the rupture between form and content, between ethics and aesthetics. In the creative portion of my thesis, I have produced five short fictions organised around a specific location: the Channel Island of Jersey, one of the British Isles. Each situation in the collection demonstrates the ways in which shame disrupts the very stories it has prompted. "Dead House" explores the way place and shame interact through a character who returns to Jersey after a failed marriage. In "Recovery Position", the protagonist deals with infertility and shame at the ending of his marriage. "The Beast" takes up the story of the wife of a notorious sex attacker and her attempts to conceal her knowledge of his crimes. "Nightwalker" is a story of obsession and failure in the context of the offshore finance industry. "All of my friends were there" considers the roles of silence and storytelling in a family dealing with the legacy of the occupation. The stories are an attempt to explore the ways in which shame and writing are, as Timothy Bewes states, "coterminous".