Date of Award

Summer 1997

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

English

Program/Concentration

Creative Writing

Committee Director

Janet Peery

Committee Member

Scott Cairns

Committee Member

David Metzger

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E64 E66

Abstract

Concerning his film Satyricon, Federico Fellini once said that the pre-Christian world would be so alien to contemporary society that it would resemble a work of science fiction. I have tried to take a similar approach in relation to the division of mind and body which has been the basis of western culture since Descartes. In this novel, I have attempted to present a world without such a division, a world where thoughts are used to power generators, where bodies possess the memory of their own suffering and where souls are capable of being stored and eaten. By blurring the boundaries between mind, body and soul, which also became the blurring of the boundaries between 6ntasy, memory and reality, and between ideals, symbols, and the objects they represent, I have attempted to describe a world in which the most fundamental aspects of human existence—love, sex and death—are thrown into confusion. In such a world, the division between the living and the dead is no longer clear; the only notion of death which has any validity is heat death, or entropy. Entropy is the central problem of this "holistic" world, and people's struggle to live spiritual lives becomes the struggle to sort hot particles from cold, to create perpetual engines, fueled by either dreams or symbols, which ironically become the struggle towards their own deaths. Although western culture appears to be engaged in such a shift back to pre-Cartesian ways of thinking, I have not attempted to present this theory in the form of research or cultural criticism. Rather, I have used this idea to fuel a creative endeavor, and while it may not have any practical application in current cultural debates, it is my hope that the value of a creative project lies in what it cannot say, not in what it says.

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DOI

10.25777/6djg-sb18

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