The Family Body

Abstract

The Family Body is a verse novel reimagining the Osiris myth cycle, a central narrative in ancient Egyptian religion, as a modern family drama that explores the emergent nature of sibling relatedness in the face of moral ambiguity and crises of identity. The work reduces narrative structure to alternating, character-identified verse forms that act both as fragmentary leitmotifs and as vocative indicators of fluctuating moral self-awareness. The novel’s elliptical qualities interrupt readerly expectations of denouement in order to complicate notions of relatedness in mythic, narrative, and familial terms. The effect foregrounds characters’ interiority by fusing lyrical intimacy with narrative structure. The verse novel comprises five chapters. Chapter one details the central conflict of the Osiris myth, which is a pair of murders, and establishes the verse forms of the main characters. Chapter two positions this conflict as the outcome of a family narrative that operates along a continuum of dysfunction and mistrust arising from the dynamics of marriage and the politics of professionalization. The narrative as a whole is presented as a type of archive. Chapter three is the quest to resolve the conflict, which doubles as a circumnavigating meditation on human material culture and archetypal roles. Chapter four tells the anti-quest of the home front, presenting the stakes that arise from creating conflict and accepting accountability for it. Chapter five is concerned with aftermath, and questions how a conflict’s successful resolution creates its own problems, such as how to identify with the conflict, its outcome, or its retelling. The end of one story proliferates new stories and new insights into received ones. In addition to adapting the Osiris myth, this verse novel explores academic identity as socialized and socializing, and suggests that forms of institutional relatedness, whether genetic, domestic, or intellectual, are prone to imbalance when the psychological and emotional motives driving them are obscure, often in large part through the dynamics of reproduction. Institutional practices and spaces -- papers, maintenance, libraries, models, conferences -- become arenas in which to productively literalize research as an iterative process of charting new paths among the seemingly already known, as sexual reproduction does analogously through a family’s genome. The creative work in this dissertation is suppressed in the UH institutional repository, Kahualike, kahualike.manoa.edu. Inquiries about the creative work should be made to Julia Wieting.