Dark Eyes on America

The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates

Gavin Cologne-Brookes

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807146057
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"A sound and engaging book that creates a balanced overview of Oates's career while tackling the question of her role in the wider community." -- Modern Fiction Studies
Joyce Carol Oates is America's most extraordinary and prolific woman of letters. In Dark Eyes on America, Gavin Cologne-Brookes illuminates the vision of this remarkable master of her craft, finding evidence in her novels of an evolving consciousness that ultimately forgoes abstract introspection in favor of a more practical approach to art as a tool for understanding both personal and social challenges. With her clear-eyed perception of human behavior, Oates has for decades offered unhesitating explorations of genre, topic, and style -- making her an inevitable if somewhat elusive subject for critical assessment. Cologne-Brookes's conversations and correspondence with Oates, his close textual study of her novels, and abundant references to her essays, stories, poetry, and plays result in a work that critically synthesizes the layers of her writing. This comprehensive yet accessible study offers an essential analysis of one of the twentieth century's most significant writers.
"A thoughtful, thorough study which... encourages readers to re-examine Oates's novels within a philosophical context" -- Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas.

The artist must be a therapist to the race, and not simply to himself.

—JOYCE CAROL OATES, New Heaven, New Earth

1 MIRRORS AND WINDOWS

MANY CRITICS OF Oates’s early novels read them primarily as social chronicles. Harold Bloom, for instance, is moved by Oates’s “immense empathy with the insulted and injured, her deep identification with the American lower classes,” and sees her as a “true proletarian novelist.” Linda Wagner sees her as a “perceptive social observer.” Mary Kathryn Grant argues that the thrust of Oates’s work is “to force her readers to examine in detail their own lives.”¹ Overall, Oates’s novel-writing career confirms such observations, and the early novels are clearly meant as social commentaries. With Shuddering Fall (1964), A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), them (1969), Wonderland (1971), and, if less so, Expensive People (1968) begin very much as social realism. Yet there is also something dreamlike about not only the characters but also the American settings through which they move.

“Oates’s America is an experience, not a place,” noted Gary Waller in the late 1970s. “Typically, automobiles and highways dissolve into the evocation of an interior landscape, while the speaker’s state of mind, thrust at the reader through the breathless ejaculations of the sentence, becomes the primary focus of our attention.” In Oates, echoes Samuel Coale in the mid-1980s, “the outside world, however created with a Dreiserian thirst for details, remains vague, curiously distant, remote,” and sometimes “entirely evaporates.” Donald Dike, Oates’s former professor to whom she dedicated With Shuddering Fall, observed in a 1974 essay that the movements of Oates’s early figures seem strangely similar and unfocused, regardless of their ostensible social contexts. For Dike, her major characters are typically “running away or wanting to run away,” but with little emphasis, on Oates’s part, as to what exactly they are running toward. This, he says, explains “the striking effect of blind, haphazard, undirected motion” in these early novels, “and of the evidently meaningless course such motion describes.” Dike also notes that this motion occurs through a landscape that, however “recognizably referential,” “persists in being strange, alien, sometimes inhuman.”² Waller’s, Coale’s, and Dike’s insights seem as accurate as any depiction of these early novels as social chronicles. Social commentary here invariably competes with a more abstract, introspective discourse about the nature of the self, and ultimately about the purpose of the artistic enterprise. Novels that seem intended to depict various American scenarios slip into abstraction or philosophical speculation some way removed from their ostensible subject matter.

Oates first distances herself from her early preoccupation with issues of self-contemplation and abstract musing in her second essay collection, New Heaven, New Earth (1974), published the year after her sixth novel, Do with Me What You Will. Perhaps it is significant that many of these essays were written from early 1972 onward, after her “mystical vision” that revealed to her the illusory nature of a unified self: that “the ‘I’ doesn’t exist” but “behaves as if it does, as if it were one and not many.”³ For, as Bloom has noted, her comments on other writers at this stage of her career seem as much to “intimate her own convictions” as to illuminate the writers in question. “To some artists there falls the difficult task,” Oates writes in New Heaven, New Earth, “of standing between two worlds—one the visible, material, ‘real’ world, the other a world no less real, but not physically demonstrable.” “By this attempt to synthesize both worlds,” she argues, “or to explain poetically why the two worlds (the ‘physical’ and the ‘spiritual’) are not two at all, but one,” the artist “may create an art that is very disturbing, because it is foreign to ordinary experience.”⁴

In fact Oates’s own art would became increasingly “disturbing” in the years after this, only returning to deal with “ordinary experience” from 1985 onward, when she followed The Mysteries of Winterthurn with Solstice. If that publication was to prove the re-turning point, New Heaven, New Earth coincided with the original turning point that would lead her art away from its earliest manifestations. Unlike her first essay collection, The Edge of Impossibility, extensive sections of New Heaven, New Earth discuss the limits of introspective writing. The general assumptions in the essays of The Edge of Impossibility, all written in the 1960s, suggest the very opposite of social engagement. “Art is built around violence, around death,” writes Oates; “at its base is fear.” Art, she says, alluding to Schopenhauer, “is a transcendence of time, but it is also a suicidal gesture.” The artist, that “most intense of human beings,” is by definition “asocial.” “He has no clear relationship with society.”⁵

In contrast, the Oates of New Heaven, New Earth seems to have been redefining herself, by implication, as an artist who does have, or wants, a “clear relationship with society.” For instance, she distances her own emerging agenda from that of Henry James and Virginia Woolf, whose novels she sees as “characterized by an extraordinary blocking out of vast areas of life and a minute, vivid, at times near hallucinatory obsession with psychic experience” (24). Such writers “represent the furthest limits of the traditional English novel,” in terms of “their preoccupation with interior details” (34). She distances herself, too—despite the obvious influence of both poets on her own poetry—from Sylvia Plath and the later Wallace Stevens, as lyric poets given to solipsistic tendencies that, in her view, it might be wiser to fight against. Plath, she writes, “did not ‘like’ other people because she did not essentially believe that they existed” (118). “The mirror and never the window,” she argues, “is the stimulus for this art” (127). Instead, she aligns herself with Yeats and Lawrence, whom she sees as synthesizing the two worlds. In Lawrence, “inner and outer reality are confused, rush together, making up a pattern of harmony and discord, which is Lawrence’s basic vision of the universe and the controlling aesthetics behind his poetry” (51). For the Oates of New Heaven, New Earth, such writers provide a way forward, whereas James, Woolf, Plath, and Stevens offer her roads inward that she prefers not to pursue farther. “After James and Woolf,” she writes, “after the experiment of the mind’s dissection of itself, and its dissociation from the body, perhaps we are ready to rediscover the world” (45).

The young author’s misrepresentation of writers who clearly influence her may be deeply uncharacteristic of the mature author, but it is all the more fascinating for that. New Heaven, New Earth reads now very much like a stocktaking of how Oates’s consciousness had evolved up to that point, and a blueprint for change. Her essay on Plath, “The Death Throes of Romanticism,” seems especially pertinent less for its assessment of Plath than for what it suggests of Oates’s own early writing. Waller describes Oates’s early aesthetic as “so clearly a neo-romantic celebration and evocation of flux and the human potential of unpredictability that it is intriguing to discover the mixture of hostility and homage she has towards Sylvia Plath, perhaps the supreme embodiment of the self-obsessive confessionalism of mid-twentieth century romanticism.”⁶ Oates’s comments on Plath do indeed suggest that the need to break free of self-destructive solipsism struck a chord with the young writer. In the essay, she distinguishes (despite always having been both) between the lyric poet and the novelist. “Most lyric poets,” she says, “explore themselves endlessly,” determined to discover the “problem of their personalities” when perhaps their only problem is “this insane preoccupation with the self and its moods and doubts, while much of the human universe simply struggles for survival.” “If the lyric poet believes—as most people do—that the ‘I’ he inhabits is not integrated with the entire stream of life, let alone with other human beings, he is doomed to a solipsistic and ironic and self-pitying art.”

Unlike “the small enclosed form of the typical lyric poem,” Oates argues, the novel form is much better suited to investigating “the foreign/intimate nature of other people.” When “not addressed to the same self-analysis as the lyric poem, it demands that one look out the window and not into the mirror; it demands an active involvement with time, place, personality, pasts and futures.” The novelist’s obligation, therefore, “is to do no less than attempt the sanctification of the world—while the lyric poet, if he is stuck in a limited emotional cul-de-sac, will circle endlessly inside the bell jar of his own world, and only by tremendous strength is he able to break free.” The implications of her essay, she goes on to say, “are not that a highly self-conscious art is inferior by nature to a more socially committed art” (132–33); it is that a highly self-conscious art is a risk to the poet’s own survival. Plath’s poetry, for instance, most convinces when it is “most troubled, most murderous, most unfair,” because it stirs in us “memories of our own infantile pasts,” rather than provoking us “into a contemplation of the difficult and less dramatic future of our adulthood” (133–34). “So unquestioningly is the division between selves accepted, and so relentlessly the pursuit of the solitary, isolated self,” argues Oates of this form of poetry, “that stasis and ultimate silence seem inevitable.” It is “a risk because it rarely seems to open into a future: the time of lyric poetry is usually the present or the past” (135).

There is a striking similarity between what Oates says here and Rorty’s ideas about the dichotomy between private perfection and social engagement. But where Rorty is talking as a commentator from outside the creative process, Oates is very clearly writing as a practitioner, both as novelist and poet. Since she sets up the writing of poetry and novels as somehow reflective of these opposing modes, it is enlightening to look through Oates’s first poetry collection, Anonymous Sins. In the afterword to Invisible Woman: New and Selected Poems, 1970–1982, Oates explains that in aiming to select poems that struck her as recognizably her own, she ended up omitting most of her early poems, including this “entire first book.” She was not, she wrote, rejecting them as poems, but because she failed “to recognize [her] own voice in them.” She felt “no kinship, no sense of continuity. That aspect of the past” was “finally past.” It would be inaccurate to claim that social commentary does not exist in any of these poems. “Lines for Those to Whom Tragedy Is Denied,” for instance, is about middle-class American housewives living stunted lives while “their husbands account for the success of airlines / And the thick red carpets of certain restaurants.” “You are educated, or were,” says the poet, but with nothing to do now but wear “the pelts of animals killed for you,” fail to control “your children,” and be “liberal about Negroes.” Indeed, there are a number of such poems about aging wives and empty lives. But there are also several poems that merge introspection with an opacity that suggests personal meanings to which readers can have no access. “A Rising and Sinking and Rising in My Mind,” for instance, involves someone glimpsing an underground stream “where the pebbles in mud are turned gently,” with patterns on them “unreadable” as snail trails. “Silence bursts heavily in this cold water,” we are told, and “a thought rises shrilly in someone’s mind: you cannot / change your life, or anything.” Other such poems—“An Internal Landscape,” “A Girl at the Center of Her Life,” “Of the Violence of Self-Death”—continue this introspective vein. The collection ends with “Vanity,” a bleak contemplation of the “vanity” of love and the impossibility of true human intimacy that is not deeply colored by personal projection. “Hard as strangulation are the decrees / of the beloved and remote,” the poem opens:

Across this distance songs cry,

Composed for distance.

The beloved is a cage

you cannot enter.

The poet assures us in the final lines:

If you lie at night with someone

it is always with someone else.

The distance between you

fills slowly with time and snow.

Years are field grass whining.

Even in dreams the beloved is

nimble of foot and vain

and immortal.⁷

What is indeed most notable about the poems of Anonymous Sins is how sharply they differ from Oates’s mature poetry in the narrow range of their subject matter and the comparatively unvaried nature of the poetic voice. They are mostly about the enigma of relationships and personal identity, and constantly muse on the self and the self’s relationship with others. “How do you get a personality?” we are asked in “And So I Grew Up to Be Nineteen and to Murder,” and several of the poems, not least “Three Dances of Death,” suggest the randomness of named identity.⁸ All this anticipates many of her later novels’ depictions of changeable identities in all manner of Americans, but there is little, here, of the daring confidence, the playful wisdom that will later enable Oates to experiment so widely in voice, tone, and subject matter in her mature poetry. My point, however, has less to do with the relative quality of these poems than with why Oates herself felt distanced from them in compiling her 1982 selection. The downbeat tones, together with the introspection—indeed solipsism itself in “Vanity”—call to mind precisely those comments in New Heaven, New Earth about lyric poets’ tendency to try to discover the “problem of their personalities” when perhaps their only problem is “this insane preoccupation with the self.” Social commentary is certainly one impulse in these poems, but introspective self-analysis is clearly another.

The implications of New Heaven, New Earth with regard to Oates’s own early novels, as with her early poetry, then, are that the young writer was realigning her own sense of the artist’s relationship with society, and the uses of art. Written so soon after her crisis and revelation about the nature of the self, these ideas provide a way into exploring the difference between the novels prior to that experience and those written and published subsequently. Such an exploration reveals that, for all their variety of subject matter and approach, the early novels invariably contain a great deal of introspective, abstract analysis of the relationship between the self and others and the self and creativity. Novels that are on one level socially committed also provide veiled opportunities for the self-examination that the Oates of New Heaven, New Earth will assert as being more the territory of lyric poetry. “Technique” has perhaps always been for Oates a question of digging and building “the dams, dikes, ditches, and conduits that both restrain emotionally charged content and give it formal, and therefore communal, expression.” But these early novels may best be viewed as examples of a young author sifting through modes of expression for folding those personal obsessions into socially useful subject matter. In other words, running from a childhood “partly obscured by pockets of amnesia, as by patches of fog” and toward a future sunlit with fulfilled ambition, Oates seems to have used these early novels to find a balance between those incommensurable impulses of private perfection and social effort.⁹

For all their differences, With Shuddering Fall and A Garden of Earthly Delights (and my concern here is only with the 1967 original, not Oates’s rewrite, published in 2003) are remarkably alike in starting out as novels that seem to be wholly of the world of social realism, yet follow their protagonists on a journey that becomes altogether more abstract and introspective. Both novels contain the seeds of Oates’s later work. Karen Herz of With Shuddering Fall and Clara Walpole of A Garden of Earthly Delights are prototypes for Marya Knauer of Marya: A Life in their sense of social alienation and need to escape their backgrounds, and their paternal estrangement is similar to Marianne Mulvaney’s in We Were the Mulvaneys. On each count, these essential dramas are replayed in as recent a novel as I’ll Take You There. Both protagonists take up with an older man, a taciturn stranger-on-the-move of the kind often seen in Oates’s early stories, who seems to stand for, among other things, brute Schopenhauerean Will. There seems to be nothing to Shar, Karen’s lover, a racing driver, except “Shar’s will, the deadly whimsical rage of his desire.” Lowry, meanwhile, seems to spend his life just driving “aimlessly across the country” as if “in an invisible, insatiable striving.”¹⁰ Karen’s affair with Shar, like Clara’s with Lowry, anticipates Enid and Felix’s relationship in You Must Remember This. Perhaps less obviously, both these early relationships also prefigure those between Monica and Sheila in Solstice, Jinx and Iris in Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, and Anellia and Vernor Matheius in I’ll Take You There. But in contrast to most of those later novels, the meticulous early details of the settings are subsequently overtaken by the dreamlike abstractions of these relationships.

In the end, even while nominally dressed as dramas about representative American citizens in specific contexts, these works come across as much more the author’s relationship with her muse. The decision to run off with a mysterious figure reads like a decision to plunge out of social life and into an art that, while masquerading as life, is in fact anything but life: whether we read this to mean a form of transcendence or symbolic suicide. For if the male figure is in both cases a lover, he is also a death figure, and the courtship is more akin to the kind Emily Dickinson evokes in “Because I could not stop for Death” than to one between two human beings. It is as if the young author felt that to opt for art was in some way to renounce life: to take art as a religion, to strive for an “after” life. Art is presented as a lonely, isolated, alienated occupation—“a suicidal gesture,” as she calls it in The Edge of Impossibility—in striking contrast to her later sense of it as a pragmatic, socially engaged activity. Both novels may show the novelist attempting to look “out the window” and involve her art “with time, place, personality, pasts and futures,” but both novels contain, and in some ways give themselves up to, the impulse toward private perfection th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 MIRRORS AND WINDOWS
• 2 ABSTRACTION INTO ACTION
• 3 REWRITING THE NOVEL
• 4 LOOK BACK TIME
• 5 DARK EYES ON AMERICA
• Afterword
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index