“I don’t consider light-hearted comedy and casual things the highest art…I wanna write about people in extremis.” ~Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is one of the prolific living writers in the United States today. She has published more than 50 novels (not to mention her numerous essays and short stories that found themselves scattered in different publications), which isn’t surprising for the Roger S. Berlind Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University that she is. In The Writing Life, Marie Arana described her as an engine of words. Her novel Them won her a National Book Award and another three of her novels (Black Water, What I Lived For and Blonde) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
I read a few of her books and like some of her critics (who rubbed salt on her for this) smelled the hint of violence lurking in the lines of her novels. Sometimes violence just sort of skirt around the barbed wire fence, at times they are like mild perfumes they are almost imperceptible and to smell them you have to draw your breath deeply and flare your nostrils, and at times, they are so in-your-face you’ll find yourself tripping on them. But Joyce Carol Oates is an entirely unique phenomenon to me–her daring, writing what others found unthinkable or writing in the language of men (which she described as “a transgressive act…for me“), inhabiting their soul in order to write how it is to be them and what it is that they see in the world and in people, comes to me as a blunt force that bears epiphany.
My first immersion with a Joyce Carol Oates work was in her novel We Were The Mulvaneys, a moving story of a perfect family in upstate New York, its disintegration when on a fateful night after the prom, an intoxicated Marianne Mulvaney, the only daughter in her family, was raped by an upperclassman who is the son of a wealthy businessman who happened to be a friend of Mr. Mulvaney. Like an exquisite statue placed under the brutal pounding force of a hammer, the marble broke and pieces lay scattered on the floor–the children left home, Mr. and Mrs. Mulvaney separated, a wide gulf of physical distance, of unspoken misgivings and regrets between them. Written in the voice of Judd Mulvaney, the youngest who grew up seeing how his family shattered under the weight of her sister’s rape, the story is a powerful narrative which I think would never fail to resonate in every one of us. After all, we are members of families with its own little tragedies.
The second Joyce Carol Oates novel that I read is Black Girl/White Girl which I found at the bottom of a dusty pile of novels that included Kafka’s Metamorphosis and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye in a small and inconspicuous bookstore. The novel tells the story of an uneasy relationship between two college roommates Genna Hewett-Meade and Minette Swift, one white the other black. Genna, is a self-effacing young woman who exhibited the need to exorcise herself of the guilt that comes from her privileged upbringing as a descendant of Quakers (who founded the college where she and Minette attended) which was exacerbated by having a post-Vietnam war left-wing lawyer father. This guilt is nowhere more evident than in the manner that she treated Minette, the black girl who is a daughter of a black charismatic minister in Washington, D.C. whose intellectual and spiritual superiority made her unpopular among black and white classmates. Each day, as Minette slowly wavered before the pressure of harassment in a time when being black calls the same attention as the star of David did during the Nazi era (well, the color still does today), Genna found herself becoming increasingly protective of and loyal to Minette, even feeling responsible for her ‘friend’s’ untimely death. For 15 years Minette’s death haunted her. But in her careful reconstruction of the events of their first meeting until Minette’s death, the staggering similarity of the girls, masked only by their colors, finally surfaced–both of them loyal to their family’s histories and zealous in their attempts to re-write and re-right the wrongs of the past.
The Grave Digger’s Daughter, Missing Mom, My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike, and Man Crazy, among many of her powerful works are not worth missing either. Missing Mom is in her words an exploration of “The ongoing process of grief and mourning which remain a mystery even to those who have experienced them“. I was scanning the Fiction shelves of the Spartan Bookstore at Michigan State one day when I saw Missing Mom but did not want to read it then for fear of missing my own mother. True to her words, the novel has a very strong appeal and touches upon that indescribable bond between mothers and daughters which Joyce Carol Oates described as “tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.” Man Crazy, on the other hand, is the story of Ingrid who, desperately needing to recapture the love of the father she lost to a violent crime, allowed men and boys to abuse her. A woman who Joyce described as, (in an attempt at humoring the truth perhaps?) “A bit like me. I get nervous when I’m treated well.”
Right now, I am halfway through her The Female of the Species: Tales of Mysteries and Suspense–a collection of gripping and disturbing tales where Joyce Carol Oates “demonstrates why the female of the species–be they six-year old girls, seemingly devoted wives, or aging mothers–are by nature more deadly than the males.” Then, there’s Sourland tagged as a book of “cruel fairy tales” waiting in the bookshelf.
While her critics may continue rubbing salt on either the hinted or explicit violence in her works, Joyce Carol Oates is brilliant at it. I believe that the danger we fear should not be levied upon writings about the violent nature of man and the tragic and/or redemptive events that come with it. Real danger comes when we no longer talk about it and we become so comfortable in our private little spaces believing, in a deceptive way, that man is already way above the primitive nature of the other creatures in this world. But even in the depths of the calmest sea is a geyser that threatens to burst with primitive ferocity.
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Photo from: http://www.cdpl.lib.in.us/blog/uploaded_images/Oates-752979.jpg
