In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Recoiling from his childhood experience with a cartoon monster-mother, George conducts improbable experiments with white rats, determining that the female of the rat species is more sexually rapacious than the male, even when death by electrocution is involved; it’s no surprise that he falls prey to a female parishioner with the ominous name Roach whose face is covered with a “pale carpet of fuzz” and whose enormous mouth, threatening a kiss, is “huge and wet and cavernous.” Soon, in a parody-paroxysm of female sexual desire, Miss Roach begins to “grunt and snort like a hog” crying, “Don’t! Don’t, Mummy!” George finds himself sucked into the woman’s very mouth where, after a ludicrous struggle reminiscent of certain of the mock-heroic adventures of Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver among the giant Brobdignagians, the virginal bachelor is swallowed: “I could feel the slow powerful pulsing of peristalsis dragging away at my ankles, pulling me down and down and down…”

  Dahl’s punished figures are not exclusively sexual victims: in “Taste,” a nouveau riche wine connoisseur is insulted at his own dinner table by a “famous gourmet” in “The Pig,” as in a cautionary Grimms’ fairy tale for greedy children, a young man who cares too much for food is led off to be butchered with other pigs strung up by their ankles: “taking Lexington gently by one ear with his left hand, [the slaughterer] raised his right hand and deftly slit open the boy’s jugular vein with a knife.”

  Not all of Dahl’s stories end so grimly, and not all of Dahl’s satire is sadistic. The funniest story in the collection, and one in which no one gets killed or even humiliated, is “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” an eerily prescient fable of 1952 in which an aspiring young writer invents a computer-printing press to churn out ingeniously formulaic books:

  First, by depressing one of a series of master buttons, the writer made his primary decision: historical, satirical, philosophical, political, romantic, erotic, humorous or straight. Then, from the second row (the basic buttons), he chose his theme: army life, pioneer days, civil war, world war, racial problem, wild west, country life, childhood memories…The third row of buttons gave a choice of literary style: classical, whimsical, racy, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, feminine, etc. The fourth row was for character, the fifth for wordage…ten long rows of preselector buttons.

  Within a year, the machine has produced “at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language.”

  Except for writers of major stature, in whose lesser work there may be some archival, extra-literary, or morbid interest, the indiscriminate all-inclusiveness of a “collected stories” is not a good idea. What a dispiriting sight, a table of contents listing forty-eight short stories with no divisions into books and dates, as the author himself had intended! (No short story writer, like no poet, would simply toss a chronological arrangement of his work into a form so lacking in interior structure: individual collections of short stories and poems have beginnings, middles, and ends that have been judiciously pondered.) Though the advantage of a purely chronological arrangement of work is that the reader may perceive the development of a writer’s style, his growth, and the prevailing themes that make his work distinctive, the disadvantage is that the reader may perceive the deterioration of the writer’s style, his decline, and his reliance upon predictable themes. Of the forty-eight stories, scarcely more than one-third seem truly notable, and these come relatively early in Dahl’s lengthy, forty-five-year career. The volume trails away in affable narrated anecdotal sketches, as if Dahl had lost interest in the craft of storytelling as he seems to have lost the sting of vengefulness. The last four or five stories might have been printed out by the Great Automatic Grammatizator or by “Georgy Porgy” who, after his nervous breakdown, seems to have become a writer-satirist whose final object of satire is writing itself:

  I find that writing is a most salutory occupation at a time like this, and I spend many hours a day playing with sentences. I regard each sentence as a little wheel, and my ambition lately has been to gather several hundred of them together at once and to fit them all end to end, with the cogs interlocking, like gears, but each wheel a different size, each turning at a different speed. Now and then I try to put a really big one right next to a very small one in such a way that the big one, turning slowly, will make the small one spin so fast that it hums. Very tricky, that.

  REVISITING NABOKOV’S LOLITA

  Laughter is the primeval attitude toward life—an attitude that survives only in artists and criminals.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  Like all classics, Lolita is a special case. An occasion for enormous controversy—bitter denunciations, fulsome praise—at the time of its publication in 1955, the novel has acquired, over the decades, like such scandalous predecessors as James Joyce’s Ulysses and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the patina of the lewd classic: far more people have heard of it, and have an opinion about it, than have read it. Individuals with virtually no interest in literature, particularly the fussily self-referential, relentlessly ornate Nabokovian manner, know who Lolita was, or is; or imagine that they do. Humbert Humbert, the narrator of Lolita, or The Confession of a White Widowed Male, the hapless lover of the twelve-year-old American schoolgirl, provides a definition of the “Lolita” prototype:

  Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”

  (Is Humbert Humbert a pedophile? In fact, he gives little evidence of being attracted to girls as young as nine, fortunately; his erotic attractions are for older girls, who arouse his ardor as “little nymphs” or “nymphets,” who seem to mimic adult sexuality while retaining a childlike innocence.) Nabokov makes clear by way of Humbert’s background that the nymphet-prototype precedes the actual girl: as Humbert had been in love as a prepubescent boy with a girl named Annabel, whom the slangy, vulgar, so very American Lolita later embodies. We are meant to think that Humbert’s (perverse, criminal) predilection for prepubescent girls is his fate, and not his choice.

  Famously, Humbert confides in the reader, as to a panel of jurors, his most shocking revelation:

  Frigid gentlewomen of the jury! I had thought that months, perhaps years, would elapse before I dared to reveal myself to Dolores Haze; but by six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen we were technically lovers. I am going to tell you something very strange: it was she who seduced me.

  And, later, in trying to describe “that strange, awful, maddening world—nymphet love,” Humbert confides:

  I have but followed nature. I am nature’s faithful hound. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off? Did I deprive her of her flower? Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.

  Like Oscar Wilde, similarly torn between the “demonic” attractions of the flesh, in Wilde’s case for young boys, and the propriety of a sternly judging society, Humbert Humbert experiences his predicament as so hopeless, the conflicts of his appetites so beyond remedy, he has no recourse but to turn to comedy for solace. Lolita is richly stocked with “realistic” details, for Nabokov had a sharp, shrewd eye, especially for human failings, but in essence Lolita is a blackly surreal comedy. Humbert Humbert is a comic character, forever trying to explain himself, excuse himself, and yet, in the next breath, incriminating himself further; after he has become Lolita’s lover, and is legally her stepfather, he tries to seduce her into being a kind of accomplice of his in incorrigible sex-deviant fashion:

  In whatever town we stopped I would inquire, in my polite European way, anent the whereabouts of…local schools. I would park at a strategic point, with my vagrant schoolgirl beside me in the car, to watch the children leave school—always a pretty sight. This sort of thing began to bore my so easily bored Lolita…she would insult me and my desire to have her caress me while [schoolgirls] passed by in the sun.

  Ev
en in this outrageous confession, Humbert Humbert tries to seduce the reader into sympathizing with him: deviancy isn’t a choice but a fate. Isn’t it cruel of Lolita to insult him.

  Lolita is a brilliantly nuanced portrait of a sex addict in thrall to his addiction even when the addiction has been and can be satisfied by someone close at hand; for always there is a yearning for the new, the not-yet-attained, the anonymous schoolgirls passing Humbert’s car—bodies of “immortal daemons” disguised as female children that seem, for the moment, to have eclipsed Humbert’s lust for Lolita. Humbert is a comic portrait of the very type for whom pornography has been invented and by whom, in the United States alone, it has become a billion-dollar industry for its addicts are continually yearning, continually sated and continually ravenous for more.

  In his archly self-defensive afterword to the 1956 edition, Vladimir Nabokov speaks scornfully of those who attempt to read Lolita for its pornographic potential. One can argue that there is, at Lolita’s core, a soft-core/sentimental pornographic romance, but few readers intent upon pornography will have the patience to make their way through the author’s Byzantine prose. (Reading Lolita for its erotic content is akin to reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for its horror content.) Especially, such readers will be deterred by the lengthy, increasingly improbable and forced melodrama-farce of Part II, in which a sinister double of Humbert Humbert named Clare Quilty appears to seduce Lolita away from her deranged stepfather. (In the impressively executed but not very sensuous 1962 film of Lolita directed by Stanley Kubrick, Clare Quilty is given a campy/clownish portrayal by Peter Sellers while James Mason is a sensitive but not very “demonic” Humbert Humbert.) Lolita is much-read and admired by undergraduate English majors with whom Nabokov’s cutting, somewhat adolescent sarcasm strikes a chord: his Humbert Humbert is an adult, skewed version of J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield who, as we may recall, has a powerful emotional attachment to his younger sister, and feels a general revulsion for most grown-ups.

  Scandalous in its time, Lolita has transcended the circumstances of its early controversy as it has transcended the circumstances of its time and place: late 1940s, early 1950s “repressed” America. Along with Pale Fire, Nabokov’s yet more ambitious novel of 1962, Lolita is a feat of literary legerdemain, a shimmering cascade of brilliant passages set like jewels in an elegant tapestry. It is surely one of the most convincing portrayals in literature of, if not the human condition per se, the (fated) condition of the obsessive.

  SHIRLEY JACKSON’S WITCHCRAFT: WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE

  We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.

  —SHIRLEY JACKSON, FROM WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE

  Of the precocious children and adolescents of mid-twentieth-century American fiction—a dazzling lot that includes the tomboys Frankie of Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding (1946) and Scout of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the murderous eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark of William March’s The Bad Seed (1954), and the slightly older, disaffected Holden Caulfield of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Esther Greenwood of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963)—none is more memorable than eighteen-year-old “Merricat” of Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece of Gothic suspense We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962). At once feral child, sulky adolescent, and Cassandra-like seer, Merricat addresses the reader as an intimate:

  My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

  Merricat speaks with a seductive and disturbing authority, never drawn to justifying her actions but only to recounting them. One might expect We Have Always Lived in the Castle to be a confession, of a kind—after all, one or another of the Blackwood sisters poisoned their entire family, six years before—but Merricat has nothing to confess, still less to regret; We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a romance with an improbable—magical—happy ending. As readers we are led to smile at Merricat’s childish self-definition, as one who dislikes “washing myself” it will be many pages before we come to realize the significance of Amanita phalloides and the wish to have been born a werewolf. In this deftly orchestrated opening, Merricat’s wholly sympathetic creator/collaborator Shirley Jackson has struck every essential note of her Gothic tale of sexual repression and rhapsodic vengeance; as it unfolds in ways both inevitable and unexpected, We Have Always Lived in the Castle becomes a New England fairy tale of the more wicked variety, in which a “happy ending” is both ironic and literal, the consequence of unrepentant witchcraft and a terrible sacrifice—of others.

  Like other, similarly isolated and estranged hyper-sensitive young-female protagonists of Shirley Jackson’s fiction—Natalie of Hangsaman (1951), Elizabeth of The Bird’s Nest (1954), Eleanor of The Haunting of Hill House (1959)—Merricat is socially maladroit, highly self-conscious and disdainful of others. She is “special”—her witchery appears to be self-invented, an expression of desperation and a yearning to stop time with no connection to satanic practices, still less to Satan. (Merricat is too willful a witch to align herself with a putative higher power, especially a masculine power.) Her voice is sharp, funny, compelling—and teasing. For more than one hundred pages Merricat taunts us with what she knows, and we don’t know; her recounting of the tragic Blackwood family history is piecemeal, as in the tangled back-story there is an echo of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw—that masterwork of unreliable narration in which we are intimate witnesses to a naively repressed young woman’s voyeuristic experience of sexual transgression and “exquisite pathos.” Like the innocent pubescent-girl-protagonists of The Member of the Wedding and To Kill a Mockingbird, Merricat Blackwood appears to be a typical product of small town rural America—much of her time is spent outdoors, alone with her companion cat Jonas; she’s a tomboy who wanders in the woods, unwashed and her hair uncombed; she’s distrustful of adults, and of authority; despite being uneducated, she is shrewdly intelligent, and bookish. At times Merricat behaves as if mildly retarded, but only outwardly; inwardly, she’s razor-sharp in her observations, and hyper-alert to threats to her well-being. (Like any damaged person Merricat most fears change in the unvarying rituals of her household.) A mysterious amalgam of the childlike and the treacherous, Merricat is “domesticated” by only one person, her older sister Constance.

  “Wear your boots if you wander today,” Constance told me…

  “I love you, Constance,” I said.

  “I love you too, silly Merricat.”

  There is a lovely lyricism to her observations when she’s alone, and out-of-doors:

  The day outside was full of changing light, and Jonas danced in and out of shadows as he followed me…We were going down into the long field which today looked like an ocean, although I had never seen an ocean; the grass was moving in the breeze and the cloud shadows passed back and forth and the trees in the distance moved…I am walking on buried treasure, I thought, with the grass brushing against my hands and nothing around me but the reach of the long field with the grass blowing and the pine woods at the end; behind me was the house, and far off to my left, hidden by trees and almost out of sight, was the wire fence our father had built to keep people out.

  Even in this pastoral setting Merricat is brought back forcibly to the prejudices of her upbringing: the Blackwoods’ contempt for others.

  If Merricat is mad, it’s a “poetic” madness like the madness of the young heroine of The Bird’s Nest, whose subdued personality harbors several selves, or the madness celebrated by Emily Dickinson—“Much Madness is divinest Sense—/To a disce
rning Eye—/Much sense—the starkest Madness—’Tis the Majority” [435]. Her condition suggests paranoid schizophrenia in which anything out of the ordinary is likely to be threatening and all things are signs and symbols to be deciphered—“All the omens spoke of change.” Merricat is determined to deflect “change”—the threat to her household—through witchcraft, a kind of simple, sympathetic magic involving “safeguards”: “the box of silver dollars I had buried by the creek, and the doll buried in the long field, and the book nailed to the tree in the pine woods; as long as they were where I had put them nothing could get in to harm us.” Merricat—surely like her creator—is one for whom words are highly potent, as well:

  On Sunday morning the change was one day nearer. I was resolute about not thinking my three magic words and would not let them into my mind, but the air of change was so strong that there was no avoiding it; change lay over the stairs and the kitchen and the garden like fog. I would not forget my magic words; they were MELODY GLOUCESTER PEGASUS, but I refused to let them into my mind.

  By degrees we learn that there are many household tasks that Merricat isn’t allowed to do, like help in the preparation of food or handle knives. Minor frustrations have a violent effect upon her: “I could not breathe; I was tied with wire, and my head was huge and going to explode…I had to content myself with smashing the milk pitcher which waited on the table; it had been our mother’s, and I left the pieces on the floor so that Constance would see them.” It’s ironic that Merricat’s aristocratic disdain of other people derives from her identification with her rich New England family—now nearly extinct—whom she seems to have hated violently when they were alive. It may have been her parents’ disciplining of her that precipitated the family tragedy when, as Uncle Julian reminisces, Merricat was “a great child of twelve, sent to bed without her supper.”