Soul at the White Heat

by Joyce Carol Oates

Commemoration. Much of literature is commemorative. Home, homeland, family, ancestors. Mythology, legend. That “certain slant of light” in a place deeply imprinted in childhood, as in the oldest, most prevailing region of the brain.

  Much of my prose fiction is “commemorative” in essence—it is a means of memorializing a region of the world in which I have lived, a past I’ve shared with others, a way of life that might seem to me vanishing, thus in danger of being forgotten. Not an “old” America but rather an “older” America—those years described as the Depression, through World War II, the Vietnam War, the 1960s, and so forward to the present time in upstate, quasi-rural America. Writing is our way of assuaging homesickness.

  Commemoration is identical, for me, with setting. Where a story or a novel is set is at least as significant as what the story—the plot—“is.” In my fiction, characters are not autonomous but arise out of the very physicality of the places in which they live, and the times in which they live. There is a spiritual dimension to landscape which gifted photographers can suggest, and gifted writers can evoke. Often, I am mesmerized by the descriptions of landscapes, towns, and cities in fiction—(obviously, the novels of Dickens, Hardy, Lawrence come to mind; it is difficult to name any novels of distinction that are not firmly imbued with “place”). And if the setting is antagonistic to the spirit, as in our environmentally devastated landscapes and cityscapes, this is a part of the story.

  Bearing witness. Most of the world’s population, through history, have not been able to “bear witness” for themselves. They lack the language, as well as the confidence to shape the language for their own ends. They lack the education, as well as the power that comes with education. Politically, they may be totally disenfranchised—simply too poor, and devastated by poverty and the bad luck that comes with poverty, like an infected limb turning gangrenous. They may be suppressed, or terrorized into silence. My most intense sympathies tend to be for those individuals who have been left behind by history, as by the economy; they are all around us, but become visible only when something goes terribly wrong, like a natural disaster, or an outburst of madness and violence. Particularly, I have been sympathetic with the plight of women and girls in a patriarchal society; I am struck by the ways in which weakness can be transformed into strength, and vulnerability into survival. If the writer has any obligation—(and this is a debatable issue, for the writer must remain free)—it’s to give voice to those who lack voices of their own.

  Self-expression. The “self” is, at its core, radically young, even adolescent. Our “selves” are forged in childhood, burnished and confirmed in adolescence. That is why there are great, irresistibly engaging writers of “adolescence”—for instance, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Hemingway (in his early short stories set in northern Michigan). Since I began writing fairly seriously when I was very young, my truest and most prevailing self is that adolescent self, confronting an essentially mysterious and fascinating adult world, like a riddle to be solved, or a code to be decoded. The essence of the adolescent is rebelliousness, skepticism. It is very healthy, a stay against the accommodations and compromises of what we call adulthood, particularly “middle age.”

  Propaganda, “moralizing.” Once, it was not considered gauche for literary writers (Stowe, Upton Sinclair, Tolstoy, Eliot, Dickens) to address the reader more or less directly, and to speak of moral predilections; now, since the revolution in sensibility generally associated with the early decades of the twentieth century, which we call Modernism, it is virtually impossible to indicate a moral position in any dogmatic way. Ours is still, over all, an age of irony—indirection, obliquity. As Emily Dickinson advises, speaking of her own credo—“Tell all the truth but tell it slant / Success in Circuit lies.” And Virginia Woolf, in these thrilling, liberating words:

  Art is being rid of all preaching: things in themselves: the sentence in itself beautiful. . . . Why all this criticism of other people? Why not some system that includes the good? What a discovery that would be—a system that did not shut out.

  Still, most of us who write hope to evoke sympathy for our characters, as George Eliot and D. H. Lawrence prescribed; we would hope not to be reducible to a political position, still less a political party—(though writers in other parts of the world are often adamantly political, and are political activists)—but we write with the expectation that our work will illuminate areas of the world that may be radically different from our readers’ experience, and that this is a good thing. It is an “educational” instinct—one hopes it is not “preacherly.”

  Aesthetic object. Writing as purely gestural, as Woolf suggests—“the sentence in itself beautiful.” In fact it is very difficult to write a sustained work of fiction that is “purely gestural”—meaning emerges even out of the random, a moral perspective evolves even out of anarchy, nihilism, and amorality, the mere act of writing, still more the discipline of revision, seems to carry with it an ethical commitment to its subject. Yet most of us are drawn to art not because of its moral gravity but rather because it is “art”—that is, “artificial”—in some sort of heightened and rarefied and very special relationship to reality, which (mere) reality itself can’t provide. Of course, “beauty” in art can be virtually anything, including even conventional ugliness, beautifully/originally treated. In choosing a suitable language for a work of prose fiction, as well as poetry, the writer is making an aesthetic choice: she is rejecting all other languages, or “voices”; she is gambling that this particular voice is the very best voice for this material. The truism “Art for art’s sake” really means “Art for beauty’s sake”—the content of any literary novel is of less significance than the language in which the novel is told.

  Now that much of publishing is digital, the book as aesthetic object is endangered. Storytelling isn’t likely to vanish, but physical, three-dimensional books comprised of actual pages (paper of varying quality)—with their “hard” covers and “dust” jackets—are in a perilous state. Many of us who love to write also love books—the phenomenon of books. We may have been initially drawn to writing because we fell in love with a very few, select books in childhood, which we have hoped to replicate somehow; we hoped, however fantastically, to join the select society of those individuals whose names are printed on the spines of books. It isn’t to grasp at a kind of immortality—we fell into our yearning as children, long before immortality, or even mortality, was an issue. Rather, we yearn to ally ourselves with a kind of beauty, an object to be held in the hand, passed from hand to hand; an object to place upon a shelf, or to be stood upright, its beautiful cover turned outward to the world. As Freud said memorably in Civilization and Its Discontents, “Beauty has no obvious use; nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization could not do without it.”

  Would the great writers of our tradition, James Joyce for instance, have labored quite so hard, and with such fierce devotion, if the end-product of their labor was to have been nothing more than “online” art—sustained purely by electricity, bodiless, near-anonymous, instantaneously summoned as a genie out of a bottle, and just as instantaneously banished to the netherworld of cyberspace? Like Joyce, most writers still crave the quasi-permanence of the book: not the book as idea but as physical, aesthetic object. This is as close as we are likely to come to the sacramental, which, for some of us, is wonderfully close enough.

  ANATOMY OF STORY

  Not that the story need be long, but

  it will take a long while to make it

  short.

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  It is a maxim: all stories are infinite. All stories have to be radically distilled. There is no “first cause” in a story as there can be no final line. Wherever the writer chooses to begin is arbitrary, in medias res. For—what came before the opening sentence? And before that? In an infinite regression, not to a beginning (for there is no beginning) but to an approximation of a beginning—Once upon a time.

  THE
KING DIED. THE queen died.

  Is this a story, or is this an anecdote? Perhaps it is not even an anecdote, and not even a single statement but two (unrelated) statements.

  The two brief statements so juxtaposed seem to suggest a temporal relationship. A geographical relationship. Some sort of familial relationship. Yet, the two statements are not actually linked, and so cannot constitute a “narrative.”

  The king died, the queen died.

  The king died, soon then the queen died.

  The king died, (and) soon then the queen died.

  These three statements have entered the gravitational field of “narrative”—“story.” For they are linked in a (seemingly) causal way.

  (Though there is no evidence that the queen died because the king died, it is a natural human predilection to make this inference. The great eighteenth century Scottish philosopher/skeptic David Hume might not have agreed, out of a perverse sort of Scottish common sense: how can we know with absolute certainty that the sun will “rise” in the morning, based upon the (mere, empirical) fact that the sun has always “risen” in the morning, in memory? We think we know, we behave as if we know, but Hume is correct, we cannot know as we might know that one and one are two, or two times five is ten.)

  The king died (and so) soon then the queen died.

  In this compound statement, the relationship between the two phrases is unmistakable and irrefutable: we are told by the small determinate word “so” that the queen died because the king had died, and there is no margin now for speculation.

  Is this a story? And if so, is it a subtle story? Or is it rather a too-explicit story, that announces its meaning before it has even begun, so that there is no mystery, and nothing for the reader to discover?

  The king died, (but then) the queen did not die.

  Here is an orthogonal narrative, that does/ does not spring from a causal relationship. The inference is that the queen should die, but in fact, we are told but then the queen did not die.

  Such a narrative, that seems to spring in a perpendicular fashion from the Once upon a time opening, is more engaging, more problematic, as it is less conventional and expected, than The king died, (and then) the queen died or its variants.

  The queen died. The king had died.

  The queen died, (for) the king had died.

  The queen did not die, (though) the king had died.

  The queen will / will not die, (for/ though) the king had died.

  All of these are variants on the original statements and each could be made interesting in its own (original, novel) way.

  ONCE UPON A TIME is a (time-) honored way of beginning a story. For a story must begin in time; there is no story out of time.

  Eudora Welty once said: “Time has to move through a mind.”

  As there can be no story without conflict, no forward momentum without disequilibrium, so there can be no story that does not move through time. Even in the distant, detached, oracular Once upon a time there is a storyteller, pretending to be anonymous. It may be a master of the faux fairy tale like Hans Christian Anderson: the highly conscious craftsman emulating the visionary distances and impersonality of the fairy tale, the voice of the people. Such faux fairy tales are bold appropriations of folk art, difficult to execute though (one might be led to think) appearing simple.

  In great literature, the simple, artless is often the most brilliantly invented.

  In tales beginning Once upon a time a narrator is telling a story in which he / she does not appear. Others appear, who are seen at a little distance—“characters.” But these are like figures in a dream, each figure generated by the dreamer, and each a part of the dreamer, however (seemingly) unlike the dreamer.

  In most contemporary fiction Once upon a time has been radically distilled and delimited. The time-setting is likely to be a recent time, a time within memory, a few years ago, yesterday. Unless it is the present time: the historic present. Our tenses are but two: was, is.

  When the tense is is, the conceit is that the story is happening even as we read it. The story hasn’t already happened but is happening.

  Even a story that is was seems, to the reader, a story that is happening, whose outcome is unknown.

  THE EXCITEMENT OF THE UNKNOWN!

  Reading a story, the reader is the pursuer of the unknown—the not-yet-known. The reader is a kind of detective pursuing clues, trying to decipher a code, interpreting “tone”—“mood”—“language”—“meaning” which seem to flow beneath the surface of the story.

  The “plot” is the vehicle bearing meaning. But if you summarize a plot, paraphrase a story, you will find that the reduction of a story to its plot yields no meaning. You will ask—“So what? What does it all mean?”

  The first book I ever held in my hand was The Gold Bug & Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. With great fascination, though I could not yet read, I turned the mysterious and entrancing pages of this book, and studied the full-page illustrations that were intricately executed line drawings, “gothic” in nature. (Not that I had any idea of the “gothic.”)

  In the farmhouse of my childhood there were few books. Perhaps there were no other books until, a few years after my discovery of The Gold Bug on a shelf, my grandmother began to give me books for my birthday and for holidays, notably Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. (From the approximate age of five onward, I became what is called a “voracious reader.” A child happiest with a book in hand, or the prospect of a book.)

  The experience of Poe in my life is a complicated one since it began, literally, before I could read. And then, when I began to read, in a childlike and stumbling way, the tales of The Gold Bug were utterly mysterious, unfathomable, and tantalizing; Poe’s dense, tortuous prose was totally unlike the speech of the adults of my life, and bore virtually no relationship to the primer prose of my school books and to the newspaper and magazine articles my parents read, at which I glanced, or tried to read out of curiosity. It was a notion of mine that the early prose fiction I encountered, by Hawthorne as well as Poe, was “real”—“realistic”; that is, I took for granted that these writers were writing about real subjects, though totally strange to me, like those upsetting dreams of childhood in which I could not quite determine if I was awake or asleep or somehow both, simultaneously.

  A child’s sense of reality differs enormously from an adult’s sense of reality which is informed by skepticism as well as experience. A child does not know enough to realize what she does not know and any voice of adult authority carries with it an air of the absolute, not to be questioned as (when a child is very young) she does not “question” the adults who surround her.

  How many years passed, during which time I tried to read the short story “The Gold Bug”—five years? six? ten? Here as elsewhere in the more obscure works of Poe one encounters dense thickets of prose in the convoluted, overwrought style of the nineteenth century, in which nothing is stated clearly, or directly: all is filtered through the prism of a “gothic” sensibility, in the case of Poe often a narrator whose unreality is compounded by mania, paranoia, psychosis. (In other tales, notably “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe is dazzling as any contemporary writer giving voice to extreme states of mind with obvious zest and virtuosity; but the denser, more “gothic” Poe tales outnumber the more fluid.) In fact I’m not sure that I ever comprehended what was happening in this awkward mixture of what Poe called “ratiocination” and nineteenth-century European gothic mystery involving the deciphering of an elaborate cryptogram message. (Though I recall as a young child being fascinated by “secret codes”—“secret languages.” Very likely I felt a natural attraction to the act of writing in code [so that no adult could know what I was writing?]—which isn’t very different from the writing of fiction generally.)

  Found amid Poe’s papers after his premature death on October 7, 1849, on a Baltimore street was a single-page manuscript titled “The Light-House.” It was a challenge to a writer of
the twenty-first century to reimagine Poe in present-day terms: to transform nineteenth-century gothic into contemporary themes of ecology and evolution, male-female relations, a re-examination of the “Romantic.” But “Poe Posthumous; or, The Light House” (originally titled “The Fabled Light-House at Vina de Mar” and written for a special edition of McSweeney’s edited by Michael Chabon) is essentially a variant of the archetypcal Poe adventure story in which a hypersensitive protagonist confronts gothic horror and succumbs to it. In this story the Poe-like narrator lapses by degrees into an altered state of being, not madness, or not madness merely, but an aroused consciousness in which brute survival is the great, immediate and prevailing challenge. “Poe Posthumous” is intended as a nightmare tale, not without moments of comedy, depicting the ways in which human beings might adapt themselves to radically altered environments; how against the grain of their own “inborn” personalities they may discover themselves behaving. For it is not enough to maintain one’s distinct identity—one must survive as a living organism.

  The story is also an ironic portrait of the Romantic male, for whom the female is idealized and de-animalized. In Poe, as in gothic writers generally, there are no bodies, and no bodily functions including even eating. And so in this postmodernist appropriation, the Poe-like narrator realizes fully, and with some appetite, the range of his animal instincts, long suppressed in his former life in genteel Philadelphia literary circles. Rare among Poe, a happy ending!

  THE FIRST GREAT WRITER whose work I read with avid interest, and set out as a young writer to emulate, was not the fevered Poe of childhood but the cool and understated Hemingway of early adolescence. In a tenth grade English class at Williamsville High School in Williamsville, New York, under the tutelage of a wonderful teacher named “Mr. Stein”—(Harold Stein?)—we were assigned short stories from an anthology of American classic stories dating back to Washington Irving, Hawthorne, Melville and Poe, and including such near-contemporaries as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Irwin Shaw, Conrad Aiken (“Silent Snow, Secret Snow”—mesmerizing!). The Hemingway story in the anthology was “Soldier’s Home”—sparely narrated, taut with irony (which I did not understand but certainly felt), a minimalist language that seemed to me very beautiful, if enigmatic. Soon then, I acquired a copy of Hemingway’s early short stories in our time from the library, and set out to immerse myself in these elemental-seeming tales written when Hemingway was a young expatriate in his twenties, living in Paris, and already married, and a father. Oddly, these early stories are less accessible to the reader than the more famous stories of Hemingway’s maturity—“The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—as they more resemble prose poetry than conventional prose fiction. The governing principle of Hemingway’s prose in in our time is “less is more”—though only the hands of a master craftsman does this adage really apply. (“Indian Camp” is an ideal story for writing students to contemplate. Line by line, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph this minimalist story, hard-cut as a diamond, yields a kind of shadow-story beneath its seemingly artless, idiomatic surface. Each element of punctuation is carefully chosen, with a mild, dramatic surprise in the final line.)