Reflecting on Joyce Carol Oates

Joanne Creighton, President of Mt. Holyoke College, and Joyce Carol Oates scholar, offers her thoughts on JCO’s life and career in the Summer 2009 issue of On Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin, Madison alumni magazine.

“While Joyce Carol Oates was early called the ‘Dark Lady of American Letters,’ that label is not right. She has tremendous respect for the dark side of human experience, for the mysterious depths of the conscious, and for the primitive brutality at the core of physical existence. Yet Joyce’s vision is not dark. She is in fact optimistic about the possibilities of human resilience and transcendence of a distinctly American variety. Despite the violence and duress that her characters typically endure, Joyce respects their tenacious attempt to, as she wrote in the preface to Marya, ‘forge their own souls by way of the choices they make, large and small, conscious and half-conscious.’”

. . .

“But she sprints far ahead of those who would attempt to assess her body of work. I agree with Anne Tyler, who was quoted in a Washington Post article (August 18, 1986) as saying: ‘A hundred years from now people will laugh at us for sort of taking her for granted.’ This we know: she is one of the most accomplished and significant American writers of our time.”

Married!

Joyce Carol Oates confirms her Gothic sensibilities by secretly marrying fiance Charlie Gross on Friday the 13th (March 2009) in a private, civil ceremony. Not wishing to “rouse much of a fuss,” friends and relatives were not invited.

Congratulations Joyce & Charlie!

Mike Tyson

Oates and Tyson in 1986

Joyce Carol Oates attended a screening of James Toback’s documentary Tyson with the director and Iron Mike himself, and participated in a Q & A session, as reported in New York Magazine:

“What’s the experience of watching yourself in this movie?” [Oates] asked. “Do you feel like you yourself are an abstract piece of art?”

“I just look at it like Jim asked me questions and I answered the questions,” Tyson explained. “It looked very simplistic to me at first, but watching it with a conglomerate of people here, I feel very vulnerable. I don’t like watching it.”

JCO of course has written extensively on boxing from her book on the subject, to many articles on Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, and others. Of the young Tyson, JCO wrote in 1986:

Mike Tyson, a boy warrior, has become legendary, in a sense, before there is a legend to define him. And never has the collective will of a crowd—the very nearly palpable wish of a crowd—been more powerfully expressed than it is tonight in Las Vegas. With his much-publicized 27-0 record as a professional boxer, of which twenty-five victories are knockouts (fifteen in the first round, several within sixty seconds), with so much expectation centered upon him as the “new hope” of heavyweight boxing, Tyson recalls the young Jack Dempsey, who fought his most spectacular fights before winning the heavyweight title. Like Dempsey in the upward trajectory of his career, Tyson suggests a savagery only symbolically contained within the brightly illuminated elevated ring, with its referee, its resident physician, its scrupulously observed rules, regulations, customs, and rituals. Like Dempsey he has the power to galvanize crowds as if awakening in them the instinct not merely for raw aggression and the mysterious will to do hurt that resides, for better or worse, in the human soul, but for suggesting incontestable justice of such an instinct . . .

Shirley Jackson Award Finalist

Joyce Carol Oates’s story collection Wild Nights! is among the finalists for the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award. Other finalists in the “collection” category include A Better Angel, Chris Adrian; Dangerous Laughter, Steven Millhauser; The Diving Pool, Yoko Ogawa; The Girl on the Fridge, Etgar Keret; and Just After Sunset, Stephen King.

The Shirley Jackson Awards ”have been established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” Winners will be announced on July 12, 2009.

Coincidentally, as reported by Elaine Showalter in an Economist interview, JCO will be editing Shirley Jackson’s work for the Library of America.

A Woman’s Work

Deborah Solomon interviews Joyce Carol Oates for the New York Times Magazine:

Why do you find violence so alluring as a literary subject?

If you’re going to spend the next year of your life writing, you would probably rather write “Moby Dick” than a little household mystery with cat detectives. I consider tragedy the highest form of art.

Topics briefly touched on include widowhood and memoirs, JCO autistic sister, housework, religion, and JCO’s fiance (first mentioned in this blog back in January).

National Arts Club Award

Joyce Carol Oates was awarded the Medal of Honor in Literature at the National Arts Club on April 7th. The event was emceed by Roger Rosenblatt, with remarks given by JCO’s editor at Ecco Press, Dan Halpern, fellow Princeton author Edmund White, and artist Gloria Vanderbilt.

In a gossipy New York Observer article, Leon Neyfakh reports on the scene.

Flannery O’Connor

Joyce Carol Oates adds to her many writings on Flannery O’Connor in the April 9 New York Review of Books with The Parables of Flannery O’Connor, a review-essay around Brad Gooch’s biography of O’Connor. JCO, a great admirer of O’Connor’s work, speaks of  her “cartoon art” (but this term is desrciptive, not derogatory):

Is the art of caricature a lesser or secondary art, set beside what we might call the art of complexity or subtlety? Is “cartoon” art invariably inferior to “realist” art? The caricaturist has the advantage of being cruel, crude, reductive, and often very funny; as the “realist” struggles to establish the trompe l’oeil of verisimilitude, without which the art of realism has little power to persuade, the caricaturist wields a hammer, or an ax, or sprays the target with machine-gun fire, transmuting what might be rage—the savage indignation of Jonathan Swift, for instance—into devastating humor. Satire is the weapon of rectitude, a way of meting out punishment. Satire regrets nothing, and revels in unfairness in its depiction of what Flannery O’Connor called “large and startling figures.”

JCO has previously written on:

O’Connor’s story “The Artificial Nigger”: “This graceful, parable-like short story, with its precise, weighted language and its comically sympathetic rural Georgians Mr. Head and his ten-year-old grandson Nelson, is virtually unique in Flannery O’Connor’s oeuvre, ending not in violent death, nor even in devastating irony, but with tenderness.”

O’Connors letters: “The experience of reading these collected letters (which are, in fact, rigorously selected letters) is a disturbing one: but tonic, provocative, intriguing. For while it cannot be said of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction that she revealed herself anywhere within it—her strategy was to submerge herself, to “correct” emotion by means of art—it must be said of the letters that they give life to a wonderfully warm, witty, generous, and complex personality, surely one of the most gifted of contemporary writers.”

O’Connors essays: “Reading and rereading this book is a moving experience: not only is Mystery and Manners (Occasional Prose of Flannery O’Connor, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald) a valuable and exciting collection of essays in itself, it is a testament to the deep humanity of Miss O’Connor, to the modesty and wisdom and gentle humor that lay behind her vivid, sometimes repulsive fictional accomplishments. Her death at the age of thirty-nine is one of our bitterest losses.”

And in JCO’s most extensive essay, on O’Connor’s fiction: “It is this complexity that makes the fiction of Flannery O’Connor so rich and at the same time so perplexing and alienating. She seems unique in her celebration of the necessity of succumbing to the divine through violence that is immediate and irreparable. There is no mysticism in her work that is only spiritual; it is physical as well. She has been accused of being un-Christian or anti-Christian in her insistence upon the limitations of the human will. For, as she says in an introductory note to her first novel, Wise Blood, ” … free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery …. ” Her refusal to account for the mystery leads to the bizarre atmosphere of her world.”

Sylvia Plath

With the recent death by hanging of Nicholas Hughes, son of Sylvia Plath, the New York Times asks “Why the Plath Legacy Lives”? Joyce Carol Oates notes,

The suicide of Sylvia Plath was and is obviously of enormous cultural significance because Plath was a brilliant poet—at the time of her death she was already considered a very important poet and since her death, her reputation has risen continuously while others who were her gifted contemporaries—Anne Sexton, John Berryman, even the much-acclaimed Robert Lowell—appear to have faded.

JCO has written extensively on Plath, most notably in “The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath:”

… the cult of Plath insists she is a saintly martyr, but of course she is something less dramatic than this, but more valuable. The “I” of the poems is an artful construction, a tragic figure whose tragedy is classical, the result of a limited vision that believed itself the mirror held up to nature—as in the poem “Mirror,” the eye of a little god who imagines itself without preconceptions, “unmisted by love or dislike.” This is the audacious hubris of tragedy, the inevitable reality-challenging statement of the participant in a dramatic action he does not know is “tragic.” He dies, and only we can see the purpose of his death—to illustrate the error of a personality who believed itself godlike.

All of the Plath writings are collected in JCO on Sylvia Plath.

Man Booker Shortlist

Joyce Carol Oates is among the contenders this year for the biennial Man Booker International Prize, recognizing one writer for their achievement in fiction. Previous winners were Chinua Achebe in 2007 and Ismail Kadare in 2005. 

The Man Booker International Prize echos and reinforces the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that literary excellence will be its sole focus. The Man Booker International Prize is significantly different from the annual Man Booker Prize for Fiction in that it highlights one writer’s overall contribution to fiction on the world stage.  In seeking out literary excellence the judges consider a writer’s body of work rather than a single novel.

The judges of this year’s prize will be Jane Smiley, Amit Chaudhuri, and Andrey Kurkov. In addition to JCO, the complete shortlist of contenders includes Peter Carey, Evan S Connell, Mahasweta Devi, E.L. Doctorow, James Kelman, Mario Vargas Llosa, Arnošt Lustig, Alice Munro, V S Naipaul, Antonio Tabucchi, Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Dubravka Ugresic, and Ludmila Ulitskaya.

Truly an impressive list to which JCO deservedly belongs.

Fifty Years

Joyce Carol Oates published her first “professional” work fifty years ago this year.

When she was a junior at Syracuse University, JCO entered her short story “In the Old World” in the Mademoiselle College Fiction Competition. The story was selected as co-winner of the competition (two winners each year) and was published in the August 1959 issue.

JCO was in good company, as Mademoiselle had also published the early work of Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, and Sylvia Plath (who had also won the competition).

“In the Old World” was subsequently included in JCO’s first book in 1963, the story collection By the North Gate.

JCO published several more stories and poems in Mademoiselle over the years, and was a regular contributor of book reviews for the magazine from 1979 to 1980.

Since the appearance of “In the Old Word,” JCO has published close to 800 short stories, including acknowledged classics such as “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” and many others collected in award anthologies such as the Best American Short Stories; the O Henry Prize Stories; the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror; etc. Fourteen of JCO’s most recent stories, including two award-winners, are collected in Dear Husband, available on March 31.

Joyce Carol Oates is among the great short story masters of all time.