Joyce Carol Oates on female trouble

This Week’s Winner

Joel Jorge Gaviola, 25, works in a call center in Makati. In his free time, he writes for different corporations, and tries to make the most literate corporate presentations. A German Language graduate from UP, his short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in different publications. He is currently at work on mystery, horror, and detective fiction.

John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."  Some writers are known by, unfortunately, their more popular, albeit less inventive works. On the basis of popularity alone, these works overshadow and ultimately box the authors into a singular expectation. That is, to do the same thing over and over again. In the process the creator and the creation become one. It could be a testament to the creator’s skill in making the old new again, or it could be a curse that hangs over their heads. Joyce Carol Oates is in the latter category, which is unfortunate because her lesser-known works are far more superior than the two novels (We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde) that have tied her name down.  

I did not know who Joyce Carol Oates was when I first encountered her story ("Extenuating Circumstances") in Sisters in Crime 5, an anthology of mystery and detective stories. Surprisingly, Oates’s contribution to the compilation is neither. It is more of a character study of a woman who has nothing. Uncannily, the lines form a dirge. The inevitability of the outcome cannot be denied. The main character retaliates in the only way she knows how:

Because he did not struggle. And when he did, it was too late.

Because I wore rubber gloves to spare myself being scalded.

Because I knew I must not panic, and I did not.

Because I loved him. Because love hurts so bad.

Because I wanted to tell you these things. Just like this. 

The lines evoke a sense of terror, and an ineffable air of the bizarre. Oates crosses genre lines with a sleight of hand. What could have been a melodramatic piece has been turned into something more horrific.

I looked for her other works and, luckily, I was able to get three of her short story collections (The Goddess and Other Women, Will You Always Love Me and Other Stories, and Faithless: Tales of Transgression). The characters in the stories range from troubled young girls/women to predatory men. What is inherent in her stories is how she weaves them. She follows the tradition (meaning writing the story in this order: exposition, complication, rising action, crisis, climax, resolution, and moral) in writing stories; however, she makes it a point to still contemporize the themes. For instance, in "The Girl with the Blackened Eye," we witness a girl’s abduction.  

The trajectory is to make the story more sympathetic to the girl. Although it does follow that path, we witness a girl who intimates that she was abducted, and that she formed a bond with her captor. The thought of being abducted is far from a savory experience. The main character, uncharacteristically, wears her blackened eye so much like a man who has won a medal. This bizarre relationship is reinforced with the idea that she had the black eye because she was special. Unlike the others who were killed, she lived to tell the tale. 

 Oates has eschewed the gimmickry that is inherent in some writers. However, when she completely embraces it in her landmark novel Zombie (which also won in the 1995 Bram Stoker Awards), it actually has more grit. It makes the novel more terrifying. In a nutshell, Zombie is about a nameless serial killer we know only by the initials Q_P_. Oates uses a lot of visual gimmicks in telling the story of Q_P_, such as scrawls and maps. Q_P_ moves about like a teenager thinking of his crushes and infatuations. The chapters tend to read like that of a schoolgirl’s slum book. At one point, we wonder if the fantasies are really fantasies or chronicles of a horror which we distance ourselves from. Here, Q_P_ treats other humans as things. In his eyes they’re disposable, mere playthings. For instance, in Chapter 47:

"Do bones float?& if so, but no flesh is attached, & the bones themselves scattered & lost to one another, what identity is there. I never think of it."

I would boldly rank Zombie with Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. While the latter two novels are gorier and far more visceral, Zombie is, for all intents, scarier. It shuns the bells and whistles; what we have is a stripped account of how one can be depraved and still maintain a certain degree of normalcy. 

In "Leave Me Alone, Goddamn You," which appeared in Lethal Kisses, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates her deft skills in subjecting her characters to torture:

"Markings, not wounds. For they were a special language; a sacred text."

Much like in Zombie, the character convinces herself that she is in every way normal. She mutilates herself to be able to communicate, but of course, to mutilate oneself is beyond the realm of normalcy. What she cannot give out in utterances, she tells in markings (although, in this case, these would be wounds).

 Oates’s stories aren’t usually encompassing, but I won’t denigrate them by saying hers is the work of a lesser artist. However, this may be the main reason why she doesn’t usually find a broader audience. Her characters are too specialized to be true, not because they’re rendered haphazardly. On the contrary, they are well conceptualized, and if people can’t relate to them it might simply be because these are tales for the marginalized.

In one of her earliest short story collec-tions (The Goddess and Other Women) is a story that could take an otherwise exploitative subject matter so subtly and so deftly. "Something being pounded into flesh like meat." Runaways in America are known to either turn up dead, become famous, or get sucked into the seedy underbelly of the flesh industry. The main character ("The Girl") is persuaded to follow her director’s vision. Consequently, I concluded that this story does not represent the whole spectrum of female consciousness; however, one cannot contend with the fact that there are people who are taken advantage of, and there are people who do take advantage of others in any and every given chance.

Ideal situations are not exactly stories worth noting. In Oates’s world, the characters revel in the seeming veneer of simplicity and contentedness. This veneer of normalcy shatters under the weight of the world. This is how the human condition should be portrayed. At its most bleak, and at its most dire. 

The world is not exactly as friendly as we would like to think it is. Oates’s stories are like that window to another world, a darker one. In this other world, people connive to get the better of you, and it is not exactly a comforting thought to have your center of gravity shaken by such people. A darker world is always rife with change. 

I like reading stories from the female perspective.  Let’s take into consideration the contempt I feel for patriarchy.  There are a lot of non-cliches that turn into cliches in the world that I have conjured.  Ineffectual men, and men as ciphers being two of them.  I like reading Oates’s stories because the women are the movers, the shakers.  I do not care if they are reprehensible.  As long as they torture the men, it’s fine by me.

What attracts me to her stories, aside from what has been mentioned? Hearts of darkness, hearts so depraved I can’t help but think they’re so pretty.  Like a moth, I try to taste the undesirable.  The forbidden.  I like to live my life.