Preface by Joyce Carol Oates
Chronology of Books by Joyce Carol Oates
INTRODUCTION
REVIEWS

James McConkey, "By the North Gate"
Ian Hamilton, "Fatal Fascinations"
David Madden, "Upon the Sweeping Flood"
Richard Clark Sterne, "Versions of Rural America"
Granville Hicks, "What is Reality?"
John L'Heureux, "Mirage-Seekers"
Benjamin DeMott, "The Necessity in Art of a Reflective Intelligence"
Calvin Bedient, "Vivid and Dazzling"
Charles Lam Markmann, "The Terror of Love"
P.S.P. (Peter S. Prescott), "Everyday Monsters"
Ronald De Feo, "Only Prairie Dog Mounds"
Sara Sanborn, "Two Major Novelists All by Herself"
John Alfred Avant, "The Hungry Ghosts"
Anonymous, "The Assassins"
Irving Malin, "Possessive Material"
Robert Phillips, "Night-Side"
Victoria Glendinning, "Hungry for God"

ESSAYS

Robert H. Fossum, "Only Control: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates"

Mary Kathryn Grant, "The Language of Tragedy and Violence"

Walter Sullivan, "The Artificial Demon: Joyce Carol Oates and the Dimensions of the Real"

Joyce M. Wegs, "'Don't You Know Who I Am?' The Grotesque in Oates's 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'"

Sanford Pinsker, "Suburban Molesters: Joyce Carol Oates' Expensive People"

Ellen Friedman, "The Journey from the 'I' to the 'Eye': Wonderland"

Eileen T. Bender, "'Paedomorphic' Art: Joyce Carol Oates' Childwold"

Peter Stevens, "The Poetry of Joyce Carol Oates"

Joanne V. Creighton, "Unliberated Women in Joyce Carol Oates's Fiction"

Alfred Kazan, "[On Joyce Carol Oates]"

G. F. Waller, "Through Obsession to Transcendence: The Lawrentian Mode of Oates's Recent Fiction.

INDEX

Excerpt

Preface

Once a literary work is published it passes forever out of the private and protective world of the writer's imagination, and out of his or her possession. It cannot be reclaimed. It belongs to anyone who happens to come across it, to anyone who happens to have a thought or an emotion or an utterance about it its merit may be, curiously, that it provokes in another person a response that moves beyond the personal and into the problematic dimension of art. For literary criticism, serious criticism, is of course an art-form—one of the most difficult of art-forms.

Should a writer read reviews of his work?—should he read critical essays? Is it possible to learn from others' opinions, others' views? The history of "informed" response to our outstanding writers has been an unhappy one. Faulkner, Henry James, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf: all had to suffer objurgation and mockery as well as simple incomprehension. And not only at the hands of professional (i.e. hack) reviewers, for Virginia Woolf appeared to be incapable of reading James Joyce, and Eliot tirelessly insisted that Lawrence's work had no merit, and Lawrence disliked Joyce, and Joyce and Proust saw nothing remarkable in each other's work; and, as his work increased in complexity and scope, Henry James had to suffer increased hostility. That Faulkner's novels should be greeted with perfunctory uncomprehending jeers in The New Yorker is highly discouraging, but perhaps instructive. What, precisely, is it possible for the writer himself to learn from written response to his work? In our time, I firmly believe, the level of reviewing and critical writing in general has risen substantially—it is an excellent time for writers and critics both—yet the problem remains. A work of art created with any degree of seriousness, over a protracted period of time, reflects, in various rippling quivering layers, the selves that constituted the writer during the period of composition. To write that work one had to be that person, or persons; to see that one ought to have written it differently—with more, or with less, clarity; with more, or with less, humor, or sympathy, or malice, or intelligence, or inventiveness, or self-consciousness—one would have to be another person. At the point at which we see ourselves we are no longer the selves we see.

Mirrors reflecting mirrors reflecting mirrors—and each subtly distorting that hazy field we call "reality!" Reading reviews and criticism is, then, for the writer, always distracting. But then they are not really written for the writer's eye. One has the uneasy sense that he is violating someone else's privacy— inadvertently reading someone else's mail—letters in which his name appears, in an ongoing and systematically developed argument that seems to be about him, yet necessarily excludes him. What is the morality of reading about oneself, when reviews and essays are so clearly written with another audience in mind? One owes it to one's literary friends, I have often thought, to give them space and freedom and privacy to say whatever they wish: not, that is, to read them. And the uncomprehending and dismissive and occasionally malicious notices are too discouraging. Many a writer, confronted with an angry attack, wonders if he had better stop writing—for the original point, that of giving something to the world, a true "gift" of sorts, offered with a necessary humility, seems to have been lost. Artists in our society, it has been observed, draw the kind of vituperative abuse that used to be reserved for ax murderers and corrupt politicians; but since the nature of their "crime" is unclear, they can never hope for acquittal.

Since writing is a highly deliberate craft, one which demands painstaking experimental work, the writer tends to spend most of his time (even while daydreaming) sifting through various aesthetic possibilities. Novelists are the most pragmatic of people. How to attain a specific end will quickly come to seem more important (because it involves ingenuity and labor) than what the end is. James Joyce's critics have written thousands of pages of critical commentary on his use of the Odyssey, but Joyce might have used another classical work instead, or he might have used Faust: he needed a structure, as a general might need a bridge to get his troops across a river, and once the end is attained, the means are irrelevant. Moralists like to chide artists for caring more about their art than about morality; but an artist is, by definition, one who grows to care more about the interior workings of his art than about its external appearance, simply because he spends all his time on the interior workings, is fascinated, maddened, defeated, delighted, intimidated, or frustrated by them—no matter that "theme," "subject matter," "plot," or even "message" will strike others as more significant.

Moralizing, visionary, and skeptical impulses contend in most writers, pulling a work in one direction, and then in another. In theory a novel is this way, or that way: it celebrates the family, or attacks the family; it praises love, or mocks love; it is "about" the hunt for the White Whale, or "about" an American named Newman in Europe; it moves toward tragedy, or comedy, or satire, or.... In theory. But in reality, in the existential unfolding fact of the work, it is always something else, something indefinable. That the writer labors to discover the secret essence of the novel is perhaps the writer's most baffling secret, about which he cannot speak, any more than we are capable of speaking about the unconscious—the unconscious being precisely that which is never experienced by consciousness. (For dreams return to us only as memories, and "memories" are phenomena of consciousness.)

For the writer it is the scaffolding that made his work possible, which was of course removed when the work was completed, that may have been, in fact, the secret (and ceaselessly exciting) reason for the work's creation. Or he may have ached to employ, for decades, a certain stretch of sandy soil by a railroad track, where yarrow, blackeyed-Susan, and Queen Anne's lace grew . . . or he may have wanted to describe an abandoned country cemetery . . . or a wide windy desolate Detroit street . . . or perhaps it was a fragment of conversation,
imperfectly overheard . . . or an intuition of such vivid, heartstopping authority that it seemed to have come from a source beyond himself. Perhaps, on the other hand, quite coolly, he wanted to decide for himself the "problem" of evil—what better way than to construct a novel elaborate and ingenious enough to dramatize every conceivable point of view?

But once the work is completed these initial ideas—these impulses—fade. They are absorbed into the texture of the work and cannot be extracted from it. No reader would guess at them; no critic would care about them; and the writer himself, as time passes, will gradually forget.

Apart from the paraphernalia of professional reviewing and criticism, apart from the dizzying phenomenon of mirrors reflecting mirrors, one does hope, however quixotically, for the ideal reader. To have that ideal reader—or two, or three—or a half-dozen—seems to make the effort worthwhile. And I count myself remarkably blessed that I have these ideal readers, as a number of contributions to this collection suggest.

JOYCE CAROL OATES
January, 1979