Scenes From American Life: Contemporary Short Fiction

Contents

Introduction: Fiction, Dreams, Revelations by Joyce Carol Oates

Jesse Hill Ford : The Bitter Bread
John Updike : Flight
Alistair MacLeod : The Boat
Peter Taylor : The Fancy Woman
James Alan McPherson : Of Cabbages and Kings
Willard Marsh : Mending Wall
Harris Downey : The Hunters
Sol Yurick : The Siege
Eudora Welty : The Demonstrators
Hollis Summers : The Third Ocean
Jean Stafford : In the Zoo
Flannery O'Connor : Revelation
Bernard Malamud : My Son the Murderer
David Madden : The Singer
Joyce Carol Oates : Plot
Charles Newman : A Dolphin in the Forest, a Wild Boar on the Waves
W. S. Merwin : The Dachau Shoe
W. S. Merwin : Make This Simple Test
W. S. Merwin : Postcards from the Maginot Line
Gail Godwin : A Sorrowful Woman
Robert Coover : The Hat Act
John Barth : Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction

Reviews

• Washington Post Book World, July 15, 1973, p. 15
• New York Times Book Review, October 7, 1973, p. 42

Other Editions

Introduction

Fiction, Dreams, Revelations by Joyce Carol Oates

All art is autobiographical. It is the record of an artist's psychic experience, his attempt to explain something to himself: and in the process of explaining it to himself, he explains it to others. When a work of art pleases us it is often because it recounts for us an experience close to our own, something we can recognize. And so we "like" the artist, because he is so human.

But there are works of art that explain nothing, that dispel order and sanity; works of art that contradict our experience and are therefore deeply offensive to us; works of art that refuse to make sense, that are perhaps dangerous because they are unforgettable. Picasso tells us that "Art is a lie that leads to the truth," and we understand by this paradox that a lie can make us see the truth, a lie can illuminate the truth for us, a lie—especially an extravagant, gorgeous lie—can make us sympathize with a part of the truth we had always successfully avoided. Instinctively, we want either lies that we can know as lies, or truth that we can know as truth. A newspaper in the mid-South declares bluntly: "We Print Only the Truth—No Fiction." But the two are hopelessly mixed together, mysteriously confused. Nothing human is simple.

Every person dreams, and every dreamer is a kind of artist. The formal artist is one who arranges his dreams into a shape that can be experienced by other people. There is no guarantee that art will be understood, not even by the artist; it is not meant to be understood but to be experienced. Emotions flow from one personality to another, altering someone's conception of the world: this is the moment of art, the magical experience of art. It is a revelation. This impact of another personality upon us—our terrible, reluctant, unavoidable acknowledgment of another person, other people, all the consciousness outside ourselves that we cannot control and cannot possess, despite our deepest wishes—all that is humanly sacred is present in this exchange, which is art.

This collection of contemporary American short fiction has been put together for use in college classrooms, but hopefully its interest will be more general. In its range of subject and style it is representative of much of the vitality of current writing; but a collection of stories that did justice to the richness of our contemporary literature would be several thousand pages long. This anthology begins with stories that appear—like our most innocuous dreams—to be "realistic," "normal." It concludes with strange stories that call attention to themselves as artificial constructions, daring us to believe in them. The gradual movement from one to the other, from lies that seem quite plausible to lies that exhibit themselves proudly as lies, is not meant to suggest any development, any progress from simple to complex—and certainly it is not meant to suggest any degeneration, any fashionable decadence! Behind the steady, straightforward narrative of Jesse Hill Ford's "The Bitter Bread," and behind the perplexing reflection of a narrative yet to be written of John Barth's "Autobiography" there are the same kinds of human emotions, someone's vivid psychic experience. As the formal fantasy breaks down—plot, characters, setting, "theme,"—the artist himself emerges, creating his art and himself while we stare in bewilderment: is this new character more or less fictional than the old-fashioned characters of fiction?

Most of the stories in this collection are moving, in their separate ways. A few are irritating, puzzling, unpleasant. Like certain people, they are not "likeable"—yet, like certain people, they are irresistible and it would be a shame to have missed them. Why should we like only those people who please us? Why should we want to be pleased at all? It is only through disruption and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.