Oates has frequently written of fellow artists and writers in her fiction. Additionally, this writer believes that many of her stories of “ordinary” people are veiled investigations into the artistic method.

Many of Oates’s depictions of artists give insight into both the dangers and powers of the creative life as she views it — and underline the uneasy relationship between the philosophy Oates champions and her own calling as a writer. Oates believes that we live at the close of the era of individualism, which began in the Renaissance. She has written that the “Renaissance world-view . . . tells us that we are not quite omnipotent but must act as if we were, pushing out into a world of other people or of nature that will necessarily resist us, that will try to destroy us, and that we must conquer.”

Human salvation, Oates maintains, lies in our recognizing the psychic interconnectedness of our species. Thus, the “hell” of selfishness must be cleansed from both the individual and the culture.

The writer’s life — and that of many other creative artists — seems, on the surface at least, inconsistent with such communalism. On the most prosaic level, writing requires long periods of working alone. More subtly, the writer has an inevitably predatory stance toward others as s/he appropriates human experience for art.

So it is both ironic and appropriate that Oates often uses artist (usually writer) characters to illustrate the “dying” philosophy of egoism.

Paradoxically, there is a sense, Oates believes, in which an artist may be truly egoless, even personless. In “Notes on Failure” Oates proclaims that a writer, while writing, “Is not an entity at all, let alone a person, but a curious mélange of wildly varying states of mind, clustered toward what might be called the darker end of the spectrum: indecision, frustration, pain, dismay, despair, remorse, impatience, outright failure.”

Conceivably as a result of coming so close to the fire, the artists she depicts can also wield an extraordinary power. This power can manifest in ways that are chilling and, perhaps more surprisingly, in ways that are good and healthy. Oates herself has wielded this artist’s power in some illuminating — and deliberately ironic — fashions.

The self-destructive artist is, of course, a stereotype, though a sadly well-founded one, and Oates has written powerfully about artists losing their sanity. Usually they are women artists, whose particular dilemma — reconciling femininity with intellect — naturally concerns Joyce Carol Oates.

“Bodies,” an early Oates short story, concerns a woman sculptor’s nervous breakdown. Pauline has pursued her career to the exclusion of a private life. Her calm, controlled demeanor attracts the attention of a troubled man who wants to awaken the animal instincts in this “ice goddess.” She repulses his advances; he flings himself against her while stabbing himself to death, making her an unwitting and unwilling party to his suicide.

This bizarre assault forces the isolated sculptor to confront the fleshly terrors she has so long subdued. Pauline becomes convinced, against all logic, that she must be pregnant and mentally collapses because of this delusion.

A protagonist with whom Oates has said she identifies is Ilena, the narcissistic heroine in her imaginative re-working of James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Oates says the story tells of a fate she could have suffered but avoided.

Ilena is a neurotic pill-popper, plagued like the sculptor in “Bodies” with a sense of collision between aesthetic needs and feminine desires. However, Ilena has not remained chaste: she is married and has a lover. But she seems to pop her men like her pills, detached from the messy physical reality. Ilena’s talent atrophies as her self-absorption — and concomitant self-disgust — increases.

In view of Oates’s own decision to remain childless, it is significant that her most egoistic writers are especially dangerous to children.

Roger Craft, protagonist of the short story “Getting and Spending,” is a successful novelist who despises homosexuals because “they can’t reproduce themselves, so they’re not natural.” Craft believes “in marriage, in families” but treats his own son with indifference, not wanting an impromptu lecture on “the family” interrupted by a flesh-and-blood boy’s “whining.”

When our narrator hears about Craft years later, he has caused a car accident that has killed this same son. His friends do not mourn the dead boy; they worry about how the tragedy will affect the writer.

At the end of “Getting and Spending,” a proud Roger Craft (his most recent book got good reviews and is selling briskly) bullies a stepson to dive into a swimming pool to illustrate the message that “Life is a constant risk, it’s cannibalistic but you’ve got to face it, struggle with it, emerge triumphant.” Note the similarity between Roger Craft’s ideology and the Renaissance philosophy as described by Oates.

“In the Autumn of the Year” is another Oates short story dissecting the selfishness of a writer. The heroine is Eleanor Gerhardt, an elderly and esteemed poet. Her most famous work is an early autobiographical play; it is common knowledge that the play was based on the love affair she had in her youth with a married man named Edwin Höller.

Asked to speak at a university conference, she is reminded of her long-ago romance by the presence of her dead lover’s son, Benjamin Höller, now a middle-aged man.

In one of several reveries, she recalls the child Benjamin playing piano while his father groped her in the bedroom upstairs. In another, she remembers being asked what the man’s wife thought about her play; she had replied that his wife probably didn’t even know about it since she was supposed to be a “vain, limited person.”

A meeting between Gerhardt and Benjamin Höller results in a rude awakening for the poet. Expecting another fawning admirer, she hears Benjamin Höller say: “You were both pigs.” He goes on to inform her that, like everyone else, he knew — as a child — that she and his father were lovers. After all, the two had carried on while the boy was in the house.

Benjamin berates her for the damage done to his mother who, humiliated by her husband’s infidelity, took to drink and ruined her health. When he says that “she had been an intelligent woman at one time — she went to Radcliffe, she had a master’s degree in French” our heroine is struck by the way her mind had left her lover’s wife “far off to one side. She had never been very substantial.” The writer realizes that it is she who has been “vain, limited” in her self-absorption.

Expensive People is a fantastic novel fiction born (!) of a fantastic premise. Oates wondered if it would be possible to write from the viewpoint of “one’s own unborn, unconceived child, giving grotesque albeit comic reasons for its remaining unborn, unconceived.”

The story poses as the memoirs of Richard Everett and, if he is the child Oates might have conceived, she can rightly congratulate herself for having rigorously practiced birth control. For Richard murders his mother — or hallucinates having done so.

In this blackly comic story, nothing is “for sure.” One of Oates’s most brilliant strokes is to give us a disturbed narrator thoroughly fluent in psychology, thus aware that his mind may be playing tricks on itself. He notes that “if I tell [my story] now and not next year it will come out one way, and if I . . . forced [myself] to begin this a year ago it would have been a different story then. And it’s possible I’m lying without knowing it. Or telling the truth in some weird, symbolic way without knowing it . . .”

Nada Everett looks very much like Oates: lithe, pale, and dark-haired. Also, like her creator, Nada Everett is a novelist and short story writer. Unlike the austere Joyce Carol Oates, however, Nada Everett is materialistic; she strives to be the very model of a “born to shop” suburban hausfrau as she accumulates flashy possessions. She is also a sensualist who engages in extra-marital affairs which she is not careful enough to hide from her pre-pubescent son. (I have no information about Oates’s sex life except that she has been married for decades to the same man and it is her first marriage.)

This writer/mother is Oates’s most savage portrait of an egoist. Like many of Oates’s anti-hero(ine)s, Nada exalts freedom as the highest good. Since Nada is a mother, complete freedom means the abrogation of responsibility. Richard craves the unconditional love and attention that are a child’s birthright and finds “Nada” — the nothingness symbolized by her name.

Eleven years old when the traumatic events he describes took place, eighteen at the time of the writing, Richard Everett is a larger-than-life character in every way: intellectually gifted, emotionally stunted, and a glutton who weighs 250 pounds.

Richard reads a short story of Nada’s called “The Molesters” and then decides to murder her. In the story, Nada has assumed the voice of a child sexually molested by a pedophile and then metaphorically “molested” by her parents hysterical reaction to it.

Richard, however, is not “molested” but ignored by his mother. Her materialism, sensuality, and the demands of her art leave nada for her child. It is her failure to properly “molest” her son which leads to her death.

The boy wanted connection to his mother but she wanted him to be “free.” After he kills her, Richard confesses to the crime for it but he is not believed. Thus, his mother still wins, leaving a curse of “freedom” which cannot be lifted except through his own death — and he plans to end his life when he finishes writing Expensive People.

The dangers — and rewards — of the literary endeavor are, in this critic’s opinion, obliquely illustrated in many Joyce Carol Oates’s stories that superficially appear unconnected with it. In much of her fiction, a character trespasses on another’s property. These characters are not police officers or detectives or theives and, thus, have no specific (and often no conscious) reason for doing so. Such trespasses occur in “An American Adventure,” “Hell”, “Bloodstains,” “The Giant Woman,” “Old Budapest,” and Marya: A Life.

What do these odd investigations represent? Oates gives us a clue when she writes that “reading . . . is the sole means by which we slip . . . into another’s skin.” Reading is a form of prying. These nosy adventures may also symbolize the writer’s habit of imaginatively invading others’ privacy.

The protagonists of “Bloodstains” and “The Giant Woman,” two representative Oates “trespassing” stories, could hardly be more different. The first is an aging man, urban and urbane, even somewhat jaded, a workaholic M.D.; the second, a rural girl-child. Yet both come to a kind of crisis by pawing through another person’s bureau drawers.

Lawrence Pryor of “Bloodstains” lives in an emotional vacuum. His relationships with his own mother, his wife, and his teen-age daughter, Edie, are reduced to superficial exchanges. His role as a father is particularly troublesome to Dr. Pryor because he and his growing child are so far apart that “it is a mystery, his having a daughter. He cannot quite comprehend it.” Seeking some inchoate connection with her, he goes through her room while she is out. He is not looking for drugs or birth control items; he is just . . . looking. Pryor easily justifies his snooping because “it is his house and all the rooms are his, his property” but he is nonetheless furtive, feeling almost criminal as he knows that he is “violat[ing] her privacy.” Then he finds something which forces upon him a sudden and unexpected kind of intimacy with her very female reality:

Rolled up in a ball, stuck back in a corner of the drawer, are a pair of white underpants. He picks them up. They have several bloodstains on them, thick and stiff, almost caked. He stares. Why bloodstains? Why here? . . . Then it occurs to him that his daughter was ashamed to put these soiled underpants in the wash, that she had meant to wash them herself but had forgotten, and weeks, maybe months have gone by . . . the blood grown old and hard, the stains impossible to get out . . . she has forgotten about them . . . balled up, rolled up and stuck in the corner of the drawer, forgotten. . . .

Pryor careens close to madness after this discovery. By a riverfront, he looks down at the water and seems to see “Edie’s face, grinning up at him.” The incoherent “shame” of his daughter’s panties dried with menstrual blood returns to him in a “daymare” and Lawrence Pryor hurriedly — and just barely — returns to the real world.

Three bored country youngsters become fascinated by an enigmatic neighbor in “The Giant Woman.” Our unnamed narrator, the youngest, is especially drawn to — and repulsed by — this neighbor because there are confused rumors that “The Giant Woman” was somehow involved, many years previously, in the death of a child about her own age. There is also a persistent rumor that the old woman is a miser who has secreted away a vast sum of money somewhere in her broken-down old house.

The children trespass the old woman’s property when she is not at home, hoping to find her legendary treasure. Like Dr. Pryor, the little girl rifles through another bureau. She is, with reason, quite a bit more frightened than Dr. Pryor was–until she discovers the rumored money in the back of a Bible: “The bills were new, not like the dollar bills I was used to seeing, all wrinkled and dirty. . . . I saw the numbers on the bills and my eyesight seemed to come and go, I blinked to get the sweat out of my eyes, I started to giggle and then stopped.”

But she does not steal it and does not tell the other kids it is there, allowing them to think they “didn’t find anything and there’s nothing to tell.” Unlike Dr. Pryor, she seems rejuvenated by her odd moment of epiphany: “. . . my face was burning and my eyes were sore and strange, as if I had been awake for a long time. I was very happy . . . [and knew that] nothing would happen to me, nothing bad.”

Joyce Carol Oates, in describing her own reaction to reading a book, she tells of feelings remarkably similar to those of the snooping little girl of “The Giant Woman”: her heart “beating more quickly, my senses alert to the point of pain, an excitement coursing through me that makes it virtually impossible to stay seated.”

Perhaps bureaus, unkempt and crowded with often forgotten personal items, are a suitable representation for the disheveled human psyche. A bureau investigation takes place in Oates’s first frankly autobiographical novel, Marya: A Life — and reveals the workings of the psyches of two uncommonly astute characters.

Like Oates, Marya grew up in rural New York, began writing short stories in her youth, and received a scholarship to a prestigious university before becoming a college professor. Marya is a promising young graduate student, house-sitting for Maximilian Fein, a professor she admires and to whom she is sexually attracted, when one day, inevitably, Marya’s curiosity draws her to his dresser drawers (pun mine but perhaps Oates’s too). She cannot resist the temptation and explores until she comes upon the following note: “My dear brazen Marya,” Fein writes, “Since you’ve come this far. . .”

One is reminded of the old story of peering through a keyhole and seeing — an eye.

In “Hell,” our protaganist is a long-married man and gas station owner. Like a writer thinking for a character, he hallucinates that he can invade his wife’s mind.

I interpreted freely the sounds inside her head, took them out of her head, and put in their place these visions:
a streak of pale soundless lightning
a spray of white-glowing dots
a whipping weightless cloud of moths
dot-sized bees suddenly swelling and stinging

Oates speaks of a writer finding his/her “voice” in terms that parallel the feelings of her intrusive characters. ” . . . the magic key unlocks a door to a mysterious room — but does one dare enter?” The writer’s task is scary — like that of a man thinking, “Hairs in the sink, scum, rings of dirt, better not look any further.”

Both the writer and the “ordinary” character inside an unfamiliar dwelling face similar dangers, Oates suggests, for, “Suppose the door swings shut? Suppose one is locked in until the spell has lifted? But if the “spell” is a lifetime? But if the “spell” is tthe life?”

The writer, especially the good writer, is a spell-caster. “The Sacred Marriage” tells of a writer who exercises a strange, frightening — though not destructive — power from beyond the grave. Howard Dean is an academic who wants to write a book about Connell Pearce, a recently deceased poet. He visits Pearce’s home to examine the late artist’s papers–and falls in love with Emilia, his beautiful young widow. While he is there, Mrs. Pearce allows another young male scholar access to Pearce’s papers. Confused and jealous, he comes across a note Pearce wrote for a novel about a great writer who arranges for his own peculiar kind of life after death. ” . . . X is about to die and wants to write the novel of his own life, extended beyond his life. . . . he selects a certain woman. . . . he marries her, and she nurses him through his last illness, buries him, and blesses all the admirers of his art who come to her, for she alone retains X’s divinity. Her body. Her consecration. A multitude of lovers come to her, lovers of X, and she blesses them without exceptions, in her constant virginity.” Howard realizes that he has become a character in a kind of novel-in-progress being written by a dead man. He is shocked and angry. He leaves Emilia but “on the road again . . . he felt a little better. . . If Howard Dean had been lied to, betrayed, what did that matter? The important thing was that he had seen the Pearce papers. . . Howard’s depression burned away . . . He felt instead the same marvelous energy he had felt upon first seeing those piles of Pearce’s unpublished, unguessed-at works. . . . He was going to bring Connell Pearce to the world’s attnetion: that was his mission, the shape of his life. It was a sacred obligation and he was going to fulfill it.” The irony is chillingly complete: forewarned, Howard nevertheless acts out his part in Pearce’s “novel.”

Solstice is told from the viewpoint of a female schoolteacher who makes friends with a sculptor named Sheila Trask. Their relationship leads to some tempestuous scenes and Oates knows that our expectations of the “romantic, doomed” artist are such that we fear Sheila will explode in violence or fall apart. But Oates deliberately foils this expectation by having the “ordinary” narrator suffer a nervous breakdown. She is rescued by the take-charge Sheila, an artist who is practical when the situation warrants it.

Joyce Carol Oates has often exercised the writer’s special powers in ways both wickedly playful and deeply instructive. Early in her career, Oates played witty practical joke on her readers. Her novel them began with an Author’s Note in which Oates described the inspiration for the book. She had taught a student who served as the model for Maureen Wendell and gotten to know her well. In the course of their relationship, “Maureen Wendell” confided to Oates the history of her very troubled family. Toward the end of the novel, them features a series of letters from Maureen Wendell to her English teacher addressed “Dear Miss Oates.”

In the Author’s Note Oates makes a point of saying that she has not exaggerated the “nightmarish” experiences of the Wendells but rather toned them down. This introduces a sense of irony since them is such a violent work, often called “gothic” because of its brutal portrait of urban life.

Later, Oates revealed in an interview that the Author’s Note was part of the fiction and the young woman had never existed. It seems that she was dramatizing a literary dilemma, i.e., what is the distinction between writer and “fictional” narrator?

“Does the Writer Exist?” is the title of one astute Oates essay. She points out the often disappointing dichotomy between a literary work and the person who created it, citing authors ranging from Thomas Hardy to Flannery O’Connor.

Oates herself is probably the most striking living example of this phenomenon. She has been called “The Dark Lady of American Letters” for her stories of rape, murder, mutilation, and cannibalism yet she is a non-drinker and non-drug user who says “I’m so dull” and calls her life “a study in conventionality.” A famous profile of her by Walter Clemons asks “Can this gentle creature really be the author of such unflinching fiction?” Perhaps most startling is the knowledge that this idiosyncratic writer was a sorority girl during her college years. The extroverted, conformist sorority hardly seems the place for the author of Wonderland and Bellefleur.

However, if the writer does not really “exist” as a “person” or “entity,” who writes books? I.e., why do we put someone’s — or anyone’s — name down as the author?

Oates played another trick with the concept of “author”-ity when she published The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories. The title page tells us that the book was co-authored by “Fenandes/Oates.”

The collection both opened and closed with brief essays by Oates claiming that The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories was the product of an inexplicable mental “possession” she experienced. She tells us that she believes she was temporarily inhabited by the spirit of “Fernandes,” a writer who may or may not have ever existed but without whose “very real help” these stories would never have been written and Joyce Carol Oates would not have been compelled to recognize “the authenticity of a world-view quite antithetical to my own.”

That some gullible reviewers took this seriously is remarkable in view of her previous prank in them. It is also disappointing since the volume is vintage Oates, with her trademark preoccupations, her communal world-view, and even her usual word choices. Their setting in “Portugal” is incidental. While the stories are a bit more abstract than most of her work to that date, the difference is one of degree and a small one at that.

Indeed, one of the stories, “Plagiarized Material,” flamboyantly gives the game away. The great writer Cabral finds that material he has worked on but never submitted is appearing in various publications — under the bylines of other authors. Cabral marvels at the similarity between the writing which has never left his home and that by these “plagiarists” stating: “. . . these ideas, the very phrases and exact words, the exact words, were [his].”

But the discerning reader should not be so mystified as to why Fernandes sounds so much like his “translator,” Joyce Carol Oates.

Her stunt in The Poisoned Kiss is similar to that played by a much less talented writer, Whitley Strieber, when he branched out from horror into the related genre of science fiction — but subtitled Communion a “true story,” thus occasioning an outpouring of speculation as to the whys and wherefores of his “visitation” by space aliens. Simply calling it non-fiction and managing a straight face undoubtedly boosted the sales of Strieber’s novel.

Oates experimented again with a change in authorial persona when she wrote Lives of the Twins under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith (a feminization of her husband’s name, Raymond Smith).

A few years previously, Doris Lessing had published novels under the name “Jane Somers.” Writing about Lessing’s experiment, Oates says that Lessing wished “to test the integrity of the publishing industries . . . which would have honored the ‘Somers’ novels with major reviews had they been issued under the name ‘Lessing.’” As Oates also says, Doris Lessing’s experiment failed — because Jane Somers’ work succeeded. The unknown author received a good deal of attention as well as quite positive reviews.

Oates’ stated reason for publishing as “Rosamond Smith” was to seek a “fresh appraisal.” But her experiment, like Lessing’s, failed, since Oates was exposed as the real author prior to the release of Lives of the Twins. There are limits to the power of the writer and a “fresh appraisal” was denied to Joyce Carol Oates.

While the attempt to fool the public misfired, Lives of the Twins is a good novel. It was also something of a departure for Joyce Carol Oates–her first mystery. And it is a mystery without a corpse though a killing may (or may not) be committed after the novel ends (Oates has given Twins a “Lady or the Tiger” denouement). Though there is violence in the novel, both of emotion and action, it is primarily a subtle study in questions of similarity and difference.

In her next Rosamond Smith novel, a story about a serial murderer called Soul/Mate, Oates returns to more familiar territory.

Oates is publishing under a pseudonym but not hiding behind one. Rather, as someone commented about pop horror writer Stephen King and his “Richard Bachman,” Oates has “sired a sorcerer’s apprentice” – although the difference in gender might make “birthed a sorcerer’s apprentice” a more appropriate formulation for Oates, however childless in fleshly young. Perhaps both outstandingly prolific authors (at their very different levels of quality) hope to bypass the reader exhaustion which has generally led publishers to believe that one novel a year from one writer is all the market will bear.

But the continuing use of the Smith pseudonym seems, like King’s “Bachman,” redundant, even meaningless. For the “mélange” of dark voices behind Rosamond Smith’s Soul/Mate, Nemesis, and Snake Eyes unmistakably belongs to the extraordinary Joyce Carol Oates: the prophet of communalism who possesses one of the hardiest egos in existence.

Johnson, Greg, Understanding Joyce Carol Oates, (University of South Carolina Press, 1987), pp. 9-10.
Oates, Joyce Carol, New Heaven, New Earth, (The Vanguard Press, New York, 1974), p. 118.
Oates, Joyce Carol, The Profane Art, (Persea Books, New York, N.Y., 1985) p. 106.
Oates, Joyce Carol, The Wheel of Love, (The Vanguard Press, New York, 1970), pp. 256-81.
Johnson, Greg, Understanding Joyce Carol Oates, (University of South Carolina Press, 1987), p. 63.
Oates, Joyce Carol, Marriages and Infidelities, (The Vanguard Press, New York, 1972), pp. 453-88.
Oates, Joyce Carol, The Seduction and Other Stories, (Fawcett Crest, New York, 1980), p. 60.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 78.
Oates, Joyce Carol, A Sentimental Education and Other Stories, (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1980), p. 106.
Ibid., p. 108.
Ibid., p. 111.
Ibid., p. 51.
Oates, Joyce Carol, Expensive People, The Vanguard Press, Inc., New York, 1968, p. 6.
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Seduction And Other Stories, (Fawcett Crest, New York, 1980).
Ibid.
Oates, Joyce Carol, Night-Side, (Fawcett Crest, New York, 1980).
Ibid.
Oates, Joyce Carol, Last Days, (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1984).
Oates, Joyce Carol, Marya: A Life (Berkley Books, New York, 1988).
Oates, Joyce Carol, (Woman) Writer (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1988), p. 56.
Oates, Joyce Carol, Night-Side, (Fawcett Crest, New York, 1980), p. 156.
Ibid, p.157.
Ibid., p. 157.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 162.
Ibid., p. 190.
Ibid., p. 191.
Ibid., pp. 191-192.
Ibid., p. 57.
Oates, Joyce Carol, Marya: A Life (Berkley Books, New York, 1988), p. 180.
Oates, Joyce Carol, The Seduction and Other Stories, (Fawcett Crest, New York, 1980), pp. 307-308.
Oates, Joyce Carol, (Woman) Writer (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1988), p. 13.
Oates, Joyce Carol, The Seduction and Other Stories, (Fawcett Crest, New York, 1980), p. 19.
Oates, Joyce Carol, (Woman) Writer (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1988), pp. 13-14.
Ibid., p. 34.
Ibid., p. 36.
Oates, Joyce Carol, Solstice, (Dutton, New York, 1985).

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