Contraries/A Sentimental Education/Three Plays:
Phillips, Robert
CONTRARIES Joyce Carol Oates Oxford University Press, $15, 188 pp. A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION Joyce Carol Oates E.P. Dutton, $11.95, 196 pp. THREE PLAYS Joyce Carol Oates t Ontario Review...
...The Three Plays are "Ontological Proof of My Experience," "Miracle Play," and "The Triumph of the Spider Monkey...
...It is required reading for anyone interested in her writing...
...These seven essays were prompted by personal and emotional responses and are enlivened by her own experiences as a writer...
...Both share a protagonist whose love of mankind is no more than a form of egotism, perhaps even madness, which will touch and devour multitudes...
...This is the spectacle we witness as, over the course of one summer on the island, nineteen-year-old Duncan experiences erotic love for his younger cousin...
...Among the challenges Ms...
...And James Joyce's multivoiced compositions and wordplay surely were precursors of Joyce Oates's own Childwold...
...My favorite essay, on the English and Scottish "traditional" ballads, deals with those universal themes and presences which haunt us all, Joyce Carol Oates not excepted...
...It should not surprise, then, that Ms...
...Her own life has not been "poetic" after all, but mean...
...Contraries offers such entree...
...Not that she would welcome comparison to the Bard, but Joyce Carol Oates, one of our most prolific and intellectual contemporary writers, fortunately has published two previous collections of critical essays...
...Can one read her dissection of King Lear without reflecting upon her fascination with "the mimesis of an action 'tragic' in its intensity, involving defeat and triumph, often in inexpressible terms" (to quote from the Preface to her Three Play si) Oates's discussion of Lawrence's novella, The Escaped Cock, is instructive in light of her evangelical novel, Son of the Morning...
...In a Preface, she states, "We are stimulated to emotional response not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it...
...Certainly it is not necessary to cross-reference Ms...
...On either plane, Oates bears witness to the evils and complexities of the world in a manner usually attributed, by some critics, only to male writers...
...All three concern ceremony, ritual, and what Oates calls "the inexpressible coherence of 'fate': the disharmonious music that is torn from us at certain moments in our lives and in history...
...The afternoon ends with bloodshed and the fear of disclosure...
...Yet the allusion is justified...
...Like Greek tragedies, they are also violent-among the most violent works in the Oates canon, in fact, portraying (on-stage or off) beatings, rape, machete murders, immolation, and facial disfiguration by boiling sugar water...
...Oates accepts is that of practicing a relatively new critical technique-fantasizing structures for works of literature other than those given by their authors...
...Is her reading of Conrad, with action serving as the "barbed hook" that, leads inevitably to man's destruction, a gloss on her recent novel, Cybelel Certainly Edwin Locke of that work follows Stein's famous imperative, "in the destructive element immerse," as does Andrew Petrie, of her The Assassins...
...They were produced originally in New York in 1972, 1973, and 1979, respectively...
...Is ritual violence, which she reads as so necessary to Dostoyevsky, as necessary to the integrity of an Oates novel such as Them...
...In ' 'Queen of the Night'' a vain divorcee marries a young lover before discerning, or admitting, his homosexuality...
...THREE PLAYS Joyce Carol Oates t Ontario Review Press, $10.95, 158 pp...
...In "In the Autumn of the Year" a distinguished woman poet is forced to confront the fact that her early, luminous love affair was (at least in the eyes of her lover's wife and child) a sordid and dirty thing, that she herself had been used and intimidated and duped by her lover...
...The six pieces in this volume all concern individuals whose passions blind them to reality...
...The books which have moved her to literary criticism (which she defines as "the most ingenious form storytelling can take") are Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dostoyevsky's The Possessed, King Lear, Conrad's Nostromo, Lawrence's Women in Love, Joyce's Ulysses, and the English and Scottish traditional ballads...
...Brilliant, unbalanced, and given to wild reaches of imagination, Duncan first seduces the girl and then, unable to silence her, proceeds to kill her...
...For instance, could the supernatural dimension and central Gothic image of the allegorical Dorian Gray have "influenced" her own Gothic extravaganza, an allegorical book which (in an Author's Note), she herself describes as "a region, a state of the soul...
...As I have observed in Commonweal in an earlier review, Oates's story collections are never randomly put together...
...The Tryst," a Cheever-like story, revolves about a wealthy married mail's dalliances, and the one time he is tempted to bring one of his girls into his home...
...It is their "driveness" which drives the book and makes it cohere...
...Together they give an intriguing overview of Ms...
...Oates has been drawn to write for the stage...
...But with a writer as challenging as Oates, it is welcome to have some entrees into the world of her imagination...
...We might not have to guess at how many of the echoes of Marlowe, Kyd, and the aphoristic Lyly are legitimate influences or acts of homage in his journey work...
...To call a fiction A Sentimental Education may seem an act of folly or of hubris, recalling what for many is the favorite among Flaubert's novels...
...As Oates observes in her essays on The Possessed, "As society approaches crisis and breakdown, preparatory to reaffirmation of its identity, it provokes private disintegration, private ceremonial exorcism...
...Her actions were responsible for the near-death of her lover's wife...
...or perhaps even more so to her plays...
...Like Flaubert's chronicle of interwoven lives under Louis Philippe, Oates's title novella also depicts calf love, disillusion, futility, the passage from youth to maturity, but depicts it without Flaubert's fascination for the counterrevolutionary currents in this country's politics...
...Such violence at times supplants a surface realism and segues into surrealism...
...The Precipice" concerns a mild-mannered professor and his inexorable tug toward the violence which ultimately triggers his own murder...
...Contraries-her third- is her most illuminating in terms of her own fictional concerns...
...And yet Oates does depict the breakdown of a society...
...Oates's extraordinary mind...
...Psychologically and symbolically Oates has rarely been more powerful...
...Robert Phillips IF Shakespeare had left behind autobiographical or critical essays, what a boon they would be to critics...
...It is tempting to remark those properties, of the authors she has taken time to study, which might have helped shape her own vision...
...Her concern for Lawrence's attempts to integrate the male and female principles is reflected, perhaps, in her "Queen of the Night," the first story in her latest collection, A Sentimental Education...
...Further, her own earlier behavior, which she has regarded as "free" and "passionate," must now be seen.as selfish and injurious to others...
...Oates's books with these literary capstones she examines in Contraries . These essays can and will read on their own as vigorous and illuminating critical examinations...
...Which is merely to say that these dramas are dramatic...
...She has the last word on this sexist notion in an essay ironically titled "Why Is Your Writing So Violent?," which can be found in the New York Times Book Review for March 29, 1981...
...Each of these stories is highly dramatic, focusing upon one vital occasion in the life of a protagonist from which he or she will never adequately recover...
...The act is performed at the edge of the ocean, in a secret, slimy place smelling offish...
Vol. 108 • August 1981 • No. 15
