RARA-AVIS: Joyce Carol Oates & popular art

Bill Hagen (billha@ionet.net)
Sat, 17 Oct 1998 12:01:20 -0500 (CDT) Before Oates and fine vs popular art get separated too much as threads, I'd
like to, well, defend Oates' fiction (as opposed to her reviewing) just a
bit.

When she's good--or WAS good, if you favor her early career--Jocye Carol
Oates is very good at depicting the insides of victims, usually women, who
are dominated and hurt by others, and can do nothing about it. Characters
like Connie in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," the stewardess
in "Did You Ever Slip On Red Blood" (both short stories) are numbed by
media or experience to the point that they are not able to think and choose
rationally. Her recent novel, _Man Crazy_, though far from her best, shows
a girl almost reduced to a decaying body before she escapes imprisonment.
Oates is less good at showing what noir or hard-boiled fiction excels in,
the psychology of the powerful.

I forget what she said about Cain, but his characters who are both
victimizers and victims seem "related" (being very careful here) to Oates'
characters. (Russell Banks and Robert Cormier are two other authors
working this area.)

Not knowing all of what she said at Boucheron, I would agree that Oates
can't be characterized as essentially a "genre" writer. But she has
certainly based much of her work on genre plots, especially the gothic and
Victorian family sagas. As Roger Kurtz and Fred Willard point out, the
boundaries are down between fine and popular art these days. In fact, that
seems to be one of the features of the "postmodern," whether you're talking
about architecture or fiction. It's an exciting time to write and read: on
the one hand you have respected "novelists," like Pynchon, Oates, and
DeLillo who infuse their fiction with so much popular culture and genre
formula that you wonder whether they will become "dated"; on the other
hand, there are many writers who begin in "genre," and then move into
"novels"--Sharlyn McCrumb comes to mind; I even sensed some restiveness in
Marcia Muller when I last read her. As a genre, hard-boiled fiction has
moved toward more interest in character psychology, partly thanks to
Chandler, which is precisely where "fine" fiction has gone in this century.

One of the reasons we have periodic arguments about whether someone belongs
"in" or "out" of the "hard-boiled" category is because the boundaries seem
less fixed; OR, if that threatens your idea of genre too much, let's say
that more and more authors sneak across the border...and then sneak back
again.

Having reduced my whole point to an immigration problem, with authors as
illegal aliens, I will definitely quit.

Bill Hagen
<billha@ionet.net>

#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.