Showing posts with label Joyce Carol Oates. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joyce Carol Oates. Show all posts

Sunday, January 14, 2018

The Tattooed Girl by Joyce Carol Oates

Image result for tattooed girl joyce carol oates
Joyce Carol Oates is not my favorite writer, but for all the repetition of her themes of fragile women being imperiled by evil masculine forces they masochistically desire, she does occasionally publish something both compelling and well written. I detested Beasts and The Falls since she exercises her familiar dreads in contrasting lengths, the first book a slender novella, the latter a literal brick, both books sounding rushed, fevered, and breathless, as first drafts of novels usually do. Or a finished Oates novel, for that matter. She does hammer that nail effectively and brutally as often as not, however, as she did with  her novels Black Water and  The Tattoo Girl", with the right configuration, her usual wit's end prose style and fascination with fragile psyches and marginally psychotic psychologies get as intense as fiction is ever likely to get. Zombie is a rather potent little psychodrama, and it's the kind of writing Oates excels at. She gets to the heart of the fringe personality better than anyone I can think of. The Tattooed Girl, from 2003, is likewise a well shaped melodrama. She depicts the thinking of women who allow themselves to be beaten and killed with seemingly scary exactitude. Oates can also be a bore, evident in We Were Mulvaneys and The Falls. My fascination with her continues, though, since it's impossible to tell when she publishes another novel that will be gripping and unnerving. I agree with the assessment on Oates. She writes so much that she's almost as undercooked and sometimes awful as she is brilliant. Producing novels at such an assembly line clip seems a compulsion. We Were Mulvaneys read like it was meant to capture some of the weepy women's market and I put it down, and Beasts was a novella of abuse that was better left in the manila envelope, as it was a flat litany of sexual assaults that she's done better before. But just as you think Oates is all used up, she surprises you. The Tattooed Girl was an amazing book, as was The Falls, with their portents of violence, domination, skewed rationalization of unworthy deeds. She has made an art of the dystopian personality, and it is here that she gets greatness. She merits a bit of respect, although you wish she'd stop trying to win the Nobel Prize so obviously with her tool-and-dye production and take longer to write a novel a reader didn't have to rationalize about. Editors hold much less sway in the preparation of a book, it seems. It's not just a matter of writers who write quickly getting away with redundant excess and awkward passages, such as Oates and Stephen King. Those who take their time also seem to avoid the more severe markings of the editor's blue pencil . 

Monday, April 16, 2007

A poem by Joyce Carol Oates

"Kite Poem," the Joyce Carol Oates poem selected and posted at Slate.com  by Robert Pinksy a year or so ago, brought audible moans from my lips when I first read it and considered it at the time to be her expected stew of haphazard, unproductive edginess. It was settled: violations of form which worked for her fiction writing more often than not made her poems drear and precious attempts to dance along the edge of reason in hopes art results in the transgression. I re-read it today to see if I had been too harsh, too quick to judge, reacting in a pique of professional jealousy. I gave it another several going over:



Her art as a prose writer is problematic enough; depending on who you talk to, she is either the most important American novelist since Faulkner, or she is a grotesque aberration of the language, taking too little care to craft her ideas or her prose. I am somewhere in the center of that controversy, thinking that she writes too rapidly to be consistently good, but acknowledge that she here novels have ofttimes been brilliant explorations of the psychologically marginal personality and that at her best, she can produce great fiction that concerns itself with the sudden violence that can visit any of us, at any time. She is a major novelist, like it or not. But she is an awful poet, and why she follows this thing other than the compulsion to write in every style and genre she comes upon--look ma, no hands. But what it seems she's attempting to show us as being an effortless work is instead cryptic, undecided, and full of awkward poses. The form is one thing, rather clever in a third-grade crafts class kind of way, but a move that begs for a death sentence. Those of us old enough to remember the fad for concrete poetry and the quizzically airless experiments of Richard Kostelanetz and his late modernist cronies will find this ploy, well, quaint. Better than Oates concern herself with content because the form otherwise dictates something like the air itself; emptiness.

I think, maybe, that Oates is proposing a new form of poetry, Compressed Literalism, as there's the feeling that she intends nothing beyond the banality of these unremarkable lines. That would have been fine had there been something else implied, something another feeling, idea, a paradox of things in the normative world that the sight of kites provoked Oates to speak of these things. Imagists, at their best ("The Red Wheel Barrel," "In the Metro"), manage to create whole worlds with their precise treatment of the image. Oates evokes nothing other than an offhand remark that only seems to start an idea and never finish it. The last word, "heap," signifying the end of the kite's tail, is meant for us to get some irony visually, where the banal words are expanded, elaborated upon in our own imaginations. We're meant to finish the poem ourselves by operating as co-authors, but there is not enough art in all of Oates' artifice. It's cute, contrived, and dreadful, and it's a sin for a writer of Oates' otherwise impressive accomplishments to waste her reader's time with these soporific outings. Better another half dozen half-baked novellas in the likely chance a keeper is produced than any more stanzas that are without effort, art, or a hint of lyric grace. Mary Ann from Slate's Poetry Fray Bulletin Board asks, "Maybe she saves her "better" poems for hard copy literary journals and uses Slate for her more off-hand pieces."

Doubtful. I've read a few of her poems over two decades, and what's appeared on Slate is par for the course. She really hasn't the ear or the eye for the off-hand associations this sort of fragmented, harsh free verse she wants to write, ala Denise Levertov, Diane Wachowski, or the sainted Sylvia Plath. Nor does she have the patience to create a plausible case where negative capability plays forth. Her verses are ideas disguised as poems, but what's missing is a natural-sounding diction, a voice, and a sense of imagery that has the seamless quality of natural talent. From what I hear, she is a realistic fiction writer of a certain kind and a decent playwright. But she remains a lousy poet. If she wrote at a slower pace -- say, producing one novel a year ala Updike -- she'd get high praises for improving her craft and writing better-crafted books. She already receives primarily glowing reviews from critics; it's funny that it's those of us in the trenches, the readers, who do most of the complaining about Oates's sudden outpouring. She writes as if she wants to get the Nobel Prize in the worst way. Writing so many half-baked novels is undoubtedly the worst way to go about it. Beasts, a novella she released last year, is the kind of penny-dreadful she's wont to write. She often attempts a reversed feminist take on the subject of violence against women. In this case, the story of a young woman who falls for the power she believes resides in the knowledge and experience her poetry professor possesses. Naturally, what happens is that the girl is summarily drugged, raped, and subjected to various indignities, all of which will shatter her idealism and motivate her to change her assumptions and effect devastating revenge. Compelling abstractly, as a topic for a coffee glitch, but botched in the novel; the prose reads without a hint of conviction and would be more suitable if it were the treatment for the script of a miserable made for TV film.