Term Paper on "Joyce Carol Oates: A Stylistic Move"

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[EXCERPT] . . . .

Joyce Carol Oates: A Stylistic Move from the Journalistic to the Literary

The American fiction writer Joyce Carol Oates has not simply tackled issues of national importance in her novels. She also has a substantial critical body of literary essays and works of nonfiction. Over the course of her career as Oates' has grown more prolific as a writer of fiction, Oates' nonfiction essays and writing have had an increasingly literary rather than a journalistic quality in the tone of Oates' prose, even while their subject matter has tackled issues of national importance. Oates' first essay collection was entitled Contraries. These early essays, the earliest of which is entitled "Is this the promised end? Tragedy in King Lear" (1971) is explicitly written in the genre of literary criticism, but does so in a fairly straightforward fashion about the text.

This tone stands in contrast to Oates' current, almost gothic approaches to real-life events such as the bloody combat of the boxing ring. "Literary criticism is the most ingenious form storytelling can take," she writes in her preface to Contraries, but Oates' straightforward analysis of Conrad and Wilde is dispassionate and objective, unlike her more subjective storytelling chronicles of life of the present day. Oates' most recently published essay is another review, a critique of Cormac McCarthy's new novel No Country for Old Men. Rather than begin with an overview of the plot, Oates begins her essay with a quotation from the French Catholic philosopher Pascal, to highlight not the concerns of McCarthy so much as her own reflections as a reader while engaging with the novel. "Life is a dream a little less inconstant" (Oates, 2005)<br />

The review of McCarthy proceeds a flight of philosophical fancy, as Oates muses not simply about this novel, but about the style of the author and why his work compels her, and compels other readers, time and time again, despite the violent nature of McCarthy's prose. "No one would mistake Cormac McCarthy's worlds as "real" except in the way that fever dreams are 'real,' a heightened and distilled gloss upon the human condition." (Oates, 2005) Oates shows evident familiarity with the entire span of McCarthy's works, and the reader might have difficulty fully comprehending the review, had the reader not read Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, books that Oates has read and refers to as common knowledge in her analysis of how the masculine and bloody world of the author she is reviewing speaks to the extreme nature of the human life, not just in the Wild West McCarthy chronicles, but in modern times. Her essay on Lear, in contrast, wrestles more with what Shakespearean critics such as Norman Lear have written about the Bard's use of narrative structure.

It is interesting to read what Oates writes about Cormac McCarthy's violence, because Oates herself has also been called a gothic American author, because of her fascination with the dark side of the American dream in novels such as Wonderland, where the outstanding doctor of the title's daughter dies of a drug overdose, and short stories such as "Where are you going, Where have you been?" (1970) where the beautiful and bored suburban teenage heroine is murdered and raped by a fantasy older boyfriend. This fascination is also echoed in Oates' literary nonfiction. Another of her reviews "Beyond Glory: The Good Fight" refers to her own extended nonfiction essay, published in book form, entitled On Boxing.

On Boxing (1994) stands as another example of how Oates' gothic, dramatic, yet philosophical style has permeated her nonfiction works, moving away from journalism into the realm of subjectivity, a personal fascination with violence and the fantastic. Oates admits she is fascinated by the bloody combat of the ring. It is interesting to note here, that although occasionally Oates' fiction involves teenage girls, such as "Where are you going, Where have you been?" she also is quite willing to make use of male protagonists, as in Wonderland, she equally fascinated with male worlds, such as the ring, if they are equally elemental in the nature of their portrayals of harsh violence. But she writes always from an explicitly and self-avowed female perspective. The earlier Wonderland, which attempts a more general view of the male protagonist, has now passed to a view that in, On Boxing explicitly identifies the narrator as not like the individuals she chronicles, as a woman rather than a man.

Oates was an aficionado of boxing since a child. Rather than begin her essay on the sport with a journalistic history of one-on-one combat, she talks about how it solidified her own relationship with her father. He often took her to watch The Golden Gloves amateur boxing matches. She speaks in this text not as a detached observer who could be either male or female, but as a woman watching men fight, in a world that really "excludes women as completely as the female experience of childbirth excludes men." (Oates, p.3, 1994)

Oates is a woman, and her femininity thus defines her perspective in her later critical works, with an open subjectivity her earlier more journalistic style lacked. In On Boxing, she even discusses how young girls often create interior spaces when playing with blocks, while men create violent arenas to explain what she sees as boxing's testosterone-driven quality. Of course, since Joyce wrote On Boxing, women's boxing has begun to enjoy a great deal of popularity, especially with the event of the film "Million Dollar Baby," about a female boxer played by Hilary Swank. This highlights one of the disadvantages of a subjective perspective, as deployed by Oates, as opposed to tackling nonfiction like a journalist. By not acting as a journalist, and going out into the field to interview a multitude of boxers, but remaining within her own subjective experience of the sport, which is of male boxing, Joyce ignores what became a major development in the division of the gender in combative, professional boxing.

However, because she is subjective and literary in her use of time and her own writerly subjective perspective, Oates at least lays her own biases on the table as an author, when she, for example, writes an article about Mike Tyson. He "recalls the young Jack Dempsey," and is a "boy warrior" in her eyes. (Oates, 1987) Rather than focus on his record in her literary essay of Tyson, Oates discusses how culture has come to construct the fighter and how she perceives what has been characterized as a man who is "a block of granite" rather than a human being. She calls his fighting "surreal" in its violence and force, a characteristic, one might again add, of some of her own fiction.

It is important to note that as well as her nonfiction; her fiction has also undergone a series of transitions in terms of their central concerns and styles. For example the 1967 Garden of Earthly Delights. Oates's second novel revolves around the world migrant farm laborers and does not have the meandering, surreal and fantastic qualities of her later works. The novel them. Oates's 1969 chronicle of a blue-collar Detroit family from the Depression through the Detroit race riots, lacks the qualities of the Gothic suburban world of Bellfleur, her 1980 work that many critics consider to be the turning point of her switch from grittier journalistic style fiction to higher flights of prose and philosophy. ("Joyce Carol Oates," About.com, 2005)

What is so interesting about Oates' stylistic shift from the journalistic to the literary in tone, perhaps, is that the subject matters less than the author's new attitude to her own writing. The essay on "Lear" deals with violence, but focuses on poetry and the nature of tragedy, while McCarthy's violence becomes a venue for the author to discuss her own interior concerns… READ MORE

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