{"id":129265,"date":"2018-09-13T09:00:17","date_gmt":"2018-09-13T13:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129265"},"modified":"2018-09-14T14:49:58","modified_gmt":"2018-09-14T18:49:58","slug":"in-tribute-to-joyce-carol-oates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/13\/in-tribute-to-joyce-carol-oates\/","title":{"rendered":"In Tribute to Joyce Carol Oates"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Still from Smooth Talk<\/em>, the film adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates\u2019s\u00a0\u201cWhere Are You Going, Where Have You Been?\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

When Joyce Carol Oates\u2019s canonical story \u201cWhere Are You Going, Where Have You Been?\u201d was made into a film in 1985, the author mostly approved. Of its lead actor, Oates says, \u201cLaura Dern is so dazzlingly right as \u2018my\u2019 Connie that I may come to think I modeled the fictitious girl on her, in the way that writers frequently delude themselves about motions of causality.\u201d Oates writes this in the New York Times<\/em> in 1986, but I didn\u2019t read it until this year, after I\u2019d written my own story modeled on \u201cWhere Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,\u201d “Rabbits<\/a>,” which appears in the Fall 2018 issue<\/a>\u00a0of\u00a0The Paris Review.<\/em>\u00a0As Oates observes, writers writing about why they wrote something are not especially reliable.<\/p>\n

The original story was based on a Life<\/em> magazine article about the \u201cPied Piper of Tucson,\u201d a psychopath who seduced and sometimes killed his teenage female victims; his story later inspired two novels and four more films. Oates says she never read the complete article about the killer because she didn\u2019t want to be distracted by the real-life details: \u201cI forget his name, but his specialty was the seduction and occasional murder of teenage girls.\u201d This casual statement gets at what is so dazzling about Oates herself as a writer: the ability to treat graphic and even lurid material in a way that is not at all graphic or lurid. She doesn\u2019t attempt to conceal violent or perverse behavior\u2014on the contrary, she often emphasizes it\u2014but she is interested in those details only for their potential to reveal surprising human truths. In an Oates story, there is no contempt for people who are down and out, nor is there any false lionizing of struggle (that flip side of contempt). If Oates has scorn for any class of people, it\u2019s for the judgmental mainstream\u2014those \u201cwho fancy themselves free of all lunatic attractions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere Are You Going, Where Have You Been?\u201d made a huge impression on me when I first read it as a teenager, and I suspect it still has that effect on high school students today. I\u2019ve read the story several times since then, but like Oates (probably like most writers), I didn\u2019t reread my source material before starting to write. I knew I wanted my story to begin with an older man, dressed as a younger one, approaching a teenage girl in a playground, and that the tension between his appeal and the pull of the girl\u2019s family would be what propelled the story. Beyond that, I wasn\u2019t sure what I was doing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When I read something, I\u2019m left with a feeling for the story\u2019s atmosphere and maybe a good sense of one or more characters, but even with novels I\u2019ve read multiple times, I\u2019m often hard-pressed to relate the plot. I\u2019m embarrassed about this failing, and I\u2019ve only recently started to cop to it. Because of this, it was interesting to reread \u201cWhere Are You Going, Where Have You Been?\u201d and see that I had taken details I never could have recalled if I had been quizzed on them beforehand. Some of them are small things: the way Arnold Friend knows Connie\u2019s name without being told, the descriptive combination of Connie\u2019s shorts and shoes as she parades around the mall with her friends, Connie\u2019s wet hair when Arnold shows up unexpectedly at her house. These things I might have expected to linger in my subconscious, but I was surprised by two deeper resonances. At the moment of greatest danger in Oates\u2019s story, Connie\u2019s house becomes a kind of character; it seems to change and become animated under the influence of the menacing stranger. This happens in my story, too, although with a different significance, when the heroine\u2019s family is in danger. In Oates\u2019s story, Connie sacrifices herself for her parents and her sister. I wrote about a girl two generations removed from Oates\u2019s heroine, from a family with more money and more options, and so it seems fitting to me that the danger they\u2019re in is more all-encompassing and inevitable.<\/p>\n

Oates also writes tribute stories to writers she loves\u2014as the most prolific great writer alive today, she writes some of almost everything\u2014and what makes these so good are the varied strategies she uses to transform her inspirations. Her stories are never a simple or clever update, a series of in-jokes for fellow devotees, but instead a wholesale reimagining of the original work. In \u201cThe Dead,\u201d which takes place in the snowy cities of Detroit and Buffalo in the late sixties, Oates writes about a young college instructor whose literary success prompts a psychologist to advise her to \u201cfail at something\u201d in order to save her marriage; without the echo of the title, its relationship to Joyce wouldn\u2019t be obvious until the last scene. In \u201cThe Lady with the Pet Dog,\u201d Oates\u2019s story rearranges time, beginning in the middle of a love affair instead of with the couple\u2019s first meeting, as in Chekhov. When I first read it, I expected Oates\u2019s story to play with the different cultural contexts, given the lower stakes of adultery in twentieth-century Nantucket than in nineteenth-century Yalta. Instead, the scrambled chronology of Oates\u2019s story emphasizes the cyclical nature of passion, and it seems less a story about the way things have changed than one about the ways they have not.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Oates describes \u201cWhere Are You Going, Where Have You Been?\u201d as \u201cromantic allegory,\u201d which she calls her dominant mode. A young woman is seduced by the devil, who manipulates her vanity in order to lure her away and ruin her. Whether this ruination will take the form of a rape or a murder is left unresolved. We talked a lot in college about the author\u2019s intention\u2014we were more than once assigned Oates\u2019s famous essay \u201c\u2009\u2018JCO\u2019 and I\u201d\u2014and how much to credit it. This may be why I still read \u201cWhere Are You Going, Where Have You Been?\u201d as metafiction. To me, it\u2019s a story about the way that stories often fail us. It seems at first to be a coming-of-age story in which a girl meets a mysterious older stranger. That scenario extends the classic promise of fiction: that the world mirrors us, says something about us, that things happen in order to transform character. The reader isn\u2019t naive enough to believe that the world works that way, only that fiction does; fiction is a way to make sense of the world. Instead, Oates\u2019s story suggests that its heroine will be transformed by an act of random violence, one she\u2019s unlikely to be able to escape or even resist. Not so much coming-of-age as coming-of-death, and for no reason at all.<\/p>\n

What I most admire in Oates, I could never imitate. I think it\u2019s some magical combination of her particular experience and her legendary discipline. (Once, at a book festival in Miami, a student charged with escorting her to an event whispered to me that the celebrated headline author had requested to be picked up at 2:35, five minutes later than the schedule dictated, because she would be working until two thirty.) I don\u2019t think writers necessarily emulate the writers whose voices are closest to their own\u2014the easiest targets\u2014but rather the ones whose work activates some element of their own emotional history. In her essay about the story\u2019s adaptation, Oates says the film left out the element of sexual jealousy between the mother and daughter that was in her story. \u201cGonna get you, baby,\u201d Arnold Friend says to Connie, but the thing that really gets me about \u201cWhere Are You Going, Where Have You Been?\u201d has nothing to do with its swaggering villain. It\u2019s Connie sitting at the kitchen table while her mother nags her over their coffee: \u201cThis did not really mean she disliked Connie and actually Connie thought that her mother preferred her to June because she was prettier, but the two of them kept up a pretense of exasperation, a sense that they were tugging and struggling over something of little value to either of them.\u201d That thing, of course, is Connie\u2019s virtue, and it\u2019s what she sacrifices at the end of the story, perhaps for her family. The dynamic between mothers and daughters, the advice that is handed down\u2014perhaps with the knowledge that it won\u2019t be heeded or that it\u2019s useless\u2014was intimately familiar to me. My mother\u2019s background was closer to Connie\u2019s than my own, both in time and circumstances, and in Connie\u2019s relationship with her mother I recognized the way my grandmother reacted to my mother\u2019s prettiness: with a kind of warning envy, as if it were an outstanding debt that her daughter would someday have to repay. Connie and her mother lodged in me for that reason\u2014so much so that twenty years after I first read it, I couldn\u2019t help writing about it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nell Freudenberger\u2019s third novel, <\/em>Lost and Wanted,<\/em>\u00a0will be published by Knopf next spring. Her story \u201cRabbits<\/a>\u201d appears in <\/em>The Paris Review\u2019<\/em>s Fall 2018 issue<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  When Joyce Carol Oates\u2019s canonical story \u201cWhere Are You Going, Where Have You Been?\u201d was made into a film in 1985, the author mostly approved. Of its lead actor, Oates says, \u201cLaura Dern is so dazzlingly right as \u2018my\u2019 Connie that I may come to think I modeled the fictitious girl on her, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1591,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18642],"tags":[37179,2015,37178,37176,37177,16262],"class_list":["post-129265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-inside-the-issue","tag-arnold-friend","tag-joyce-carol-oates","tag-laura-dern","tag-the-pied-piper-of-tucson","tag-where-are-you-going","tag-where-have-you-been"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn Tribute to Joyce Carol Oates<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On rewriting a Joyce Carol Oates story, and fiction as tribute in general.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/09\/13\/in-tribute-to-joyce-carol-oates\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"In Tribute to Joyce Carol Oates by Nell Freudenberger\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 13, 2018 \u2013   When Joyce Carol Oates\u2019s canonical story \u201cWhere Are You Going, Where Have You Been?\u201d was made into a film in 1985, the author mostly approved. 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