Literary Chicago

When we think genre fiction, many of us often think of cheap, paperback novels that are quickly consumed and more quickly forgotten. It’s widely understood to be trite, formula fiction that’s manufactured for mass consumption—the stuff with which no “serious” author would ever want to be associated.

There is perhaps no better writer to challenge these assumptions than Joyce Carol Oates. The author of 58 novels, 34 collections of short stories, and more poems, plays, essays, and book reviews than anyone outside the Library of Congress can enumerate, Oates has garnered a great deal of critical acclaim and a slew of literary awards, including the National Book Award, the O. Henry Award, and the PEN/Malamud Lifetime Achievement Award. She also happens to teach at Princeton University. Writing doesn’t get more serious than Joyce Carol Oates, and yet, at the same time, her work is featured alongside the likes of Stephen King, Dean R. Koontz, and Robert Bloch in my copy of The Complete Masters of Darkness. Her status as a master of darkness was confirmed by the Horror Writer’s Association when, in 1996, she won their Bram Stoker Award for her novel, Zombie.

So what gives? Is she a literary genius who likes to go “slumming” once in a while? Or is she a horror and mystery hack who has managed to fool the literati into giving her undue recognition?

Randall Albers, the chairperson of Columbia College’s Fiction Writing Department, seems to think of her as the poster child of a literary movement that might just abolish such distinctions. By way of introducing the theme of this year’s Story Week event, “Genre Bending: The Faces of Fiction,” Albers writes that, “the borders between genre fiction and so-called ‘literary’ fiction seem to be growing more porous, with conventions of each interpenetrating and cross-pollinating in ways not seen previously” (http://www.colum.edu/SpecialEvents/Story_Week/Thank_You.php).

Although I got the sense that Oates herself is well aware of the challenge that her body of work represents to the supposedly great divide between literary and genre fiction, she didn’t mention it directly during tonight’s conversation at the Harold Washington Library. Instead, she read one of her short stories, “The Night,” which, like so many of her tales, is based on an incident of true crime, and she talked about the origins of several of her novels and collections of short stories. A number of social, political, and economic issues were touched on as well, such as the vast differences between our current economic crisis and the Great Depression, the changes in sexual mores, the unprecedented pressure placed on certain groups of young people to become overachievers, and what she refers to as the “narcotizing of American children.”

Even if she didn’t directly address the question of literary versus genre fiction, she did have a few things to say about genre writing in general. For example, one of the reasons that she finds it to be so appealing is that it presents its readers with a guarantee of closure; a complete, straight-forward resolution is integral to its structure. “If you want to read a literary novel,” she said, “you could read it all the way through and be moved by it but still not quite ‘get it’ because there isn’t that contract with the reader that you have with a mystery novel.”

For me, the highlight of the evening was when Oates explained how she came to secretly assume the first of her two pseudonyms, Rosamond Smith. “I wanted to escape my own identity,” she said, reiterating a statement quoted in The New York Times back in 1987 (http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/05/specials/oates-pseudonyms.html). She seemed to feel that critics were bored and maybe even annoyed by her staggering prolificacy. With slumped shoulders, she mimicked them, saying, “Oh, look, Oates is back. She hasn’t even been away.” The way she told it, the relationship she had with critics at that time was very much like a marriage that’s lost its fire: “I wanted to get back to that feeling when you’re, like, sixteen and in high school writing something for the first time.” In pursuit of this feeling, Oates started seeing another agent behind her agent’s back. Over lunch, she handed this secret agent the manuscript of a suspense novel called The Lives of the Twins, saying, “Oh, just take this, show it around, don’t tell them who did it.” This form of literary adultery resulted in a modest sale, a movie starring Aiden Quinn and Isabella Rossellini and, upon discovery, a series of extremely unpleasant phone calls. “My agent said, ‘Joyce!? What have you done!? You published a novel under another name at Random House?’ I blacked out. You know, people commit these mass murders and they say, ‘I don’t remember.’ So that’s what I said. ‘I don’t remember.’”

As illuminating and entertaining as the event proved to be, Oates left us to ponder the tension between literary and genre fiction without her. So here’s my two cents: Isn’t it interesting that Oates and other writers of today are challenging literary rules by following the rules of genre convention? And isn’t it interesting that many, if not most, classic works of literature in the Western tradition can be understood as genre fiction? (The Iliad and the Odyssey, Beowulf, Morte Darther, The Faerie Queene, Hamlet, Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, “Rip Van Winkle,” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” “Young Goodman Brown,” the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness, etc.) Maybe the revolution that Oates and company threaten is a revolution in the truest sense of the word. To quote Days of Awe by Achy Obejas:

The word itself is imbedded with a kind of circular logic that has at its core a contradiction. Revolutions are, after all, for the moment. The minute they cease to be the outside challenge, the moment they become the power inside, they shift more than their balance. They demand another upheaval, another ensanguined engagement. And they’re as regular as the seasons. Indeed, we measure time by the constant and sluggish turn of our own watery orb; nothing could be steadier and more predictable than these collective, planetary revolutions. Constant insurrection is in our system, in our programming, our cranial codes.

And now I’m looking forward to seeing Obejas tomorrow as Story Week continues…

EVENT: JOYCE CAROL OATES READING, CONVERSATION, AND SIGNING | MONDAY, MARCH 15, 2010 AT 6PM | HAROLD WASHINGTON LIBRARY | AN EVENT OF COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO’S STORY WEEK FESTIVAL OF WRITERS