them
As violence is a kind of romance, bound up with the energies of youth, so romance is itself a kind of violence, a storm of the senses. For all its grittiness and the sordid depths to which Jules Wendall sinks in the months preceding the “race” riot of July 1967, them is a valentine to the Detroit of those vanished years; Detroit at the peak of its economic power, the quintessential American city; the world capital of motor vehicle manufacturing; to its inhabitants, a rhapsody of chemical-red sunsets, hazy-yeasty air, relentless eye-stinging winds; new-constructed expressways cutting through old, settled neighborhoods with the destructive fury of cyclones; overpasses, railroad tracks and shrieking trains, factories and factory smoke, the choppy, usually gunmetal-gray and greasy-looking Detroit River, the daunting length of Woodward Avenue out to Eight Mile Road and Ferndale, the first of the “white” suburbs; wide, littered Gratiot Avenue, Grand River Avenue, John R., Outer Drive, Michigan, Cass, Canfield, Second Avenue, Third Avenue, Highland Park, Jefferson, Vernor, Fort, Jos. Campau, Dequindre, Freud (pronounced exactly the way it looks, “frood”), Beaubien, Brush, Randolph, Livernois, Six Mile, Seven Mile, Fenkell. Fenkell! Such blunt syllables, such spondees, are the very music of this Midwestern city; former inhabitants recite them together like poetry. How like an exiled ghost I continually revisit Detroit, prowling these streets, doomed to see—what? The elusive treasure that Jules, Maureen, and their plucky mother Loretta sought without knowing what name to give it?
The essence of a place and a time. That magical conjunction of one’s self and the larger, communal, mystical, and unknowable soul.
* * *
—
Them was intended as the third and most ambitious of a trilogy of novels exploring the inner lives of representative young Americans from the perspective of “class war”—a taboo subject in supposedly apolitical literary quarters. (But the term “war” in this context is only metaphorical—isn’t it?) A Garden of EarthlyDelights (1967) and Expensive People (1968) are the predecessor novels, the first set in various parts of the rural United States and in western New York and the second set in an affluent Detroit suburb called Fernwood. By 1971, however, the trilogy had become a quartet: Wonderland thematically ends the informal series, moving in time beyond the era of them and into the yet-uncharted, apocalyptic America of the late Vietnam War period when the idealism of antiwar sentiment had turned to cynicism and the counterculture fantasy of egalitarianism and “love” had self-destructed. The original title of them was Love and Money, an ironic variation on such classic titles as Pride and Prejudice, Crime and Punishment, The Red and the Black (whose class-conscious hero Julien Sorel is less idealistic, greedier, and crueller than Jules Wendall but clearly a spiritual kinsman), and it must have been that in the course of immersing myself in the Wendalls’ lives, I saw that the title was too rawly thematic and reductive. For them is as much an ode to the American dream of re-visioning and remaking the self, the inexhaustibly pliant self, as about the conquests of love and money. The title them came to me as inspiration, with its sly suggestion that there is in fact a them and an us; in our democratic nation, a category of them at whom we can gaze with pity, awe, revulsion, moral superiority, as if across an abyss; a them not entirely civilized, yet eager to “rise” in class; a them who constitute the ideal, impressionable, ever-naïve and ever-hopeful consumers of American dream-products. The them of the novel are poor whites, separated by race (and racist) distinctions from their near neighbors, poor blacks and Hispanics.
Of course as the daughter of rural-dwelling, working-class Americans, born at the end of the Depression, who’d grown up on a small and not very prosperous farm in western New York State, I felt an absolute allegiance with them; my presumption of us is ironic. Jules Wendall speaks for me at the novel’s conclusion, chiding his sister Maureen who hopes to be saved by disappearing into the middle class, “Aren’t you one of them yourself?”
Few readers of them since its 1969 publication have been them, because them as a class doesn’t read, certainly not lengthy novels, but many of the novel’s readers over the decades have been the daughters and sons of them, whom I think of as my spiritual cousins and whom I meet often in my travels: we’re the first in our families to graduate from high school, to graduate from college, and to enter, often with deeply ambivalent feelings, the enormous American professional class. All that distinguishes us is whether our parents are proud of us, or whether our “rise” in some way hurts and diminishes them. It’s an irony of twentieth-century American social history that we who’ve been them must redefine ourselves as the properly prosperous American us. For African-Americans whose parents or grandparents were Southern sharecroppers, and whose ancestors were slaves, the leap across the abyss is particularly dramatic since it involves as well a conscious cultivation of a new “white” language. Yet we survive: Maureen in a Detroit suburb, pregnant and terrified of losing what she’s gained (another woman’s husband); Jules somewhere in California, confident that his violent, criminal life has been exorcised by the fires of the Detroit riot—“Everything that happened to me before this is nothing—it doesn’t exist!—my life is only beginning now.”
* * *
—
Rereading the Author’s Note to them, decades after having composed it, I’m stunned at the author’s assumption that an astute reader would recognize these earnest words as fiction; a postmodernist appendage meant to guarantee the “reality” of an obvious work of artifice. In the Sixties, when literary experimentation was itself a convention, playful and mock-deceptive but in the service of a higher or more essential truth, the Author’s Note to them may or may not have been generally interpreted as the author intended, but by the end of the twentieth century, in an era of memoir and memoirist fiction, it would surely be interpreted literally. And yet there can be no expectation of literal truth in the realm of the novel. As we approach the gravitational field of any work of the imagination, we must grant how reality begins to bend: even what is “real” will be transformed into something rich and strange, else the artist has not made it her own.
For all literary styles are conventions, and all literature is artifice; we may easily recognize myth, legend, fantasy, as a mode of art “not real” but symbolic; we are less likely to recognize the very art of realism as a convention, an authorial stratagem. When we choose to write in the realist mode, we hope for a trompe l’oeil effect by means of which both reader and writer suspend disbelief and accept without question the artifice under creation. (Does it seem surprising that the writer must convince him- or herself, too? In fact, this is the first and most difficult stratagem in the creation of any artwork.) To make the ideal reader believe not only in the verisimilitude of the writer’s endeavor, but in its originality, worth, and “symbolic” significance; to make oneself as writer/reader believe; this is the great challenge of any effort of art, though it is rarely acknowledged or discussed. In composing them, I drew upon source materials close at hand, for I knew much of Detroit intimately by the time of the outbreak of the riot in July 1967, and I saw how a novel might be structured that would lead, as in a vortex, to this cataclysmic event, beginning many years before in an entirely different era, before even World War II. It was happenstance that my husband and I were living in a residential neighborhood bounded by Seven Mile Road to the south and Livernois Road to the west that was at the periphery of looting and burning; I was subjected, like hundreds of thousands of other Detroit citizens, to every emotion associated with such social tumult, which registers in the mind as a break in sanity itself. What is happening? How can this be happening? Will we be killed? Who will protect us? In fact, the Michigan National Guard moved in to protect property and lives in this, the northwestern section of Detroit; the heart of the violence was miles away, near the ghettoized, long-impoverished core city of Detroit, as distant from the Caucasian/Jewish northwest sector as if it were in another country, but a country now become militant and crazed. Yet a stinging, su
lfurous smoke-haze would hang over the city for days, in the grip of a heat wave; the stink of burning things would seem to pervade the remainder of our lives in Detroit, and no one who lived through, or even near, the 1967 riot would ever feel that Detroit was a “safe”—or even “sane”—place in which to reside. (We too moved away, in 1968, to live for the next ten years in a kind of exile from America, across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, where my husband and I would both teach at the University of Windsor.)
In the depiction of the riot and its aftermath, them was intended to be historically authentic, as in its surreal-documentary tracking of Detroit geography and the Land-of-Oz suburb of white privilege, Grosse Pointe, where Jules Wendall falls irrevocably in love. There’s a brief cinematic sequence in Part III in which Maureen Wendall, lost in dreamy thoughts of plunder and appropriation, walks in the affluent residential neighborhood above Six Mile Road and the University of Detroit campus where I, too, walked, contemplating those large, beautifully tended brick homes with their suggestion of idyllic lives within, seeing them with Maureen’s yearning eyes; for though I was now living in one of these very houses, I yet felt a deeper allegiance with my fictitious character than I did with myself; such walks replicated the walks I’d made regularly as a young girl in certain affluent neighborhoods of Lockport, New York; feeling, like Maureen, not envy exactly, and not hatred, but “something like love.”
Yet there are aspects of them that are, if not precisely unreal, less real than others. The Author’s Note, for instance, about which I’ve been asked frequently. Of course, it does bear a glancing relationship to reality, but only a glancing relationship. I did teach English at the University of Detroit in the years 1962–67 and I did teach night school students who might have resembled “Maureen Wendall”—but of course Maureen is my invention, and her “voluminous” recollections and letters are my invention; my invention too, and a risky stratagem it certainly seems to me now, is the fictitious “Miss Oates” whom Maureen conjures up in her inevitably biased memory, as the night school instructor who gave her a failing grade. (I was not, in fact, “Oates” at the University of Detroit, but always “Smith”: Joyce Smith, or Professor Smith.) What is strange to me now is that in 1968–69 I would fantasize an earlier teacher-self unlike me in my actual classroom methods, one who would “fail” a student without much explanation and apparently little sympathy; a “Miss Oates” who drove the black Volkswagen my husband and I owned at that time, and who much admired Flaubert’s Madame Bovary but was, in conspicuous ways, an entirely different person. The motive here, I think, must have been to suggest by this distorted portrait that the “Oates” in the novel isn’t the historical “Oates”; yet, in so meticulously creating the portrait, as a curious masochistic reappropriating of one’s own now defenseless past self, I succeeded in displacing the historical “Oates” entirely; if I read these passages unskeptically, I naturally assume that the portrait is “Oates”; if “Oates” is me, this “Oates” must once have been me; though I’m reasonably sure that I wasn’t this person, as I know that Maureen Wendall never lived, yet Maureen’s testimony is so convincing, how can I doubt it…? Aesthetically, such stratagems can’t be faulted, for the imagination is boundless after all, and everything within the covers of a work of fiction is fiction; but morally, or perhaps practicably, this displacement of “reality” by an invention is of ambiguous worth. In more recent years, in such diverse works of fiction as E. L. Doctorow’s World Fair, Philip Roth’s Deception, Paul Theroux’s My Other Life, and others, protagonists boldly bearing the names of their authors similarly blur the line between reality and authorial invention. So plausible was the Author’s Note to them and so apparently convincing the characters of Maureen and Jules, readers still write to me asking me to forward mail to them; at readings, I’m asked how Maureen and Jules “are”; years ago, a woman wrote lengthy, emotional letters confessing her love for Jules, though she insisted that she wasn’t unhappily married; an irascible, rather gullible reviewer fulminated in print, when them received the 1970 National Book Award, that the author didn’t deserve the award because them wasn’t fiction but “real.” (How naïve in any case, the notion that “reality” by itself can create a structure of language, an artifice, out of the very air, with no human agent involved.) With the passage of time I’ve come simply to say that the characters of them, like most of my fictional characters, are “composites”: myself, and others. And this is so.
As a chronicler of American lives I have sometimes been criticized for not more explicitly judging my characters or indicating what the “moral” or message of my work is. Does them condone violence, theft, deception, the “viciousness” of the poor? Is Jules Wendall the pimp/murderer a hero? Can victories be salvaged out of the ruins of others’ lives? These are questions the writer may ask herself, to which the work of fiction provides a complex, perhaps tragic answer. To immerse oneself in others’ souls is an act of sympathy, however, and not censure; them is in fact a work of love, and like all those who love I have no wish to set myself up as a judge. A novel’s meanings may be as myriad as its readers.
Joyce Carol Oates
Princeton, October 1999
For my husband, Raymond
ALSO BY JOYCE CAROL OATES
NOVELS
With Shuddering Fall(1964)
A Garden of Earthly Delights(1967)
Expensive People(1968)
Wonderland(1971)
Do with Me What You Will(1973)
The Assassins(1975)
Childwold(1976)
Son of the Morning(1978)
Cybele(1979)
Unholy Loves(1979)
Bellefleur(1980)
Angel of Light(1981)
A Bloodsmoor Romance(1982)
Mysteries of Winterthurn(1984)
Solstice(1985)
Marya: A Life(1986)
You Must Remember This(1987)
American Appetites(1989)
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart(1990)
Black Water(1992)
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang(1993)
What I Lived For(1994)
We Were the Mulvaneys(1996)
Man Crazy(1997)
My Heart Laid Bare(1998)
Broke Heart Blues(1999)
Blonde(2000)
Middle Age: A Romance(2001)
I’ll Take You There(2002)
The Tattooed Girl(2003)
The Falls(2004)
Missing Mom(2005)
Black Girl, White Girl(2006)
“ROSAMOND SMITH” NOVELS
Lives of the Twins(1987)
Soul/Mate(1989)
Nemesis(1990)
Snake Eyes(1992)
You Can’t Catch Me(1995)
Double Delight(1997)
Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon(1999)
The Barrens(2001)
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
By the North Gate(1963)
Upon the Sweeping Flood(1966)
The Wheel of Love(1970)
Marriages and Infidelities(1972)
The Goddess and Other Women(1974)
Hungry Ghosts(1974)
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?(1974)
The Poisoned Kiss(1975)
The Seduction(1975)
Crossing the Border(1976)
Night-Side(1977)
All the Good People I’ve Left Behind(1978)
The Lady of Abyssalia(1980)
A Sentimental Education(1980)
Last Days(1984)
Wild Nights(1985)
Raven’s Wing (1986)
The Assignation(1988)
Heat(1991)
Where Is Here?(1992)
Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque(1994)
Zombie
(1995)
“Will You Always Love Me?”(1996)
The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque(1998)
Faithless(2001)
I Am No One You Know(2005)
High Lonesome: Stories, 1996–2006(2006)
The Female of the Species(2006)
NOVELLAS
The Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976)
I Lock My Door upon Myself(1990)
The Rise of Life on Earth(1991)
First Love: A Gothic Tale(1996)
Beasts(2002)
Rape: A Love Story(2003)
ABOUT THE INTRODUCER
ELAINE SHOWALTER is professor emeritus of English at Princeton University, where she taught courses on contemporary fiction, women’s writing, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. The author or editor of eighteen books on English and American literature, she has reviewed contemporary literature and culture both for scholarly journals and for periodicals such as The Guardian Review, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, The Washington Post Book Review, and the Los Angeles Times. Her current project is a literary history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.
JOYCE CAROL OATES AND THE WONDERLAND QUARTET—NOW AVAILABLE FROM THE MODERN LIBRARY IN TRADE PAPERBACK EDITIONS.
A GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS is the story of a family of migrant farm-workers traveling across the United States, centering on the unforgettable Clara Walpole and her struggle to rise above the poverty line.
“Clara bursts out of her background, surprising, willful, strong, earthy and decisive…I honor Miss Oates’s talent, her courage.”
—The New York Times