A ‘Fourth Way’ to Tell the Story

Acknowledgements

Similes within the semantic field of gestation and motherhood are very common when someone writes a book. Any writer—of any kind—tends to consider his or her book like their child, and I am no different, especially because some of the themes of this book are no foreign to the idea of motherhood, and because this ‘child’ was the product of a very long gestation.

An African proverb claims that it takes a village to raise a child, and in this respect, I was probably a lucky writer/mother, because I had more than one to sustain me and this creature: several villages scattered around the world, whose people gave a significant contribution to my task.

I would like to start by thanking the University of Gdańsk and the Institute of English and American Studies for the huge support given to me and this book. My gratitude goes to our Head, Prof. Mirosława Modrzewska, our lighthouse, guide, and irreplaceable problem-solver; to Prof. Arkadiusz Misztal, exceptional scholar, teacher, and person of immense empathy without whom many things, including this book, would not have been possible; to Prof. Marta Koval for her ability to always having the right words, the right suggestion, and for being a great point of reference; to Prof. Jean Ward, for being the first one reading the manuscript and a provider of precious advice.

My ‘Polish’ village would not be complete if I did not mention Prof. Marek Wilczyński, editor of the series on Transatlantic Studies in British and North American Culture, not only for kindly selecting my book as part of the series, but also for his very uplifting words which, coming from an authority in my field of studies, gave me the necessary confidence to pursue the project.

The second village, the American one, contributed to the first stages of development of this book, as most of the research for it was done at the University of Yale, specifically at the Sterling Memorial Library and the Bass Library. Everything there was made easy and doable by the staff of the libraries, in particular by Mrs. Viviana McHugh, who was tremendously helpful and friendly.

The core of the Yale experience was undoubtedly represented by one single afternoon spent in the office of the late Prof. Harold Bloom discussing my ideas and absorbing all the words and teachings he provided. Every page of this book bears his virtual mark and, in a certain way, is dedicated to his memory and the great and venerable figure he was.

Lastly, my gratitude in the American village goes to Dr. Nicole Leibold. Even if we do not a share a single research interest, talking to her was always a powerful ←7 | 8→intellectual fuel, and probably the lack of all our conversations and adventures would have changed the final outcome of my project.

Introduction

This work stems from a reflection on the relationship between Joyce Carol Oates’s writing and the news. Long before she published the novels that will be analyzed here, her tendency to rework American news stories in a fictional form, especially those concerning criminal or violent acts, had appeared in some short stories¹ and in the novella The Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976).² Accused more than once of putting too much violence into her work, the author replied: “when people say there is too much violence in Joyce Carol Oates … what they are saying is there is too much reality in life” (Milazzo 89). Elsewhere she declared “I wish the world were a better place, but I wouldn’t be honest as a writer if I ignored the actual conditions around me” (Wagner xii).

An incident that occurred in 1971 and was reported by Oates’s biographer, Greg Johnson, validates these statements by the author. The novel Wonderland, the fourth in the Wonderland Quartet (a tetralogy on the social classes in America) had been published that year. It opens with the escape by the teenager Jesse from the massacre that his father has carried out on the entire family, including his pregnant wife, towards a life that will be devoted to Medicine and the study of the brain. In February of 1972, Oates read an article about an identical slaughter, where one of the children had managed to save himself from the fury of his father. Oates had already been labeled ‘a gothic writer’ and “such coincidences showed that her imagination was simply responding to the violent reality of America” (Johnson 179). Her reaction to this label was reported in a Time interview: “Gothicism, whatever it is, is not a literary tradition so much as a fairly realistic assessment of modern life” (Johnson 179).

When Oates began her activity as a writer (her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, was published in 1964), a new trend in journalism was spreading in the United States: the use of the devices and rhetorical instruments of fiction to tell real stories, thus casting off the shackles of traditional journalism. This trend was ←9 | 10→labeled ‘literary journalism,’ ‘new journalism’ and ‘literary nonfiction.’ Thomas B. Connery defined it as “a third way to tell the story” (6). It is a third way, after journalism and fiction, to record, report and interpret the facts. Literary journalism contains all the factual elements of conventional journalism, but focuses more “on presenting impressions, details, and descriptions not central to the typical conventional newspaper report.” It tells not simply the facts, but “the ‘feel’ of the facts” (Connery 6).