In a 1981 New York Times essay confronting readers who wondered, time and time again, why her work was "so violent," Joyce Carol Oates took scabrous exception to the idea that female writers must confine themselves to traditionally female topics and models: "The territory of the female artist should be the subjective, the domestic. ... Her models should not be Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky but one or another woman writer." But Oates also illustrates a certain ambivalence to the canonical and male models she cites as her own, including Faulkner and the Greek dramatists. Oates doesn't seem to have any problem with a canon per se, or even a canon with a singular focus on the traditionally male topics of "[w]ar, rape, murder and the more colorful minor crimes"; the trouble is that the Western canon almost by definition excludes her because of her gender.
Now, at 70, Oates has reached the age where many writers become preoccupied with their place in the firmament. Up until her latest book of short stories, Wild Nights!, her fiction hadn't focused on writerly concern with literary immortality, instead carrying on the project of her entire life: publishing a book or three a year of varied quality (her 2004 novel, The Falls, I found almost impossible to get through, and the thrillers written under the pseudonym Lauren Kelly are overwrought and empty; whereas 1999's Broke Heart Blues ranks up there with We Were the Mulvaneys) but unvarying themes -- yes, tragic violence and its aftermath, but also the loss of innocence, the possibility of redemption, and the unending pathologies of the nuclear family.
Wild Nights!, on the other hand, engages straightforwardly with canonization, serving up simultaneous homage and nose-tweaking to four members of the male tradition (Edger Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway) and one member of the female (Emily Dickinson -- the title comes from a Dickinson poem). Each story in Wild Nights! tells of a famous writer's last days -- or, in some cases, life after death. Oates inhabits the dead writers' styles and obsessions, producing five more-or-less successful mash-ups that express an ambivalence about the mostly male canon while also stubbornly lodging her in it, if only as the mischievous eyes behind the mask.
It's a fun gambit, but yields uneven results. The first, and also the best story, "Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House," riffs off a manuscript fragment of Poe's last short story, also called "The Light-House," which describes a man living in a mysterious lighthouse with his dog Neptune; Oates's version describes Poe himself living in a lighthouse in Chile (the first entry is dated October 7, 1849, the day of Poe's real-life death in Baltimore) with his dog Mercury. But the plot of Oates's story is actually closer to another Poe story, "M.S. Found in a Bottle," which purports to be the diary of a shipwrecked passenger picked up by a strange, unearthly vessel on which he eventually meets his destruction.
Like in "M.S.," the entries in "Poe Posthumous" move from the quotidian ("So far I seem to be in very good spirits, and eager to begin my Light-House duties") to the increasingly fragmented and hallucinatory. Poe is haunted by the memory of his true love, Virginia Clemm, as well by the monstrous amphibians that begin to creep out of hiding places and into his enclosure: "Its head is as large as a man's & its snout pointed, with rows of shark-like teeth; its up-right, translucent ears humanoid; its tail of moderate length, to be picked up like a dog's, or to trail off at half-mast, defiled with filth." Because of convincingly Poe-esque passages like this, and the thrilling, eerie ending, "Poe Posthumous" works extremely well as a tribute, but even independent of Poe's legacy it is enthralling and wonderfully odd.
The Emily Dickinson story, "EDickinsonRepliluxe," works well too, although it has far less to do with Dickinson than "Poe Posthumous" has to do with Poe. In some American future, the RepliLuxe -- "a brilliantly rendered manikin empowered by a computer program that is the distillation of the original individual," frequently a famous baseball star, writer, or former president -- becomes a popular commodity, sort of like an extremely advanced Tamagotchi. A childless couple buys an Emily Dickinson RepliLuxe: "She'd be quiet, for one thing," the husband says. The wife, herself a frustrated poet, develops a nervous, possessive relationship with the thing, while the husband becomes increasingly frustrated with it, first insisting that they treat it like a robot and finally trying to violate it in an extremely non-robot-like fashion.
Unfortunately, the structure of "EDickinsonRepliluxe" doesn't require Oates to imitate Dickinson's style; it's intriguing to imagine Oates, with her breathy, cumulative sentences and many exclamations, channeling Dickinson like she channels Poe. Those two writers seem far closer to Oates's own proclivities than do Mark Twain, Henry James, or Ernest Hemingway, which may be part of the reason why the rest of the collection falls short.
The Twain entry, "Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish 1906," is sort of an epistolary romance between the aging Samuel Clemens and one of his young, female admirers. The imaginary "Angelfish" is drawn from Clemens's very creepy real-life "Aquarium Club," a group of preadolescent female "pets" Clemens collected in his later years for grandfatherly advice and head-pats. James, in "The Master at St. Bartholomew's Hospital 1914-1916," is shown falling in love with one of the wounded soldiers he helped care for in World War I London. And "Papa at Ketchum 1961" describes in great detail Hemingway's last meandering crazy days before his suicide.
Those stories seem to go together -- all barely fictionalized accounts of unexplored, prurient aspects of the subject's life: Twain's interest in very young girls, James's homosexuality, and the high ratio of "cunt" to all other words in Hemingway's inner monologues. But, unlike the other two, or the rest of the collection, the Hemingway story is markedly hostile, a screed against both the writer and the man. Oates's Hemingwayese is ridiculously bad: "On safari, he'd always brought a woman. You needed a woman after the excitement of the kill. You needed whiskey, and you needed food, and you needed a woman. Except if you were too sodden-drunk for a woman." One pictures the waspish Oates mugging behind a giant fake Papa beard -- but it's not praise, it's a burial.
As if to soften the attack, Oates then puts Hemingway on the couch, assigning him every neurosis from latent homosexuality (from the famous episode where he undressed F. Scott Fitzgerald in a Paris bathroom to reassure him about the size of his penis) to a vagina dentata phobia ("That thing between a woman's legs, inside the softness of the woman's cunt, was a nasty little beak") and generally making very little sense at all with any of it. Altogether, it's a mean, meaningless story, without any of the celebratory fun of "Poe Posthumous" or even the more thoughtful deconstruction of man and myth in "Grandpa Clemens."
Wild Nights! places Oates in a strange relationship to the canon --subverting it while also, in some senses, reaffirming its boundaries : for example, the notion that famous writers are more interesting than nonfamous writers, or nonwriters. With the inventiveness of a story like "Posthumous Poe," she also does something to enlarge those boundaries, playing with canonical expectations in a way that embellishes Poe's world. With "Papa at Ketchum," however, she merely deflates, leaving us with nothing. Oates, by this point, should be sure enough of her own stature to avoid this sort of lazy clowning.
