Joyce carol oates why violent

The book is an acutely observed and melancholy portrait of grief and upheaval for which Oates, 81, a giant of American literature, did not have to look far for inspiration. Last year, she was widowed after her second husband, the photographer Charles Gross, died from cancer. His death came 11 years after the loss of her first husband, Raymond Smith, to whom she had been married for 48 years, after a bout of pneumonia.

Yet, here I am. You find a way to survive. For Oates, survival has been made possible by work. Barely a year goes by without Oates publishing a novel, novella, a book of poetry or a short story collection.

She is not sure how many books she has written, but it is well over In Night. We reserve the right to remove any content at any time from this Community, including without limitation if it violates the Community Standards.

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Book reviews. Autobibliography by Rob Doyle: A funny trawl though the 52 books that made him. The Lyrics: Great Beatles songs have, somehow, become even greater. New poetry. Aggression, discontent, rebellious urges, a sense of injustice - these have nothing to do with the outer world, but only with the sufferer; and if the sufferer is a woman, by definition a creature characterized by envy, how is it possible to take her seriously?

The territory of the female artist should be the subjective, the domestic. She is allowed to be ''charming,'' ''amusing,'' ''delightful. Her skills should be those of a conscientious seamstress. The serious writer, after all, bears witness. The serious writer restructures ''reality'' in the service of his or her art, and surely hopes for a unique esthetic vision and some felicity of language; but reality is always the foundation, just as the alphabet, in whatever motley splendor, is the foundation of ''Finnegans Wake.

Hence such an artist's contempt for ''real'' worlds and the sentimental hope for a forcible remaking of the universe - as if there were not a universe in existence beyond the artist's control. So the serious male writer is allowed his vision and takes as his rightful subject a world as vast as Dostoyevsky's Russia, or Melville's oceans or Faulkner's ''postage stamp of earth'' in Mississippi.

One does not inquire of them, ''Why is your writing so violent? If the lot of womankind has not yet widely diverged from that romantically envisioned by our Moral Majority and by the late Adolf Hitler ''Kirche, Kinder, Kuchen'' , the lot of the woman writer has been just as severely circumscribed. Events do not build toward a climax, or accumulate tension and meaning, or illuminate each other, but seem simply to happen in the random and insignificant way of real life.

It could just as easily have been the other way around, and the reader comes to feel rather lost in a succession of lurid and dreary events that might have come from the pages of the Daily News. Moreover, the style reflects a certain attitude toward the characters that deprives their misfortunes of context and significance.

That was that. A change, a different man. A new man. Yet the result is only that things happen, and it is hard to care much about the people they happen to. The sentences become heavy and tautological, inching forward through thick clusters of elements in apposition:. Jules had felt it, their sympathy—women at their best, their most healthy, giving sympathy to a man, their eyes growing moist with love for the death of a man.

He felt that, he understood. This sympathy women drew up from the deepest, most private part of their beings, from a frightening sense of doom, of mortality, and now it was being directed toward his uncle—a man without worth, a failure! This manner too comes to seem empty and oppressive. The reader is told that the author did a great deal of research for this novel, and that it is based mainly on the recollections of the real Maureen Wendall.

Just before he kills the policeman, Jules is described riding through the burning streets of Detroit with a gun in his hands:. Jules felt blood running down his face. He thought of blood. He thought of two girls in his childhood, twins, who had been stabbed to death along a city block, one of them struck down in front of her house and the other chased and stabbed so that blood ran in thin streams along the sidewalk, and the next morning everyone had come out to look at the blood.

In the frenzied pounding of his blood he felt something heavy emerging, a solid, violent certainty. The theme of blood is established by the obtrusive device of the flashback to childhood, and sustained by insistent repetition. The reader feels a point being made about the steady violence of American life, and the point plainly comes from the author, not from Jules.