Oates' "Where are you going, Where have you been?" as social criticism

After reading Joyce Carol Oates' short story "Where are you going, Where have you been?" I thought that JCO was trying to make a criticism to society. This story written in 1966 talks about a girl named Connie who enjoyed being liked by older men. She would often sexualize herself in order to be attractive to men; she was concerned about her looks, and she liked to take pleasure from other people finding her attractive. It is not until one day a man comes to her house while she is home alone and threatens her with hurting her family if she doesn't come with him, that Connie was watching the consequences of her behavior.

It is described throughout the story that Connie has a lot of conflicts with her family, she doesn't get along with her sister who is seen by her parents as "the perfect daughter", she fights with her mom a lot, her dad works too much and when he would take them to the mall, he wouldn't ask what she and her friend did, showing that he didn't really cared about what her daughter was doing.

I believe that JCO issued a situation that is fairly common in today's society, children living in dysfunctional families which make them have certain issues such as Connie's behavior. Being constantly criticized by her mother, the lack of attention of her father, and being like the "black sheep" of the family, made her look for acceptance in her peers, which would make her too sexual even though she was only fifteen. As a consequence of her behavior, she gets between the eyes of a pervert called Arnold Friend who let her not choice but to come with him to, possibly, rape her. 

If we analyze Connie's situation, she was only looking for the acceptance she didn't get at home, and probably her dysfunctional family is the one to blame for the way she acted. It is important to understand that had she been understood and accepted by her family, she would have not have this issues with herself, even though anyone can be a victim of perverts like Arnold.

"Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn't much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. "Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you're so pretty?" she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.

"Why don't you keep your room clean like your sister? How've you got your hair fixed—what the hell stinks? Hair spray? You don't see your sister using that junk."

Alcoholism

I was listening to the radio when Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” started to be played.  I inevitably made the connection with Carver’s stories: the both portray alcohol abuse as a way of evading meaning. In her song, Amy Winehouse denies the possibility of treatment and sees alcohol as the only way of coping with life: alcohol is losing control, is madness but is her refugee and she does not want to abandon it. Therefore, she becomes completely detached from existence. In fact, Amy makes direct reference to death when naming Mr. Hathaway who was a soul singer that killed himself:

“There's nothing you can teach me
That I can't learn from Mr. Hathaway”

Furthermore, it is quite interesting that both artists where immerse in alcoholism when becoming famous, and that somehow alcohol triggered on the one hand her music and on the other hand his writing. Somehow, on their way to avoid meaning, they actually gave meaning to their careers.
Indeed I read an interview a couple of days ago in which he talks about the story that inspired “Why don´t you dance?”:

INTERVIEWER
Could you say something about one of my favorite stories in your most recent collection? Where did the idea for “Why Don't You Dance?” originate?

CARVER
I was visiting some writer friends in Missoula back in the mid-1970s. We were all sitting around drinking and someone told a story about a barmaid named Linda who got drunk with her boyfriend one night and decided to move all of her bedroom furnishings into the backyard. They did it, too, right down to the carpet and the bedroom lamp, the bed, the nightstand, everything. There were about four or five writers in the room, and after the guy finished telling the story, someone said, “Well, who's going to write it?” I don't know who else might have written it, but I wrote it. Not then, but later. About four or five years later, I think. I changed and added things to it, of course. Actually, it was the first story I wrote after I finally stopped drinking.

Don’t be sympathetic but empathic

I thought that after reading The Hours, connectedness was no longer a word I was going to see again in the short stories. I know. I was wrong.  While reading “A small, good thing” I realized that this was no over.  In this magnificent story I could appreciate how we are all connected; no matter what we try and make an enormous effort to connect with everyone, yet we are all separate from each other.

In the story we can see that Ann and Howard are connected through the pain after their child’s accident, and how they are also connected to the baker after telling him that Scott died. This is product of empathy; a feeling we develop throughout our lives.

I found a video that explains perfectly what being empathic is, but first I want to make clear what sympathy and empathy are:

Sympathy implies recognizing that someone’s suffering while empathy is sharing someone’s suffering. So, empathy is characterized as a deeper emotional experience: putting into one’s shoes.

The Power of Empathy

Empathy is fully represented in this short story, for the characters try to understand one another and even if they cannot really do it, they try their best anyway. For instance, despite having no child, the baker understands the grieve Scott’s parents are living after losing their kid. He sees them incredibly sad, so he opens himself up and tells them more about himself. He is able to take the parent’s perspective by being empathic. He connects with something in himself that shares the same feeling the parents are suffering.

Another moment of sympathy that I liked in the story was when Ann comes across an African American family that was waiting for news about their child. They thought she was a nurse and asked her about the condition of their boy, though she said she was just looking for the elevator. After that, they were no longer interested in her, yet she remained there and talked about her son. Minutes past by and she wished she could talk more with them; people who were in the same kind of waiting. In the following lines we see another important episode of empathy in the story:

She was afraid, and they were afraid. They had that in common. She would have liked to have said something else about the accident, told them more about Scotty, that it had happened on the day of his birthday, Monday, and that he was still unconscious. Yet she didn't know how to begin. She stood looking at them without saying anything more.

 To finish, I would like to sum up all this with a sentence that is in the video I am sharing with you: “Rarely can a response make something better. What makes something better is CONNECTION.”

The tip of the iceberg. (Daniel Riquelme)

While seeing a picture of an iceberg we are amaze of the fact that a huge piece of ice is floating on the sea’s surface. But the reality is that we don’t know what is below the surface, and certainly it is bigger and more complex than what we can see.

In this sense, the short stories by Raymond Carver are written based on this phenomenon. This style was originally settled by Ernest Hemingway who focused his writing on the superficial aspects of the story narrated. Both Hemingway and Carver meant the reader to find out what were the main and crucial themes treated in the story that were not written explicitly. So the idea is that the background of the story is omitted while the narration tells in a superficial way what’s happening at that moment, this led to a minimalistic style.

Look at this quotation of Carver’s short story Why don’t you dance?

"Those people over there, they're watching," she said.

"It's okay," the man said. "It's my place," he said.

"Let them watch," the girl said.

"That's right," the man said. "They thought they'd seen everything over here”

The man finished the dialogue with this phrase “They thought they’d seen everything over here”. In the story this make sense in the way that people is always judging from what they see, probably they just saw a scene, a picture of that moment and think that they can have a say on other’s life. On the other hand, we as readers are the observers; we are reading and creating an image of what is happening in the story. Nevertheless, the story was written in a way that we think that it is superficial and even senseless. But, there’s a lot more in these stories. Dreams, tragedies, love, opportunities, and misfortune bias the characters’ behavior. As a result, we have to go beyond the casual dialogue, the descriptions and the hard facts that are presented trying to answer why did that happened and make connections between the lexis used, the facts and the mood of the characters and with those clues try to crack the meaning, the real theme, the background of the story.

Now try to think on how many things surrounding us are like this tip of the iceberg, and how many times we avoid looking beneath the surface to see what is really happening. It’s not only about literature; it’s our life, and the things we lost when we support them in facts. There’s a lot more waiting for you.  

Daniel Riquelme. 

What really matters...

After having read Carver’s Why don’t you dance? for the first time,  I had to read it again because even though it is a short story, there’s a lot implied (or understated). The first instance we are introduced to is when the old man is taking the furniture out of his house in order to sell it in his front yard. As seen in class, it is interesting the fact that this man is selling even his bed, which clearly reflects not only a proof of him without a partner, but also a loss of intimacy as everyone can have access to his private life. By the same token, the furniture demonstrates the way human beings are connected to stuff, in this case furniture, and that there’s a process of devaluation (personal stuff should not have a price). According to the previous idea, we can infer that he is alone and furniture maybe reminds him of his past life (and that is why he wants to get rid of it). Then, a young couple arrives at this man’s front yard in order to buy furniture for their apartment. Here it can be appreciated that there’s a duality as the old man is finishing a moment of his life and the couple is starting one, yet they want everything cheaper. This desire also anticipates what would probably happen with them: they are not going to last much. Later on, there’s an experience that provides a break from routine which is the dancing part. While dancing, they are supposed to express themselves, though communication is not present.

I consider that this image reflects a moment to remember and value for every couple. This mere hand-holding can be something very common, but from my point of view, it symbolizes love and compromise between two people. Additionally, it should be considered as a reminder, that is, what allows a couple to remember what their union means and to dream of a future full of unforgettable experiences.

In conclusion, people should always give value to things, though this value must not be materialistic as furniture; on the contrary, this value has to be a more personal one that let people remember what really matters: to live.

Joyce Carol Oates at Home

Writer Joyce Carol Oates at Home

From all these classes, the one about Oates was one of the most interesting authors I have heard so far. The way the professor presented Oates, her achievements, novels, short stories,  all her work just  let me with the feeling of knowing more about her.

 That is why, I have been trying to find and gather information about Joyce Carol Oates. I looked for biographies and what some other authors say about her work. I found very great publications about her work -which I will post later. But suddenly,  I thought it would be a good idea to look something on Youtube. That is how I got to this video. To know about her in HER own words was way better to have read a four-page essay about herself and her thoughts about her own work. To have heard that three-minute video is worth doing it.

The way words come out of her mind and the pasion she has of writing are amazing. Her thoughs  about life and herself are aslo remarkable. I recommend everybody to watch it and hear-and-watch by your own how amazing she is! 

"Blurred Lines" in The Hours.

http://candef.blogspot.com/2008/07/hours-by-michael-cunningham.html

I have found this interesting blog that shows us some of the techniques used by Michael Cunningham in his writing of The Hours. Through my reading I realized that many of the things said by the blogger were covered for us in class. What took my attention was the importance given to the blurred boundaries in the book, and how Cunningham used this tool in order to create this world that overlaps and creates fiction from reality, and a reality from fiction.

The intertextuality in the books is mainly represented by Clarissa, which is the main character in Mrs. Dalloway, even though in this book she lives a completely different reality. The boundaries become more blurred when we find Virginia Woolf character inside the book. She is the author and creator of Mrs. Dalloway, but in The Hours she is presented at the same level of his characters: Clarissa and Richard. The reality that we found in Woolf is portrayed as fiction in the book, so she becomes a fictional character that comes from reality to make it fictional. In the same aspect, we have Richard Dalloway, who is a character of Woolf’s and Cunningham’s novels, writing a book inside a book, using one of the characters in the book (Clarissa Vaughan) as a fictional character in his own book; so, this took us again to a limbo between fiction and reality, because inside the book they are fictional characters who are making fictional characters of themselves. The case of Laura Brown and her connection with Mrs. Dalloway is also interesting, but I think this does not demonstrate the blurred boundaries I was talking about as well as the other relationships in the book.  Inside the blog you could find some quotes from the book that can help you to understand the intertextuality and the connections between the characters in both books.

I thought these demonstrations of the not defined lines in the book would be really helpful for us to have a better understanding of the book and also to understand Michael Cunningham’s vision of literature, taking into account the different techniques he used to get us into the book and make his fiction more real for the readers. 

NOTE: The blog is written in Spanish first and then in English. I think you should read it in English!