Quote of the Day (Joyce Carol Oates, Imagining the Climate-Change Apocalypse)

“When they moved from West Seventy-Eighth street and Columbus Avenue to Hazelton-on-Hudson, in 1991, the air in the Hudson Valley was cleaner, the sky was a brighter and clearer blue–Luce is certain. The white oaks and birches did not shed their leaves prematurely, in September. That maddening chemical odor wasn't borne on the wind, and the soil on Vedders Hill seemed more solid, substantial. Mudslides were unknown, as were firestorms. An excess of pollen was a far more serious problem than a depletion of ozone was. True, there were reports of acid rain in the Adirondacks, and the Hudson River had been heavily polluted, like Lakes Ontario and Erie, upstate, but the media didn't make a fuss over it, and social media, that vehicle for channelling outrage, did not yet exist. Everyone sailed, canoed, kayaked on the Hudson River. Fished! The river's steely beauty prevailed.” — Joyce Carol Oates, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” The New Yorker, Oct. 14, 2019

This past weekend, on Meet the Press, the panelists, asked to list the most important stories of the last decade, named climate change as number two. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who listed it as number one, explained her reasoning: “What are they going to say 50 years from now? And am I going to be right, 50 years from now?...If we're not taking a leadership role in this, the generations to come will know that we failed.”

That failure hangs heavily over “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which takes its title from the infamous 1741 sermon by Jonathan Edwards sermon. But, while the Congregationalist minister conjured up a personal and collective calling to account for assorted sins, the prolific fiction writer Joyce Carol Oates imagines an environmental catastrophe visited upon her characters, Luce and Andrew.

Not only is the circle of friends of this New York couple decimated by cancers before their time, but the two of them, gripped by confusion, anxiety and fear, grow more emotionally distant from each other, unable to express their emotions to each other. At the climax of the story, death is present not only outside the couple’s home, in the form of a raging firestorm, but inside, through the stricken fellow musicians in Luce’s “Little Quartet”: “Wheelchairs, walkers, canes. Little knitted caps on (bald) heads. A contingent of chemotherapy’s walking wounded.”

“Accusing others of ‘catastrophizing,’ even as the world is disintegrating and one’s own health has become tenuous, is a form of denial in which most/many of us indulge daily,” Oates explained in an interview with The New Yorker. Through fiction, she brings readers face to face with our ongoing individual and collective failure of environmental responsibility. 

The astonishingly prolific Oates has occasionally written horror stories, but I can’t imagine that she has written anything more terrifying than this grim tale. It gives powerful narrative form to the epic ecological change noted by J. R. McNeill in Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century: 

“With our new powers we banished some historical constraints on health and population, food production, energy use, and consumption generally….[I]n  banishing them we invited other constraints in the form of the planet's capacity to absorb the wastes, by-products, and impacts of our actions. These latter constraints had pinched occasionally in the past, but only locally. By the end of the twentieth century they seemed to restrict our options globally.”

(Photograph of Ms. Oates ©Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 4.0 at the 2014 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, Oct. 25, 2014.)

Quote of the Day (Joyce Carol Oates, on Memoirs and Elderly Parents)

“Nothing is more offensive [in a memoir] than an adult child exposing his or her elderly parents to the appalled fascination of strangers.”— Joyce Carol Oates, The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age (2015)

Born on this day 80 years ago in rural Lockport, NY, Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most astonishingly prolific writers in American literature. I’m not talking about just the 40 novels she has produced, but all the other genres in which she has dabbled: short stories, plays, essays, poetry, and yes, memoirs. 

At her peak, in the 1960s and 1970s, Oates was coming out with three books a year. And all of this while teaching at Princeton University! It’s enough to make someone like me, who feels lucky at points even to post daily on my blog, deeply envious.

I still vividly remember the Oates cover story in Newsweek back in December 1972, an era when an author achieving that distinction in the newsweekly or rival Time constituted a very big deal indeed. Back then, Newsweek critic Walter Clemons hailed her as “perhaps the most significant novelist to have emerged in the United States in the last decade.” 

It is hard to believe that she already had a decade of writing under her belt at that point. It’s equally hard to think of her still sticking to her routine (and even putting her thoughts out on Twitter!) at an age when most people have slackened off.

The issue raised by Oates in the "Quote of the Day" led me to look up her own parental status, to see if she might have had a child who might reveal family secrets. She does not, though she has addressed, on her Twitter feed, her childlessness: "Often asked why no children  and now I have the answer: to be spared ‘math anxiety’ helping w/ homework.”

(Photograph ©Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 4.0 at the 2014 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, Oct. 25, 2014.)

Quote of the Day (Joyce Carol Oates, on How Music is ‘The Supreme Solace’)

“Music is the supreme solace because it is so much more. It is the spiritual counterpoint to the world's cacophony, essential as a heartbeat." —Novelist Joyce Carol Oates, The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age (2015)

(Photograph ©Larry D. Moore CC BY-SA 4.0 at the 2014 Texas Book Festival, Austin, Texas, Oct. 25, 2014.)

 

Quote of the Day (V.S. Pritchett, on Balzac, ‘Novelist of Our Appetites’)

“Balzac is the novelist of our appetites, obsessions and our idees fixes, but his great gift—it seems to me—is his sense of the complexity of the human situation. He had both perceptions, one supposes, from his peasant origins, for among peasants, he was fond of saying, the idée fixe is easily started; and their sense of circumstance overpowers all other considerations in their lives. A character in Balzac is so variously situated in history, in money, in family, class and in his type to begin with; but on top of this Balzac's genius was richly inventive in the field least exploited by the mass of novelists: the field of probability. It is very hard to invent probabilities. This simply means that Balzac knew his people as few novelists ever know their characters.”—V.S. Pritchett, “Honore de Balzac,” in The Pritchett Century: A Selection of the Best, selected by Oliver Pritchett (1997)

Like Theodore Roosevelt, Honoré de Balzac--born on this day in Tours, France, in 1799—was turbocharged by epic amounts of coffee consumed through the day. But, while the American devoted much of the “strenuous life” he advocated into the outdoors, the Frenchman spent much of his indoors—wooing women, hatching foolhardy get-rich-quick schemes, dodging creditors.

Oh, yes—and creating an astonishing body of fictional work. In our time, John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates have been acclaimed (or damned) for being prolific. But even with the two extra decades of life that each enjoyed, Balzac still probably has them both beat. With 93 novels and stories in his opus, Comédie humaine, he is an inspiration for those of us with a rage to write—and a standing rebuke concerning why we don’t match that output.

Pritchett, a fiction writer of no small gifts himself, is very shrewd in noting that Balzac was not a mere documentarian of social customs of his time, but someone who understood his characters’ compulsions because he shared them in abundance. Two writers who stand far apart in time and sensibility, Henry James and Tom Wolfe, have claimed him as a literary forbear. 

His work teems partly because he tries to account for all levels of a French urban society bursting at the seams with new-found wealth and ambition. In novels such as Pere Goriot, Cousin Bette, Cousin Pons, Eugenie Grandet and The Bureaucrats, he depicted with exactingly painful personal knowledge the romantic striving for all that wealth and status can provide—and the often ugly means and ends to which his characters reduced themselves to achieve it.