“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.)
