From Violence To Tolerance:the Transcendent Vision Of JCO

Joyce Carol Oates, whom John Updike called America’s most extraordinary "woman of letters," is one of the most honored and respected authors in contemporary American literature. In her speech accepting the National Book Award for them1970, Oates concluded that in her novels, she had tried to "give a shape to certain obsessions of mid-century-Americans-a confusion of love and money, of the categories of public and private experience, of a demonic urge1sense around me, an urge to violence as the answer to all problems, an urge to self-annihilation, suicide, the ultimate experience and the ultimate surrender." Although this statement was made in Oates’s early career, the concepts of love, money and violence have permeated almost all of her following works.Indeed, Oates’s works repeatedly portray frightening violence:murder, suicide, rape, riots, arson, and beatings and nearly all her characters, regardless of background, suffer intensely the conflicts and contradictions. However, Oates is not a mere chronicler of American society. Instead, Oates has continuously been sympathetic with her hero and expects her audience to share this sympathy. These "tragic" heroes are also "heroic" because they are often gifted with the audacity to undertake certain actions. Though they fail, though they may not personally transcend their fates, they are often full of endurance and are therefore heroic in their ritualistic enactment of the common human dilemma.In Oates’s works, what seems to be tragic or violent for many readers is rather in some way intended to justify the sufferings that her characters have experienced. Instead of expressing the naturalistic spirit of helplessness or hopelessness, the real aim of Oates’s art is to raise the consciousness of these ordinary people to the realization of the destruction of their lives and help them "get beyond the dazzling complexities of beings to the transcendent/imminent Being itself (NN35). In other words, the articulate moral position of showing possible ways of "transcending" rather than "exposing" nightmarish situations explains Oates’s real artistic stance.It is true that many of Oates’s works explore, in quite different contexts, the inevitability of violence, but the potential creative initiative of Oates is more powerfully to show how this inevitability of suffering can be tolerated or transcended. Ellen G. Friedman’s conclusion that "the idea that one cannot transcend the conditions of one’s existence, is central to Oates’s vision" should be reevaluated right now. for the real purpose of Oates’s artistic creation may be that one is born not to suffer but to negotiate with suffering, to choose or invent forms to accommodate or transcend it.Oates is a "phenomenon," a writer of extraordinary productivity. In a career that began in1963with the collection of short stories By the North Gate, through2012. Oates has published fifty-seven novels and novellas, thirty-five volumes of short stories, eight collections of poetry, nine books of plays, and fourteen collections of non-fiction ranging from literary criticism to a book of boxing."A future archaeologist equipped with nothing more than Oates’s collected works could piece together postwar America," Henry Gates concluded at the beginning of the1990s.While Oates is still occasionally depicted as a writer of bleak, violent novels that stem from a "nightmare vision" of modern America, she could never be accurately called a pessimistic writer. Instead, Oates would like to see far more of readers attempt to comprehend the roots of destructive behavior rather than merely condemn it. Her works arguably lead to explicit affirmation of values, pointing toward another, better, more perfect way of living. Oates explains that serious writers write in order to "illuminate the world" and to single out meanings from the great confusion of the time, or of our lives. She states that it is just because the hero at the center of tragedy exists so that we as readers may witness, in his destruction, the reversal of our private lives and transcend the sordid banalities of this world. Surely art "does not reproduce what we see," but "makes us see," and the function of literary criticism is not simply to dissect either cruelly or reverentially, to attack or to glorify, but to illustrate how the work of a significant artist helps to explain his or her era and our own.With the analysis of the characters’resilient efforts in transcending the deficiencies of the chaotic world through money, erotic love, violence and tolerance as reflected in Oates’s novels and critical essays, this study is aimed at arguing that what appears as "disorder, instability, and frequent madness" to many critics may exactly be the starting point to understand Oates’s creative vision of transcendence. The "violence" that critics have often noticed in Oates’s works may be the "means,’ rather than the "end" of her creative activity. Not unlike the classical works written by other great authors, the real intention of the seemingly violent scenes in Oates’s works is positive, rather than negative, aiming at the arousal of the consciousness of the readers to understand the complexities of the real world and integrate themselves inside it. All through her creative career, Oates has constantly believed that people can invent forms to accommodate with suffering and finally get through the difficult situations of life so as to reach love and transcendence.