Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

06/03/2024

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“I don't accept charges that I am unduly violent in my writing”, Joyce Carol Oates says. “Most of my novels and stories are explorations of the contemporary world interpreted in a realist mode, from what might be called a tragic and humanistic viewpoint.” (Contemporary Literature) Yet looking at a few of Oates’ preoccupations, violence is everywhere. She writes well on boxing, with fine essays on Mike Tyson and Mohammad Ali (On Boxing), on an apparent murder (American Appetites) and on gang rape (Rape, A Love Story). Her take on Marilyn Monroe in Blonde led Mary Gaitskill to say: “she has brought Monroe to life more viscerally than I have yet seen, making the reader feel the extraordinary strength and intelligence that coexisted with the slutty, manipulative allure, the in-turned rage of an ultra-femme victim.” (Exploring Fictions) 

    However, Oates is often interested in what is implicit within the explicit: seeing nuance where others might wish for the categorical. In Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Oates seems as fascinated by the family dynamic as the potentially abusive one that develops between a fifteen-year-old girl and a man twice her age. Connie wants to be all grown up and revel in her prettiness that she sees her mother trying to dampen her down. Connie “knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother has been pretty once too, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.” Connie feels there are two Connies — one for home and one for anywhere but home. “Everything about her had two sides to it…her walk that could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head.” 

   It isn’t that Connie is falsely confident nor is she putting on a performance. Oates proposes that this is the reality of an attractive teenage girl who is in some ways already grown-up and in others still a child. The story hinges on the polar figures of the mother who insists that Connie is still a young teenager, and Arnold Friend, who sees her as old enough to be his lover. Connie’s resistance to parental authority is so evident as to let Arnold appear initially interesting: he is someone who sees in her the fully-formed woman she would wish to see in herself. She might be thinking when he turns up unannounced at her home while the rest of the family is out. “she couldn’t decide if she liked him or if he was just a jerk”, but the doubts in her mind may be associated with the danger he represents next to the dull demands of her nagging mother. Earlier, Connie says to friends “she makes me want to throw up sometimes”, after thinking that her “mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead.” 

   By the conclusion, she might want to reassess that claim, with the tale’s ambivalence towards exactly what happens between Connie and Arnold secondary to a realisation that something has happened to Connie. Arnold says “the place where you came from ain’t there any more, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out. The place you are now — inside your daddy’s house — is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time. You know that and always did know it. You hear me?” That world of domestic oppression the story started with is shown to be very fragile indeed. But what has replaced it has become potentially the reality she is about to face: that "she herself will be dead.” If earlier she wished her mother dead and herself too as an afterthought, by the conclusion Connie may well end up dead as she allows her mother and the rest of her family to live. This is close to the reading Oates offered in 1994 in an afterward to the collection that shares this story’s title, saying: “…Connie makes a decision to accept her fate with dignity and to spare her family’s involvement in this fate…. At the end of the story, Connie transcends her Connie-self—her merely local, teenage, American self. So, confronted with death, we are obliged to be equal to it. Or to try. To merely sexualize the story trivializes it.”

    This makes the story ethical, perhaps even theological, no matter Oates’ ambivalent relationship with faith. When speaking of the similarities between her work and Flannery O’Connor’s, she says, “I used to think that I was influenced by O’Connor. I don’t know that I am really. She’s so religious, and her works have to be seen as religious works with this other rather creepy dimension in the background, whereas in my writing there is only the natural world.” Oates adds: “I think there probably is a great deal there that I’m not owning up to. I know my first novel, With Shuddering Fall, was conceived as a religious work.” (Commonweal) Rather than seeing Oates as a religiously inflected writer as O’Connor clearly was, more useful perhaps to see her finding in faith aspects of the mythical, to see a way of escaping the readily, realistic, ethical and psychological readings that a work like 'Where are You Going...?' attracts. 

      Elaine Showalter, introducing the story, looks at a few of these readings, with one critic viewing the story as an account of serial killer Charles Schmid who drove like Friend here a gold convertible and would pick up high school girls. Another, sees it as a cautionary tale, with Connie going the way of mothers and grandmothers: “she will go into sexual bondage" Greg Johnson says, 'at the hands of a male ‘Friend’.” Another critic, elsewhere, says “she has never had people that she was truly close to because she pushed them all away, and so she has nothing to go on as far as liking Arnold Friend in any sort of way. Due to her insecurity and low self-esteem.” (Inquiries) 

    The second and third are readings we might see as interpretively reductive; the first as useful, but factually reductive. If there is little doubt Oates based her story on Schmid’s case from the same year as the tale, 1966, it was very clearly influenced by a Bob Dylan song from the mid-sixties as well: It’s all Over Now (Baby Blue). (The story is dedicated to Dylan) Are we also reducing the story’s meaning by proposing it rests on the notion of contrary parental figures and that by the conclusion Connie grows up less because she has found an alternative role model to her mother, but more that she has taken responsibility for her life in potential death all the better to protect the family she claims to detest or at least find contemptible? As Connie says early in the tale: “her sister June was twenty-four and still lived at home. She was a secretary in the high school Connie attended, and if that wasn’t bad enough — with her in the same building — she was so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all the time by her mother…” Her dad is generally indifferent: “he didn’t bother talking much to them” but at least he doesn’t pick on her all the time.  

   Oates hardly presents them as a family worth saving, but if our take on the story meets Oates’s that is exactly what she does. Friend knows where her family are and what they are doing, and if she accepts her kidnapped status at the end of the story, it is to save a family she has shown little signs of loving. It isn’t that she abandons her family for the love of a man twice her age all the better to show just how grown up she happens to be. It is more that she grows in the process of taking responsibility for her family’s safety by risking her own. If her gesture seems ungrounded this might be where a certain type of theology comes in. To have shown Connie as a caring, considerate and kind person who adores her family would have made the story more plausible but less troubling and ambiguous. It wouldn’t have led her to question her identity; it would have confirmed it. She would have proved herself equal to the personality she possessed and lived up to herself, in common parlance.  

     Oates offers instead a story that shows her less living up to herself as potentially transcending herself: going beyond the parameters of her personality as though Friend is capable of bringing out the best of her in the worst of himself. This can make things very complicated but it helps us make sense of an ending that sees her watching “herself push the door slowly open as if she were safe back somewhere in the other doorway, watching this body and this head of long hair moving out into the sunlight where Arnold Friend was.” This isn’t a young woman living up to herself but one beside herself, a point exacerbated when Friend says “my sweet little blue-eyed girl"…"that had nothing to do with her brown eyes." 

       A young woman who leaves her family for a charismatic older figure isn’t confusing even if it is ethically troublesome, and a young woman who gets kidnapped by a hoodlum, who says he will hurt her family if she doesn’t come, isn’t so difficult to comprehend. But what if the older figure isn’t conventionally charismatic and the family is one she doesn’t much love, then the two main motivating factors are diluted. 

    This is potentially where the theological comes in but not as an explanation but as an illumination. It could be argued that nobody believes in God, at least not in the way one believes that a good education will get them a job, or that a shop is open till ten at night. In these prosaic instances, like many others, the belief is there until the evidence confirms or contradicts it. There is no such evidence for God, so it would be better perhaps to speak of the belief of the belief in God. Fiction and philosophy have often been drawn to this belief in belief and when interviewed Oates invokes several examples, saying “I was very interested in religious problems when I was writing those early stories, and many of them I know I had imagined as workings out of remarks of Pascal, and also Kafka, and Kierkegaard too. And I would take ideas from these men and try to illustrate them dramatically.” (Commonweal) In Where Are You Going…? we are expected to believe in Connie’s decision rather than find it plausible. If going with Friend isn’t quite a leap of faith, this rests partly on his function as devilish instead of godly. But it seems a leap of some sort as we wouldn’t so describe it if Connie adored her family or if Friend was presented as charming and decent. We might still have had a problem with the age gap but we wouldn’t have had a problem with the plausibility of Connie’s motivations. 

     “My persistent and fundamental belief,” Oates says, “is that art is an expression of the human soul and need not ever, in any circumstances, justify its existence.” (Contemporary Literature) Reducing the story to the readily psychological, moral or factual might make the tale easier to read but makes it more difficult to understand: there would be too large a missing component. The story is instead of an answer, a question, one that wonders what leads a selfish, pretty fifteen-year-old potentially to give her life to a man she doesn’t like and for a family she has shown little love towards and that has shown little love towards her. If the provisional answer it gives may seem inexplicable, at the same time it shouldn’t be unbelievable — as if the purpose of fiction in Oates’ formulation is to make us recognise the inevitability of Connie’s choice without simply reading it through the cause and consequence of a given set of actions. 

     This is a risk because one could say the story doesn’t justify its conclusion (as love for her family or for Friend would) but that is surely part of Oates’s gambit. She risks assuming that the reader will understand the type of literature the story works within and the sort of provocative belief the tale invokes. This is the anagogical level, as O’Connor defined it. “That is the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories readers could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.” (Mystery and Manners)  

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

“I don't accept charges that I am unduly violent in my writing”, Joyce Carol Oates says. “Most of my novels and stories are explorations of the contemporary world interpreted in a realist mode, from what might be called a tragic and humanistic viewpoint.” (Contemporary Literature) Yet looking at a few of Oates’ preoccupations, violence is everywhere. She writes well on boxing, with fine essays on Mike Tyson and Mohammad Ali (On Boxing), on an apparent murder (American Appetites) and on gang rape (Rape, A Love Story). Her take on Marilyn Monroe in Blonde led Mary Gaitskill to say: “she has brought Monroe to life more viscerally than I have yet seen, making the reader feel the extraordinary strength and intelligence that coexisted with the slutty, manipulative allure, the in-turned rage of an ultra-femme victim.” (Exploring Fictions) 

    However, Oates is often interested in what is implicit within the explicit: seeing nuance where others might wish for the categorical. In Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Oates seems as fascinated by the family dynamic as the potentially abusive one that develops between a fifteen-year-old girl and a man twice her age. Connie wants to be all grown up and revel in her prettiness that she sees her mother trying to dampen her down. Connie “knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother has been pretty once too, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.” Connie feels there are two Connies — one for home and one for anywhere but home. “Everything about her had two sides to it…her walk that could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head.” 

   It isn’t that Connie is falsely confident nor is she putting on a performance. Oates proposes that this is the reality of an attractive teenage girl who is in some ways already grown-up and in others still a child. The story hinges on the polar figures of the mother who insists that Connie is still a young teenager, and Arnold Friend, who sees her as old enough to be his lover. Connie’s resistance to parental authority is so evident as to let Arnold appear initially interesting: he is someone who sees in her the fully-formed woman she would wish to see in herself. She might be thinking when he turns up unannounced at her home while the rest of the family is out. “she couldn’t decide if she liked him or if he was just a jerk”, but the doubts in her mind may be associated with the danger he represents next to the dull demands of her nagging mother. Earlier, Connie says to friends “she makes me want to throw up sometimes”, after thinking that her “mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead.” 

   By the conclusion, she might want to reassess that claim, with the tale’s ambivalence towards exactly what happens between Connie and Arnold secondary to a realisation that something has happened to Connie. Arnold says “the place where you came from ain’t there any more, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out. The place you are now — inside your daddy’s house — is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time. You know that and always did know it. You hear me?” That world of domestic oppression the story started with is shown to be very fragile indeed. But what has replaced it has become potentially the reality she is about to face: that "she herself will be dead.” If earlier she wished her mother dead and herself too as an afterthought, by the conclusion Connie may well end up dead as she allows her mother and the rest of her family to live. This is close to the reading Oates offered in 1994 in an afterward to the collection that shares this story’s title, saying: “…Connie makes a decision to accept her fate with dignity and to spare her family’s involvement in this fate…. At the end of the story, Connie transcends her Connie-self—her merely local, teenage, American self. So, confronted with death, we are obliged to be equal to it. Or to try. To merely sexualize the story trivializes it.”

    This makes the story ethical, perhaps even theological, no matter Oates’ ambivalent relationship with faith. When speaking of the similarities between her work and Flannery O’Connor’s, she says, “I used to think that I was influenced by O’Connor. I don’t know that I am really. She’s so religious, and her works have to be seen as religious works with this other rather creepy dimension in the background, whereas in my writing there is only the natural world.” Oates adds: “I think there probably is a great deal there that I’m not owning up to. I know my first novel, With Shuddering Fall, was conceived as a religious work.” (Commonweal) Rather than seeing Oates as a religiously inflected writer as O’Connor clearly was, more useful perhaps to see her finding in faith aspects of the mythical, to see a way of escaping the readily, realistic, ethical and psychological readings that a work like 'Where are You Going...?' attracts. 

      Elaine Showalter, introducing the story, looks at a few of these readings, with one critic viewing the story as an account of serial killer Charles Schmid who drove like Friend here a gold convertible and would pick up high school girls. Another, sees it as a cautionary tale, with Connie going the way of mothers and grandmothers: “she will go into sexual bondage" Greg Johnson says, 'at the hands of a male ‘Friend’.” Another critic, elsewhere, says “she has never had people that she was truly close to because she pushed them all away, and so she has nothing to go on as far as liking Arnold Friend in any sort of way. Due to her insecurity and low self-esteem.” (Inquiries) 

    The second and third are readings we might see as interpretively reductive; the first as useful, but factually reductive. If there is little doubt Oates based her story on Schmid’s case from the same year as the tale, 1966, it was very clearly influenced by a Bob Dylan song from the mid-sixties as well: It’s all Over Now (Baby Blue). (The story is dedicated to Dylan) Are we also reducing the story’s meaning by proposing it rests on the notion of contrary parental figures and that by the conclusion Connie grows up less because she has found an alternative role model to her mother, but more that she has taken responsibility for her life in potential death all the better to protect the family she claims to detest or at least find contemptible? As Connie says early in the tale: “her sister June was twenty-four and still lived at home. She was a secretary in the high school Connie attended, and if that wasn’t bad enough — with her in the same building — she was so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all the time by her mother…” Her dad is generally indifferent: “he didn’t bother talking much to them” but at least he doesn’t pick on her all the time.  

   Oates hardly presents them as a family worth saving, but if our take on the story meets Oates’s that is exactly what she does. Friend knows where her family are and what they are doing, and if she accepts her kidnapped status at the end of the story, it is to save a family she has shown little signs of loving. It isn’t that she abandons her family for the love of a man twice her age all the better to show just how grown up she happens to be. It is more that she grows in the process of taking responsibility for her family’s safety by risking her own. If her gesture seems ungrounded this might be where a certain type of theology comes in. To have shown Connie as a caring, considerate and kind person who adores her family would have made the story more plausible but less troubling and ambiguous. It wouldn’t have led her to question her identity; it would have confirmed it. She would have proved herself equal to the personality she possessed and lived up to herself, in common parlance.  

     Oates offers instead a story that shows her less living up to herself as potentially transcending herself: going beyond the parameters of her personality as though Friend is capable of bringing out the best of her in the worst of himself. This can make things very complicated but it helps us make sense of an ending that sees her watching “herself push the door slowly open as if she were safe back somewhere in the other doorway, watching this body and this head of long hair moving out into the sunlight where Arnold Friend was.” This isn’t a young woman living up to herself but one beside herself, a point exacerbated when Friend says “my sweet little blue-eyed girl"…"that had nothing to do with her brown eyes." 

       A young woman who leaves her family for a charismatic older figure isn’t confusing even if it is ethically troublesome, and a young woman who gets kidnapped by a hoodlum, who says he will hurt her family if she doesn’t come, isn’t so difficult to comprehend. But what if the older figure isn’t conventionally charismatic and the family is one she doesn’t much love, then the two main motivating factors are diluted. 

    This is potentially where the theological comes in but not as an explanation but as an illumination. It could be argued that nobody believes in God, at least not in the way one believes that a good education will get them a job, or that a shop is open till ten at night. In these prosaic instances, like many others, the belief is there until the evidence confirms or contradicts it. There is no such evidence for God, so it would be better perhaps to speak of the belief of the belief in God. Fiction and philosophy have often been drawn to this belief in belief and when interviewed Oates invokes several examples, saying “I was very interested in religious problems when I was writing those early stories, and many of them I know I had imagined as workings out of remarks of Pascal, and also Kafka, and Kierkegaard too. And I would take ideas from these men and try to illustrate them dramatically.” (Commonweal) In Where Are You Going…? we are expected to believe in Connie’s decision rather than find it plausible. If going with Friend isn’t quite a leap of faith, this rests partly on his function as devilish instead of godly. But it seems a leap of some sort as we wouldn’t so describe it if Connie adored her family or if Friend was presented as charming and decent. We might still have had a problem with the age gap but we wouldn’t have had a problem with the plausibility of Connie’s motivations. 

     “My persistent and fundamental belief,” Oates says, “is that art is an expression of the human soul and need not ever, in any circumstances, justify its existence.” (Contemporary Literature) Reducing the story to the readily psychological, moral or factual might make the tale easier to read but makes it more difficult to understand: there would be too large a missing component. The story is instead of an answer, a question, one that wonders what leads a selfish, pretty fifteen-year-old potentially to give her life to a man she doesn’t like and for a family she has shown little love towards and that has shown little love towards her. If the provisional answer it gives may seem inexplicable, at the same time it shouldn’t be unbelievable — as if the purpose of fiction in Oates’ formulation is to make us recognise the inevitability of Connie’s choice without simply reading it through the cause and consequence of a given set of actions. 

     This is a risk because one could say the story doesn’t justify its conclusion (as love for her family or for Friend would) but that is surely part of Oates’s gambit. She risks assuming that the reader will understand the type of literature the story works within and the sort of provocative belief the tale invokes. This is the anagogical level, as O’Connor defined it. “That is the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories readers could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.” (Mystery and Manners)  


© Tony McKibbin