Archives
Oates captivates CFA audience
By DONNA BUDNIEWSKI
Reporter Assistant
Editor
In "Small Avalanches," a short story written in the 1960s by Lockport native Joyce Carol Oates, a young girl almost unwittingly plays cat-and-mouse with a cunning, would-be rapist, leading him up a narrow, wooded, rock-strewn path that serves as a shortcut to her home. An intermittent tingling sensation "that's almost noisy" is her only clue that she's in grave danger, but the 14-year-old brushes it aside in favor of the sadistic pleasure she takes in the man's growing unsteadiness and inability to negotiate the steep, mountainous terrain—he becomes short of breath, clutches his chest and knees, falling several times as she kicks loose the rocks that block his way.
All the while, the girl is bemused by the fact that the stranger, at first full of flattering banter, has noticed her—not something the men in her life had done up to that point. The complexity of the relationship, however brief, is balanced by the simplicity, yet taunting power, of the young girl's voice. It appears as if the man may endure a just fate—suffering a heart attack in what he calls "beautiful, hard country," but the listener never knows for sure.
For the Oates initiate, the story—read by the author to a captivated audience Tuesday night in the Center for the Arts' Mainstage theater—served to illuminate, in part, her talent as a writer and storyteller. She has published almost two books a year for the past 40 years, Uday Sukhatme, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, told the audience in his introduction of the prolific and world-renowned writer who spoke at UB as part of the Distinguished Speakers Series. "That's roughly 32,000 published pages," he quipped, which Oates later attributed to "not having that much to do in Lockport."
Not having much to do during her very rural upbringing fueled a life's work that has been nominated three times for the Nobel Prize.
Oates' most compelling remarks—about art, success and human nature at the center of those activities—asserted an optimism balanced by the reality of American life, which is tinged by the apparition of violence just around the corner, if not in our very laps.
"I'm very idealistic about art. I think when it comes to history and politics that the tragic sense of life may be somewhat appropriate, but when it comes to art and ethics and things of the spirit, I think we have reason to be proud of ourselves and our creations, she said.
"For some reason, our species is a very creative species, but it is also destructive and these two antithetical polarities are things that strike very deep in the heart of our sense of destiny—like why we are creative, very generous and spiritual people and at the same time there is this other side to us that is destructive and somewhat chaotic and seems uncontrolled," she said.
The human spirit, Oates believes, is one of constant yearning, of moving toward the mirage of our obsessions that continually appears and disappears in front of us, always just out of reach. That yearning fuels much of the creative and destructive tendencies that shape the individual, communal and universal voices that speak through what she avows is humanity's highest endeavor, art.
"Through our individual voices, through our regional voices, we speak to those who don't know us and in our very obliqueness to one another a strange and very beautiful intimacy is born. The individual voice is the communal voice; the regional voice is the universal voice," she said.
Oates peppered her talk with humorous asides about her age and growing up in Millersport—"did you know there was a Millersport, that it wasn't just a highway"—and on Transit Road, once a "one-cow lane," now a multi-lane highway, where she grew up on a "small, but not very prosperous farm."
Oates has taught creative writing at Princeton University since 1978 and her insights into the publishing world and the success of some of her students, mostly males of late, is instructive for all would-be poets and writers. The difference, she said, between the quality of the writing produced by students who eventually publish their work and those who don't "is almost nothing," yet for some reason, many of the young men in her class, "through dogged persistence and not getting discouraged" more than just being good writers, have found success while her young female students didn't pursue publication work, for reasons unknown to Oates.
In the one-room schoolhouse where Oates attended school in the Millersport area and where "books were not that plentiful," she said she learned a great respect for the written word and for reading. "For me, a book is an object of possible beauty," she said.