Pushcart 2013: Joyce Carol Oates, “Mudgirl Saved by the King of Crows. April 1965.” From Boulevard, Spring 2011

Patricia Allingham-Carlson: “King of the Crows”

In Beecham County it would be told – told and retold – how Mudgirl was saved by the King of the Crows.
How in the vast mud-flats beside the black snake River in that desolate region of the Southern Adirondacks there were a thousand crows and of these thousand crows the largest and fiercest and most sleek-black-feathered was the King of the Crows.
How the King of the Crows had observed the cruel behavior of the woman half-dragging half-carrying a weeping child out into the mud flats to be thrown down into the mud soft-sinking as quicksand and left the child alone there to die in that terrible place.

Joyce Carol Oates has gone down a completely different path with this one. That’s not a huge surprise in itself, since she frequently goes down different paths, but I wouldn’t have expected an Indian folk tale out of her. It’s available online.

I have to admit, having JCO’s name attached to this colored my view of it, at least initially. I have a long-standing grudge against her over “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been.” And We Were the Mulvaneys. But I must reluctantly admit to very much enjoying, against my will, the stories I’ve read recently, stories like “ID” and “You” which Zin discovered during the Second Person Study. And now this. Maybe I’m going to have to get over myself when it comes to JCO.

As I read this, I was charmed. The language takes some getting used to. I dictated the quotes into Dragon and found myself struggling in places to get the word order correct. It isn’t drastic, but there’s a style here, a consistent style, that’s just slightly different.

It’s a simple story about a simple man, Suttis Coldham:

In Suttis’s immediate family there were five sons and of these sons Suttis was the youngest and the most bad-luck-prone of the generally luckless Coldham family as Suttis was one for whom Amos Colton the father had the least hope. As if there hadn’t been enough brains left for poor Suttis, by the time Suttis came along.
Saying with a sour look in his face – like you’re shake-shake-shaking brains out of some damn bottle – like a ketchup bottle – and by the time it came to Suttis’s turn there just ain’t enough brains left in the bottle.

Suttis is a trapper. This story is set in fairly recent times, so the notion of a trapper, even in the hills of rural upstate New York, carries some liability. But Suttis is doing what his people have done for generations, the only thing he knows how to do. He does everything he can, whatever the weather, to get to his traps before predators come upon whatever lies helplessly caught, so he isn’t without compassion. It’s a mindset those of us who grew up in cities and suburbs or on farms and ranches might not understand, and it’s something to keep an open mind about. And as the story proceeds, that open-mindedness is rewarded.

Suttis has three times in the past received communications from animals.

The first – a screech owl out behind the back pasture when Suttis had been a young boy. Spoke his name SSSuttisss all hissing syllables so the soft hairs on his neck stood on end and staring up – upward – up to the very top of the ruin of a dead oak trunk where the owl was perched utterly motionless except for its feathers rippling in the wind and its eyes glaring like gasoline flame seeing how the owl knew him – a spindly-limbed boy twenty feet below gaping and grimacing and struck dumb hearing SSSuttisss and seeing that look in the owl’s eyes of such significance, it could not have been named except the knowledge was imparted – You are Suttis, and you are known.

So it doesn’t come as a terrific surprise to him when the King of the Crows lets him know to go down to the mud-flats. He isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do there, but presently he comes across a doll, which creeps him out. Not half as much as the little girl he comes across next:

A terrifying sight, a living child – part-sunken in the mud, a glint of iridescent insects about her face – has to be flies – suddenly Suttis is panicked, scrabbling on hands and knees to escape this terrible vision, moaning, gibbering as the King of the Crows berates him from a perch overhead and like a frenzied calf Suttis blunders into a maze of vines, a noose of vines catches him around the neck and near-garrots him the shock of it bringing him to his senses so chastened like a calf swatted with a stiff hunk of rope he turns to crawl back to the edge of the embankment. There is no escaping the fact that Suttis will have to wade into the mud-flat to rescue the girl as he has been bidden.

I’ve found numerous references to crows in Native American lore, but I have no way of determining which source is authentic and which is nonsense. Many refer to the crow as a symbol of justice, a messenger of the gods, as a shape-shifter, and as a leader of souls from darkness to light. I’ve also found similarities to the raven, in that the crow is a trickster and has a sense of humor. For the purposes of this story, I pick a messenger from the gods, and a leader of souls from darkness to light. Maybe a little Justice as well.

I think this story has been done a great disservice. It’s a fine little folk tale, nicely and consistently told. But it wasn’t until I found out it’s part of Oates’s novel Mudwoman, published last March, and read some descriptions of that novel, that I started to get some sense of the depth of the story. The style is based on Native American legends and tales, and while I wouldn’t be able to tell, knowing JCO, I’m betting it’s completely authentic. The girl Suttis rescues becomes a University president – which is a little cliché – and goes crazy – which is a different cliché. It’s a novel I’ve got to read, and, trust me, I’ve never said that about a JCO novel before. But how this folk tale gets folded into that novel, if/how the style turns into standard prose, if this episode comes back to play a part later on – well, that I’ve got to see.

And, unlike most of her writing, this is not based on any event in Oates’s life (though presumably the University president is the first female president of Princeton, where Oates teaches). It was inspired by a dream. That’s very un-Oatsian.

And it is the child in the mud-flat Suttis Coldham will recall and cherish through his life.

Normally, I get all indignant about novel excerpts masquerading as short stories. I’m not outraged here. Maybe I’m getting over that particular bit of pettiness. It’s a complete story on its own, that’s not the issue. I just think its significance, as a part of something bigger, is missed.

But I won’t know for sure until I read the novel. Mission accomplished, JCO.

The Second Person Study, Part 15: “You” by Joyce Carol Oates

YOU! Who?

This story does some fascinating things with second person; Monika Fludernik analyzes it in the third part of her treatise “Second Person Fiction: Narrative You as addressee and/or protagonist.”

One of the coolest points she makes is that the story “illustrates the excellent suitability of second person fiction for the expression and description of intimacy.” It is a superb way of telling this story of mother and daughter, since it is capable of increasing the intimacy between reader and narrator (by “even if only initially, seeming to involve the actual reader in her role as a potential addressee”) and of increasing and decreasing the intimacy between narrator and protagonist:

Since address combines a distancing factor (foregrounding the non-identity of the I and You) with the presupposition of an acquaintance with the person thus addressed, it proves to be a fictional mode adaptable to detailing the jig-saw structure of the mother-daughter relationship. As feminist studies have revealed in detail, that relation alternates between dominant intimacy and the continual struggle on the daughter’s part for liberation from the boundedness of that very intimacy.

I personally feel there is also a great deal of accusatory tone here, that teen-age scorn done with finesse, and this is possible without spelling it out by use of second person, as the daughter relates what mother is doing while daughter is trying to find her lost sister. It is quite remarkable.

The story starts with one “you” protagonist: “You are leaving the airplane…. You hate mornings – anger rises in you, bubbling like something sour in your throat – but you grin into the morning because someone is approaching you, shouting a magic word. Your name.” Wow, the egotism! We learn “You” is Madeline Randall, B-list actress, met at the airport by her agent and a friend who fetch her luggage and discuss the part she is about to film: “But that part is exactly you,” her agent tells her. ” The new you. It could have been written exactly for you!” At the motel (“the odor of chlorine and bug spray” – this is not the Beverly Hills Hotel) someone asks if she is Madeline Randall. Her identity is the focus of so much of the opening, and we keep reading along, learning who “you” is without ever getting a clue of who this person is.

The scene continues to play. “You” works on the part, goes to dinner, and threatens to go back to New York – “It’s my daughter….there’s trouble with my daughter.”

It strikes you that this is an important scene, an emotional scene. People are watching you anxiously. You might be in a play. Not one of those crappy television plays, like the kind you have flown out here to film (you’ll do five tapes and make thousands of dollars, thousands!) but a real play, like Chekhov, like… like Chekhov, where people do cry out at each other and hold up their shaking hands, pleading.

Yes, this is a scene in an important life, your own.

But they need you to be you, so you prove your worth with pushups and get ready for dinner. And here, it’s casually dropped in, the first “I” – four pages into the story! There is an “I” in this story! It is not a reflector narrator at all, it is the “homocommunicative address mode” Monika has outlined, the “person-and-a-half” as I call it. Aha! This changes the narrative – four pages into the story!
We do not know who this “I” is yet. We return to “You” for a paragraph and learn “You” “like to set traps but don’t like to clean up after them. As a matter of fact, you never clean up after anything!”

And then in the next paragraph, nearly a page after the first ‘I” is dropped, we find out who that is:

Now they are herding you to the elevator and now I am walking through the rooms of our apartment in New York, my head pounding – now they are herding you out to a taxi , fussing over you, admiring you, and now I am dialing the telephone again.

This juxtaposes “You” – in the lap of luxury – with “I“, in distress, though we do not yet know the nature of that distress. But the scorn comes through loud and clear. Yes, while I am here taking care of what must be taken care of – cleaning up – you are off partying! This reversal of parent and child roles (it is usually the child who is having fun while the parent takes care of things) adds to the effect, I think! It is quite wonderful!

After a page of this, we learn more of what is actually happening right now – twin sister/daughter Miranda is missing. We do not know what the urgency of this is. But we realize it is more than just a girl who forgot to tell anyone she had a sleepover with a friend.

We then learn about the night before; we get more of an idea what is actually happening here when “You” tells Miranda: “I have renounced that man! I have discarded him! If you persist in seeing him I will discard you! If you persist in refusing to see the doctor I am finished, finished, finished with you!”

At this point, I thought I could not be getting it right. I thought, Miranda is pregnant by a man Mom-Madeline used to date. But, wait, would not Madeline be outraged at the man, not at Miranda? Would she not have stayed in New York? Is that not what anyone would do in that crazy situation? So I must be wrong… but I was not wrong. I will not go into the rest of the story, only to say this wonderful use of second person continues right up until the last scene, the last paragraph, the last sentence.

I think the power of this story comes from that “what the hell” feeling, the slow reveal of information that includes a really shocking situation (or am I too easily shocked?) along with the juxtaposition of “You” and “I” as mentioned above – what mother and daughter/sister are doing about the girl who goes missing after this argument over this truly abhorrent mess. And I think the use of second person is the perfect way of telling this story. And of course the title – perfect! The narcissism of Madeline, her constant performing, the accusatory “YOU!” It sums it all up in three letters.

However… I will tread into a region that I still do not understand, and that I am not sure I need to understand right now to appreciate second person. We get everything through the POV of Marion. Is Marion reliable? There is no reason to think otherwise, but even a reliable, reasonable daughter can exaggerate and blow Mom out of all proportion (who has not said, or heard, “I hate you” or “I never want to see you again”?). Was Madeline truly thinking so egocentrically? Did she really drop the “trouble with my daughter” angle as soon as it failed to yield drama, as depicted? Still, the conversation (“finished!”) was apparently real. I am inclined to believe Marion. But is the story more about Marion, about her view of Madeline, than it is about Madeline? Madeline is clearly the villain, but is that because Madeline is the villain, or because Marion sees her as the villain? What is real, and what is Marion? If I tell you a story about how my great-grandfather beat me, then you discover it was all something I made up (which would have to be the case, since all my great-grandfathers died before I was born), would that be a story about my great-grandfather, or a story about me?

As part of her view of the story as “a superb example of what one may consider to be the postmodernist tendency to subvert the realistic, representational mode,” (sheesh, do they not teach tight prose in Austria?) Monika says:

…the story in fact allows one to observe the naturallistically and narratologically ‘impossible’ combination of voyeuristic omniscience (seeing into and knowing the minds both of the actress/mother Madeline and that of the fictional “I“, the daughter Marion) with no realistically recuperable teller or reflector agent who might view events unfold….important almost epistemological questions remain unanswered. Are we getting Marion’s view of her mother’s psyche, or a ‘real’ figural mode presentation of it?

This leap into pure narratology and discourse analysis is beyond me, and I would love to study it further. Some day, I may! You may find a “Narratology for Dummies” section here! But for now, I will just appreciate that there is the impossibility that Marion can factually relate what Madeline is doing, and that is part of the intriguing magic of this story. It is like thinking about infinity plus one!

I am shocked at how good this story is – and very surprised, and perplexed, that I have not run into any mention of this story in the course of my study until now! Monika, I forgive you for all your insane nomenclature and twisted syntax, for you led me here! It is extraordinary, not only as a story but as a use of second person – two modes of second person! – to add to the story of the relationship! This should be at the top of every second-person-story list! And I am not even a big Joyce Carol Oates fan – but this story could have made me one, if some one had suggested I read it instead of shoving “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” down my throat over and over again!

Joyce Carol Oates – “I.D.”

I’m going to be reading the stories Cliff Garstang’s Perpetual Folly blog has listed as The New Yorker’s best stories of 2010, and this one happens to be online so is the easiest for me to access.

I found an article about a lecture Oates gave at Stanford last September during which she called “I.D.” a story of denial. It started from a prompt she used in a class she taught at Princeton: write a story about someone saying “Come with me” to a student in class.

Let me state for the record that I am not a huge fan of Joyce Carol Oates. In particular, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been.” I’m sorry, I know, it’s the most anthogized story in the history of the universe and it’s perfect and leaves parents and teens alike nervous and teary, but it just left me a big so what. But Cliff states he is not a fan of JCO either, and he loved this story.

I had mixed feelings about “I.D.” It breaks so many rules I’ve been dinged for, I guess I hold some resentment for that. For example, opening with a quote, a loosely attributed quote at that, and then a lapse into flashback and background for half the story before getting back to the point were “they” say “Eiii-dee”. And while I’m at it, I wish the title was different, because of course “eiii-dee” is obviously “I.D.” and I think it would’ve been interesting to not know that, because the main character didn’t know that. Isn’t that the thing, the reader needs to know what the main character knows? These are not rules I particularly treasure, they’re just things people have told me I should not do. I think they should start explaining how to do them well, instead.

Despite – or because of? – the broken rules, it was a pretty cool story with lots of heartbreaking moments and a lot of wonderful images. Sad-wonderful. My favorite kind.

Lisette is your typical 13-year-old-at-risk. Here is a list of things we find out about her life:
- she drank some beer that morning at the urging of some older guys.
- she’s not doing well in math or in school, though she was a B student last year.
- she’s curious about sex but doesn’t really know much about it.
- she’s hanging out with girls who are more mature than her.
- she’s sending lipstick-blots to an older boy, the meaning of which is uncertain but may include “I will hav sex with you.”
- her parents are divorced after a couple of separations.
- her mother has worked at a lot of different casinos.
- she has had eye surgery recently and her eyes are not doing well.
- one of her mother’s man friends told her she looks older than 13 (there’s nothing better to a 13 year old)
- her mother is borrowing money for Lisette’s eye surgery.
- she has been living alone for five days as her mother is off somewhere.

And here are some great manifestations about Lisette’s powers of perception:
- she thinks – but isn’t sure – the older boys are laughing at her because they like her, not because they’re being mean.
- she can’t see the blackboard in math class because of her eye problems.
- the blackboard is green. (This always bothered me, too).
- her mother says they’ll go to a casino and count cards, then denies that’s what she meant.
- she feels like there are red ants crawling in her armpits and her crotch.
- her nose is numb from injury and surgery.
- her eye tears but she isn’t crying.
- MTV videos include moans of something she knows is sex-pain though she doesn’t know what that is.
- when her mother sex-pain moans in the shower Lisette can’t tell if she’s happy or angry.
- sitting in the front by the windows in math class makes her feel like she’s in a bright room looking in.
- she isn’t sure if her mother is a blackjack dealer or a cocktail waitress.

And that’s just the first page. This girl has some problems perceiving reality, made concrete by her eye surgery and post-surgical tearing. When you don’t want to see something, it’s a lot easier if you’ve had recent eye surgery and are wearing dark purple glasses.

There’s a very touching scene when she won’t answer the phone because she sees on Caller ID it’s her mom, and she’s angry her mom went away and left her alone – a real, honest moment. But then she regrets this when she starts hearing noises and tries to call her mom, but gets no answer, and converts that back to anger again. Heartbreaking.

When the police show up in the classroom, she uses the distraction, not realizing they are there for her, to flip her lipstick-covered note to JC, the slightly older, left-back (i.e., bad news) boy she has a crush on. And he doesn’t pay much attention to it, crumples it and stuffs it in his pocket, because after all, he’s cute and popular and she’s got snarled hair and weird purple glasses for her healing eyes. More heartbreak. And more when we find out what caused the eye problem in the first place: think dad. Dad who is in the Army in Iraq except he isn’t.

The playing with perception continues, as she hears “eiii-dee” and has no idea what that means, and she thinks the cops are looking at her with disgust which later she decides is sympathy. And things progress to the ultimate perception disturbance, so disturbed even the reader isn’t totally sure which way it goes. At least this reader. And Lisette goes on, keeping up her front because reality isn’t so bad if you completely ignore it.

My main complaint about the story is that I want to know what happens now. It’s rather odd the police mention Family Services then just take her back to school, “for now.” Then what? At what point does someone figure out if this 13-year-old has adult supervision or not? Or is that the way things are now, in which case maybe I don’t want to know what happens next. I guess the reader has to forget about reality as well.

Addendum: This story was chosen for BASS 2011.