Joyce Carol Oates
From Philosopedia
Oates, Joyce Carol (16 June 1938– )
Oates, a writer of realistic novels tinged with surrealism, is known for describing the connection between violence and love as she finds it in American life. Three of her many novels, novellas, short story collections, dramas, short story collections, dramas, poetry collections, and young adult works are A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Childwold (1976), and Solstice (1985).
Her interests are catholic, as evidenced by her writing about religious fanaticism in Son of the Morning, about brutality in On Boxing, and college faculties in Unholy Love. Twenty-seven or more of her novels have been published, as well as seventeen or more collections of short stories, seven or more books of poetry, five or more volumes of essays, fifteen plays, and more than two dozen works published by small, independent presses.
When her grandfather died of emphysema, Oates described in a Playboy (November 1993) interview, her family became religious:
- My parents had been Catholic and they had lapsed. That’s a joke to other people, but to Catholics you are never not a Catholic. You’re born Catholic and you’re baptized, then you become a lapsed Catholic for the next ninety years. It’s like an alcoholic - you’re never not an alcoholic. I’m not a person who feels very friendly toward organized religion. I think people have been brainwashed through the centuries. The churches, particularly the Catholic Church, are patriarchal organizations that have been invested with power for the sake of the people in power, who happen to be men. It breeds corruption. I found going to church every Sunday and on holy days an exercise in extreme boredom. I never felt that the priest had any kind of connection with God. I’ve never felt that anyone who stands up and says "Look, I have the answers" has the answers. I would look around in church and see people praying and sometimes crying and genuflecting, saying the rosary, and I never felt any identification. I never felt that I was experiencing what they were experiencing. I couldn’t figure out whether or not they were pretending. . . . Organized religions such as the Catholic Church are the antithesis of religious experience. . . . The persistence of crackpots, pseudoscientists like astrologers, suggests the failure of science and education. How can people still be superstitious, still believe in nonsense and astrology and grotesque demonic religions of every kind, every fundamentalist religion crowding us on all sides? How can we have these phenomena and say that science and education have not failed? That’s embarrassing.
In a similar vein, during a conversation reported in The New York Times Magazine (25 December 1994) with fellow novelist Bebe Moore Campbell, Oates stated,
- I was never very religious, so I look upon the phenomenon of religion as interesting. But religion has been used by people in power for their own ends, which are pretty transparent, and they are men. So there are different ways of experiencing religion. I mean, obviously, the inner and the spiritual are very different from what I’m talking about.
Oates has written so many articles, essays, and books (70 or more titles) that her friends wonder where she finds all the time. Twice, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
With Shuddering Fall tells a story that is analogous to the biblical myth of Abraham and Isaac. But “merely having faith” in a supernatural reality,” she has written, “leaves one really nowhere.”
Her own favorite short story, she has stated, is her “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” That work has been made into a movie, “Smooth Talk.”
Greg Johnson’s Invisible Writer, a Biography of Joyce Carol Oates (1998), similarly confirms Oates’s distaste for religion. At an early age she was furious that a group of cardinals had proclaimed that abortion was unacceptable under any circumstance, reasoning that the fetus might be male.
In 2007, she was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.
On 12 April 2009, asked by New York Times columnist Deborah Solomon about her religion, Oates responded:
- I could never take the idea of religion very seriously. Other Catholics thought that God really cared if they ate meat on Friday and would be upset. I never thought that God could care at all what you were eating.
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