The united States citizenry emerged into the Bicentennial observance through a series of traumas that diluted the enthusiasm for patriotism. Certain recent events have discouraged any unprotesting display of patriotic fervor as ethically insensitive. Antipatriotism has come to be viewed in some circles as a moral necessity if not a spiritual imperative. The elevation of patriotism into an idolatrous national religion is therefore far less of a temptation than is a dismissal, by alienated radicals, of patriotism as a fiendish aberration.
It is highly unlikely that we shall see any swing away from this moral questioning of patriotism toward a Bicentennial religion of uncritical nationalism. Nor is there any sign of a Bicentennial religious mood that would reflect negatively on the patriotic loyalties of those who are ecclesiastically uncommitted.
But the American questioning of the morality of patriotism ought not to be unchallenged. Neither the Communist world nor the Third World questions patriotism. Is the American disposition to debunk patriotism ethically grounded? Or does any nation approach the endtime of its greatness when its citizens are no longer willing to make sacrifices for it?
Prior to Watergate, the American questioning of patriotism was largely an underground phenomenon. In the sixties, militant demonstrators increased their reliance on coercive tactics to confront racial discrimination and social inequity. As the war in Viet Nam widened, religious support mounted not only for economic leveling in the face of poverty but also for pacifism and draft dissent. Over against radical reliance on disruptive tactics stood a pervasive national mood of law-and-order that reelected President Nixon. Even so, in their refusal to sing the national anthem celebrating “the bombs bursting in air,” activists slowly but steadily gained the understanding of ever-increasing numbers for whom American military strategy in Viet Nam became less and less persuasive.
But two striking developments provided a dramatic turning point in historical fortunes. The staunchest public defenders of patriotism, Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon, came under the spotlight of criminal investigation, causing confidence in political credibility to plummet. Cynical activists, meanwhile, demeaned the hallmarks of patriotism, disowning the salute to the flag and the oath of allegiance, even burning the flag. To be sure, Martin Luther King, Jr., appealed to American conscience through some elements of the country’s traditional symbol-system. But radical protestors were propagandizing a new set of American symbols. Black insurgency mirrored the signs “whites only” and “colored to the rear,” and Black Zionism claimed to be American Indian rather than contemporary American. The stark fact was that neither black nor red had shared in the original white experiment of America as a land of liberty.
The nation’s citizenry clearly balked at twisting “patriotism” into a bad word. Cynical radicals were unable to channel public indignation into a burlesque of the traditional patriotic hallmarks. While the masses did not analyze and clarify its significance, they intuitively viewed patriotism as something more than a modern species of tribalism. Citizens familiar with national history could have appealed to intellectuals like Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson for an endorsement of patriotism as a virtue.
The Bicentennial crisis over patriotism has sharpened debate over what the nation’s political documents imply for the evident gap between the American dream and the American reality. If the nation’s patriotic symbol-system does not truly belong to radical activists who approve violence as a means of structural change and promote extreme socio-political programs, do the conventional signs of patriotism truly belong to defenders of the status quo who use them as a cover for special interests and ignore the alienated minorities?
The badges of patriotism can be exploited by any and every ideology. Social critics and religious crusaders have wrapped the flag around secular socialism and secular capitalism. Religious leaders have unfurled it in the past over religious theism. Secular spokesmen now drape it over irreligious atheism.
Never have pressures been as intense as in the recent past for a change in the content of national patriotism. Radical critics who lost their audience in the sixties by degrading the patriotic symbols are now more prone to retain the symbols in their efforts to promote social change. The patriotic citizen, we seem to be told, will stand energetically between the United States and the possibility of any further commitments to war in any circumstances, to any revival of a military draft. And the patriotic citizen will be dedicated to redistributing the national wealth and sharing resources with “have nots” around the world, no questions asked. Others flaunt the flag for ever-increasing defense budgets, insist that the United States has no obligation to strain its own economic system to assist unsure allies, and assert that the perils of Marxist economics are so evident wherever this system has been tried that we had better flee from it at home.
How are we to distinguish between an exploitation of the symbol-system for ideological ends unrelated to true patriotism and legitimate appeals that boldly call the bluff of American affirmations of a superior sensitivity to human justice? Is the American experiment to be correlated with an alien or debatable ideology, or only with what clearly and legitimately belongs to the form and content of traditional patriotism? The nation’s classic political documents are not so vague that they can be correlated with any and every ideology. Those who wish to liberate the nation from its own belief-system can hardly be viewed as patriotic. But are those who speak fervently of values only when they coincide with self-interest, and ignore the sphere of action when it has a price tag, to be considered patriotic?
The Judeo-Christian revelation provides a theological anchor for patriotism. God’s essential but limited purpose for civil government upholds respect and prayer for rulers and submission to government within unqualified loyalty to God alone. Christian patriotism does not require the unswerving loyalty to rulers, institutions, and policies that totalitarian powers demand. If national sovereignty becomes the ultimate loyalty, patriotism is subverted into nationalism. Implicit in this commitment is the notion that a particular political ideology and rule should become universal through the repudiation of all transcendent claims. Only in the Western and biblical heritage will one find the emphasis that the political order is to support man in the pursuit of purposes that transcend the political order.
For the Christian, love of country and regard for ruler are theologically inseparable from a divine concern for justice in national policy and practice. Patriotism therefore becomes an intellectual and moral umpire of national issues. Although the Christian’s primary identification is theoretically found in a redeemed community transcending national distinctions, his patriotic identity in actuality all too often reflects a national more than a transcendent commitment, and a party commitment more than spiritual and national loyalties.
II
The controversy over civil religion in recent decades focused on the aura of evangelical acceptability surrounding the Eisenhower, Johnson, and Nixon White House. The welcome for evangelist Billy Graham as a periodic guest at the White House at a time when ecumenical Protestant leaders were in decreasing public and political favor because of their call for swift and often highly controversial policy changes, and the broadly evangelical overtones of the annual presidential prayer breakfast, inspired charges that evangelical Christian trappings were being deployed as a religious atmosphere to commend national political policy rather than to criticize and judge it.
In some respects this controversy reflected deeper tensions involved in ecumenical-evangelical differences over the political role of the Church and the priority and definition of evangelism. Yet there was little doubt that evangelical Christianity was largely favorable to conservative political programs and a strong national defense posture, and that evangelicals in the recent past to some extent permitted their faith to function as a civil religion serving the establishment. Senator Mark Hatfield made headlines with his prayer-breakfast reminder that the God of the Bible judges every nation by his righteous requirements and does not lend his glory to political exploitation.
In recent years, national religion in the political arena was more an innocuous Judeo-Christian idealism than an explicitly evangelical faith, as an analysis of most presidential speeches and even prayer-breakfast comments will indicate. Even this Judeo-Christian idealism was generously intertwined with an older “social gospel” emphasis on the virtues of democracy, although correlated with capitalism more than socialism, while welfare programs looking in the direction of democratic socialism were on occasion virtually commended as Christian humanitarianism.
If one assesses political addresses by officeholders for implicit beliefs suggestive of civil religion—in distinction from private, personal ecclesiastical commitments—the content hardly rises to authentic Christian theism or Judeo-Christian theism. It is, rather, a dilution of elements borrowed from the biblical past and blended with modern socio-political philosophy. Much of it is metaphysically amorphous except for occasional references to God, who emerges somewhat as a benevolent force that undergirds human dignity and human rights.
The nation’s creedal foundation of two hundred years ago now seems incredibly remote. The founding fathers coupled their vision of the American mission in the world with a conviction that God has universally bestowed inalienable human rights and that government is both divinely limited and responsible. They prohibited any religious establishment, yet they insisted on the validity of certain religious truths.
Lack of interest in the American political heritage, as in the Western religious heritage, is now widespread. But nobody should discuss the value and continuing viability of the national credo or dismiss it as utopian or archaic without being familiar with its content. Historians holding positivistic views of life now routinely ignore the emphasis on divine providence in national origins and on inalienable human rights grounded in divine creation.
The American mission is divergently perceived at home and abroad. What was once hailed as persuasive evidence of the “success” of the American economic system is now globally deplored by Marxists who generously blame the world’s economic problems on Western capitalism and on American imperialism and exploitation. No longer do Americans assume, as they did earlier in this century, that the nation’s “manifold destiny” is to liberate an underdeveloped world through global exportation of the “American Way” of political democracy and economic free enterprise; even the more modest alternative of a global duty to share American funds and food is increasingly questioned in view of social burdens at home and the reemergence of Germany and emergence of Japan and Near Eastern oil shiekdoms as wealthy powers. Misrepresented and misunderstood abroad, the world’s leading military and economic power seems now even at home to be embarrassingly confused about national significance, purpose, and goals.
Yet the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, even the national anthem and the Gettysburg Address, can be potently and critically turned against the present American experience. The conception of free and responsible government, the assertion of the irreducible nature of human rights, the imperatives of human liberty and social justice, have ongoing validity. Lines like “and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea” can sound the call for racial justice and environmental concern. And the vision of America’s distinctive mission in the world can be carried forward without the misconception that the United States is the carrier of an international salvation-history. The classic documents imply a criticism of much in twentieth-century American principle and practice, and Americans can and should be asked to respond to their idealism instead of substituting emotional celebration for creedal practice. A meaningful Bicentennial will renew a commitment to both precept and practice.
For all their insistence on non-establishment, the founding fathers viewed religion and education as indispensable twin supports of democracy. Today a growing vanguard considers religion nationally irrelevant and, if not openly hostile, professes indifference to it. The clear implication is that in a pluralistic society religion of any and every sort is best avoided in public life as nationally insignificant.
There are at least three difficulties with this point of view. The first is that even when a society is not explicitly religious it nonetheless is implicitly so. Mankind is by nature religious, even if some members of the human species devote themselves religiously to irreligion. No society can long retain cohesion without a shared faith-commitment in the form of common convictions and agreed values. The issue touching civil religion is not whether we shall have it, but what sort of civil religion we do and ought to have.
The second difficulty is that the species of civil religion that now subtly dominates much of the American outlook is radically secular naturalism. It has become the influential semi-official philosophy of most American college and university classrooms, and it underlies the outlook of some foes of civil religion who publicly advocate the greatest possible distance between the nation and religion. The most formative faith-stance in American life in the arena of public education is not evangelical Christianity; a strikingly different outlook toward spiritual concerns has in the past decade pervaded political, professional, and business ranks, a mind-set contributed by the campuses rather than by the churches and increasingly anticipated in the high schools and accepted in American homes. Its pulsebeat is the naturalistic dogma that everything (except this dogma, of course) is on a non-stop merry-go-round, that all is temporal and changing, that every belief about the true and the good is culturally relative, that man himself is the architect of whatever value and purpose life and reality bear.
This notion now so potently pervades the American classroom that naturalistic scientism may be designated its implicit if not explicit world-life stance. The universe becomes a colossal Las Vegas where change and chance prevail; everything bears an expiration date. Man is “king for a day” and imposes on nature, history, and society whatever patterns he prefers. Every philosophy and every religion—including the Judeo-Christian revelation—is held to be supported by feet of clay.
When the American Association of University Professors deplored the relativistic morality that had permeated the White House and framed a resolution censorious of national political leadership, some members reminded their colleagues that the educational arena itself had done much to shape the ethical outlook of most American political frontiersmen. It is ironic that ecclesiastical guides deplored evangelical civil religion as a political phenomenon while ignoring the rise of the quasi-official educational establishment of a radically secular naturalism that is erosive of theistic commitments. This oversight was caused by the tendency to consider that political arena as the most potent instrument for social change, alongside a loss of faith in spiritual dynamisms.
In contrast to a past “manifest destiny” to export the “American Way” worldwide, more and more spokesmen seem bent on purveying a radically secular world-life view. Developing countries covet American technology while they resist the importation of a world-view that demeans the supernatural, unchanging morality, and fixed truth. This assimilation of the American Way to radically secular naturalism enters no less than Sino-Soviet materialism into the Third World’s reaffirmation of ancient cultural and religious traditions in a nationalistic context.
It would be wrong, however, to suggest that the secular stance that by default has become the most influential contemporary classroom theory represents also the uniform commitment of young American intellectuals. For insofar as it eludes a biblical faith, the student world increasingly yields itself to self-interest and “doing one’s own thing” to the neglect of those social and humanitarian concerns that contemporary humanists seek to correlate with a radically naturalistic view.
The third difficulty with the view that would ban religion from public concerns is that Christians who affirm Jesus Christ as King of kings and Lord of lords refuse to dethrone the Risen Lord in any of life’s relationships and duties, even as Orthodox Jews refuse to relate Yahweh only to private concerns. The Kingdom of God demotes all other rulers to subordinate dominion. While the Bible locates in the eschatological future the time when “the kingdoms of this world are become [the kingdoms] of our Lord, and of his Christ” (Rev. 11:15; cf. 17) and when Christ will, having completed his mediatorial work, restore universal dominion to God the Father as eternal King (1 Cor. 15:24), the New Testament nonetheless applies the title of king to Messiah Jesus as insistently as the Old Testament applies it to Yahweh. Only the one almighty God is truly basileus of the ages; Messiah King is King of kings and Lord of lords. The Blessed and only Sovereign, King over all kings and Ruler over all rulers, is not simply almighty God (1 Tim. 1:17) but specifically the Risen Jesus, King and Lord of those who reign (1 Tim. 6:15).
The Christian holds that the concern for personal righteousness, social justice, and political integrity that the nation desperately needs at the threshold of its third century will be found only through a recovery of Christ’s lordship and kingdom, and he is not about to exchange that faith for any quasi-official alternative.
III
A discussion of non-establishment and religious freedom is now inescapably on the docket. The Constitution disallows any religious establishment, and it protects the religious liberty of all citizens. The area of concern to which I propose to speak is public education. The notion that to preserve national well-being in a pluralistic society religious concerns must be shunted to the margin of public education, or wholly to private life, has little merit. It needs to be challenged, particularly concerning its pretense of religious neutrality. There is no such thing as neutrality in thought and deed; all precepts and practices are based on underlying assumptions. Consequently this notion implies the specific, if unrecognized, premise that religion is irrelevant to mainstream political and educational concerns. It is not far removed from the misconception that the religion editor of a newspaper should be an agnostic, for he can then in his journalistic work best serve all religious confessions.
The question is not what is offensive to a particular religious minority or majority, although the largely anti-theistic orientation of public education is assuredly distasteful to much more than half the American population, including evangelical and other Protestants, Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and Orthodox Jews. The question rather is whether the exertion of academic pressures for or against religious commitments is academically compatible with the American principle of separation of church and state.
The Supreme Court’s historic Schempp decision more than a decade ago emphasized that public schools need not avoid classroom reflection and discussion of religious realities. It did, to be sure, oppose school-sponsored religious exercises. But it expressly noted the incompleteness of education “without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization.” Hence it established the propriety of expounding the rise and growth of Judeo-Christian theism—though not as normative—and of comparing its tenets with other views. An interest only in contemporary religious fads or in non-biblical religions, however worthy of study, to the neglect of the Judeo-Christian heritage, which has strikingly shaped the culture of the West and remains for most Americans the most significant religious option, would betray a lack of academic balance and sensitivity.
Instead of ruling against all Bible reading, the Schempp decision emphasized that “the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities.” The importance of this for a religion of historical and verbal revelation, one moreover that presents a particular view of history, cannot be gainsaid. The fact that many thousands of high school students voluntarily attend non-credit Bible-study classes speaks of the neglect of this learning-opportunity in the classroom. Some find in many required courses little relevance for the present moral and spiritual crisis; others weary of detached comment about the Bible rather than first-hand exposure to its content.
The Schempp decision adds that “such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may … be effected consistent with the First Amendment.” This emphasis on secular context and objectivity requires analysis.
But we should first note the striking growth in recent years of religion departments on state university campuses and the widening interest in religious study at precollegiate levels. Religion is now approved by numerous states as a teaching minor. Public school administrations are not free, of course, to require of teachers a specific religious identity or doctrinal subscription. But whether non-advocacy further distinguishes them is a question with interesting overtones. Many evangelical colleges, while faith-affirming, reject any implication that advocacy implies that other views are merely caricatured, or that dissenting students are academically penalized. Public colleges are always value-structured, at least implicitly; underlying beliefs and acceptable mores are readily identifiable, even when an institution does not explicitly identify these.
The public institution is to teach about religion, not to press for commitment or rejection. There can be no plea for the special authority of the Bible, no espousal of the Ten Commandments as the sole sanction for morality, no presentation of Christ’s death and resurrection as the only ground of salvation.
That supplies no basis, however, for viewing a death-of-God theorist as best qualified to teach world religions or a naturalist as best qualified to teach Judeo-Christian thought. To be sure, no basis exists for excluding an academically qualified Buddhist from being chairman of the religion department or a member of a modern cult from being a religion professor. But to give only token representation to evangelical scholars in the religion department is like excluding astronauts and cosmonauts from seminars on space travel because they are personally committed.
The Bible can assuredly be taught as literature or history by non-believers. Evangelical Christians insist that even the truth of revelation is objectively written, that perception of its content does not require a special act of faith, and that the Bible is self-interpreting and self-authenticating. The Bible’s claim to be authoritative can be adduced as one that many intellectuals as well as common people have accepted and still do. But scholars qualified to teach the Bible as history are not especially to be found among those who mythologize its central historical acts or transmute them into mere tradition.
The Schempp decision requires the teaching of religion, to be sure, as “part of a secular program.” In this context the instructor may indeed indicate that Christianity sees all reality and life centered in the Logos of God as the divine agent in creation, revelation, redemption, and judgment, and that for many persons revelational theism remains the most credible option. But he may not insist on the validity of this integrating framework or any other.
Teaching religion “as part of a secular program of education,” therefore, is something very different from what it is sometimes made to be, teaching religion in the academic context of radical secularity as the decisive philosophical premise. A hallmark of contemporary American education is its interception and inhibition of theistic belief. The climate of public learning is such that it makes difficult a commitment to Judaic, Catholic or Protestant theism; it is notably erosive of the inherited religious faith of young intellectuals.
Religious liberty and religious constraint become at this point critically important Bicentennial concerns, since the outlook of the nation’s future citizens is influenced greatly by public academic institutions. In part the erosion of the historic beliefs of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants is due to the disposition of parents to allow an educational elite to function as surrogate elders. But that does not vindicate an academic orientation that promotes a radically secular ideology.
Recent research in control technology has focused attention on the subtle ways in which soldiers, prisoners, and learners are behaviorally influenced not only by drugs and electrical devices but also by indoctrination. The selective communication of ideas in the academic arena is receiving more and more attention. Teaching in the public classroom is not to be mainly an outlet for the instructor’s personal beliefs or disbeliefs, nor for the fashionable prejudices of the decade. Students usually wish to know where the instructor stands, and they have a right to know what he believes and why. It is not the theist—be he Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant—who tends to monopolize that opportunity today.
The attempt of liberal learning to preserve an attenuated God as the cohesive center of academic study collapsed a generation ago into a pantheon of competing gods; the substitution of a hierarchy of moral values in turn emptied into a value-vacuum. The current fashion is to escalate the secular into the totality of human concerns and to exclude the transcendent supernatural. It espouses the culture-dependence of religion, philosophy, and morals, and enthrones individual creativity, seeking somehow to correlate this with ethical duties to others. Its undergirding premises are the absolute autonomy of man, the comprehensive contingency and total temporality of the real world, and the radical relativity of all beliefs and commitments. Here is no basis for moving confidently into an assured future but rather a way of eroding confidence in the truths and values of the past and in the worth and meaning of life in the present.
It is therefore not enough to emphasize that the state may not establish “a religion that is hostile to religion”; it is equally important to ask what this implies for a learning milieu that subtly presents a secular world-view eclipsing all alternatives. For unless one copes with this educational ethos, he drains away the fixed meaning and worth of patriotism, of religion, of democracy, of freedom, and of all else.
The nation that, through voluntary sacrifice, became the world’s most powerful paradigm of responsible freedom now promotes its ongoing devotion to limited government, inalienable rights, and human welfare in a context of forced elementary-school busing, alienated and morally permissive teen-agers, young intellectuals schooled to “do one’s own thing,” a parent generation more interested in things and more things than in transcendent truths and values, tides of humans who cannot find work and others who have lost the meaning of work; and yet it unmercifully condemns political and business leaders for practicing in the public arena what is more readily condoned in private. What then does this say to the world about us and our patriotic symbols?
Joyce Carol Oates: Wit And Fear
In Part One I said that violence provides the imaginative focus for Oates. This violence comes in two related forms, on two levels, in Oates’s writing. Violent acts—murder in particular, since it combines death and action, but also suicide and social violence like riots—fill her stories, forming their starting-points and climaxes. But there is also the “assault upon an audience’s expectations … a writer’s most basic form of violent activity.” Murder comes wrapped in a highly characteristic, battering verbal energy that denies a reader rest even when the story is outwardly peaceable. “Parody,” Oates writes—this is true of her style in general—“is an act of aggression.”
But this verbal violence would be merely pretentious if violence did not lurk in the heart of the reality she sees and speaks. In the central novels of her canon—Expensive People, them, Wonderland—her time and place are mid-America from about 1935 to the present. It is the time of our questioning: What is the moral and psychological America that the apparent, economic America has brought into being? Who are we? and where are we going?
Oates answers by exposing our reality. She is not leery of headline history: in Wonderland, the hero sits weeping beside his sleeping daughters on the night of Kennedy’s assassination, and them closes with the Detroit slum riots of the late sixties. Behind this Oates sees sickness, not in generalized political terms but in terms of individuals who cannot make their lives cohere within the excess and confusion of America’s dreams.
The hero of Wonderland has, barring the grandfather whose name he finally takes, two fathers; in these Oates sketches a balance sheet of America’s spiritual bankruptcy. The first father is a little man, a joking, motorcycling ne’er-do-well whose muscular self-confidence collapses under the Depression into suicide and murder. The second, adoptive father is a big man, wealthy, well-known, a positive thinker, a prophet of hope. Dr. Pedersen preaches, as a religion, the American era, the gospel of endless expansion, the denial of death, the displacement of God by sheer material power. Of course, his denial of death is a denial of humanity as well. It denies the sources of compassion; and when his orphaned, adopted son yields, momentarily, to compassion, he is exiled from the Promised Land without a second thought.
Poverty and wealth are basic themes here, the incredible excesses of American comfort. When a woman who alternately leaves and returns to her family is reconciled to them once again, the ritual of reconciliation is a luxurious shopping spree by telephone—organizing one’s life in utter objectivity, at a distance, at a word. The Pedersens of Wonderland eat constantly, and their pampered, flatulent obesity symbolizes both success and security. (The image appears earlier in a story from Upon the Sweeping Flood, 1966, where a young wife eats, and forces her son to eat, as reassurance, a defense against the fear of need.)
This fear is the mainspring of them. The novel concerns a family in the slums of Detroit. Oates writes that the plot is based on the life of one of her students; and, indeed, letters to Oates, by name, from “Maureen Wendall” come into the fictional world to keep us from thinking this world unreal. The Wendalls have no money, and consequently worship it as the price of safety, comfort, and love. As in Lawrence’s “Rocking Horse Winner,” every day and object intones the lack of money. And, as in Lawrence, the only conceivable solution is magical. Here, however, the magic is American; the Horatio Alger story, always magical, becomes a pervasive faith, a superstition, a dream—anonymous rich men who pick the poor boys up, hand them checks for $10,000, and then drop them negligently. But the dream continues, fed by hope, the sense of a possible miracle.
What is the effect of this materialistic confusion on her characters? Wonderland is concerned with what Oates calls the “phantasmagoria of personality”—the illusion that the self is stable and can be identified. Oates’s position is clearly existential, though not in a dogmatic sense, and can be related to her picture of social and economic chaos. For personality in the American era becomes an effort to catch up with one’s own changing, which is itself a function of uncontrollable social process. “What is a personality?” asks a doctor in Wonderland. “I will tell you, it is a conscious system of language. And when the language deteriorates, as it must, the personality vanishes.…” But where, in the sliding languages of America, is one to find a footing, a stable language for a stable identity? “Somewhere there were words for him, for Jesse, the exact words that would explain his life. But he did not know them.”
We might say, then, that in an abstract sense Oates’s basic theme is flux vs. stability. Her vision is compelling, and compellingly real—her characters racing desperately along behind their living consciousness, “talking” faster and faster in the effort to define a still point.
It is clear, however, that this vision puts special strain on a writer’s basic tool. For the vision of failing language must be captured in language. This paradox accounts, in part, for Oates’s highly characteristic style. She is a wit—perhaps a great one; she wields a mordant, gnawing cleverness of style, and great energy. But it is a wit of the nerves, and not of words. No Peter de Vries, Oates writes not puns and witticisms but combinations of conflicting impulses, brilliant spurts of language that catch the complexity of emotional life without making it easily available.
At its best, the style is disquieting and creative. But one feels, not seldom, that Oates’s complexity is being made, not found, that here energy is feeding on itself rather than on new perceptions. In the flood of language, something is lost. Instead of imagining fictions into being, into palpability, the style imagines people and objects out of being, dissolves them into explosions of words. The characters sometimes become merely allegorical—Jesse’s two fathers in Wonderland, for example. Harte (poor, desperate) kills a family but Jesse is saved; Pedersen (rich, confident) preserves his family but “kills” Jesse. The symmetry is instructive but too neat.
This is to say, finally, that Oates cannot always keep her style from becoming a rhetoric. The slightly intrusive commentary of the early stories can be heard still speaking in the most recent ones. It has an identity of its own; it becomes a recognizable “voice.” One suspects, moreover, that this voice could be objectified, made into an actual fiction. And, in fact, this is what has happened. The Poisoned Kiss collects stories “translated” from the “Portuguese” of an imaginary author named Fernandes. Through the illusory “Fernandes,” Oates’s own authorial voice has become fictive—decayed by the instability of words. It could not have remained exempt, stable. It, too, suffers the violence of reality.
To this fictional world Christianity seems irrelevant. Like other modern writers, Oates poses a serious question to the theological critic—how to make a valid theological statement about works in which theology seems unimportant.
We may assert that doctrinal religion—“mere Christianity”—must be relevant to the lives and predicaments of her characters, if we regard them as “real” people. The very secularity of this violent America is frightening and challenging to a religion which professes to explain hatred and hopelessness. But these people are not real. They are fictions, created for a definite reason. And in this framing rationale, I think, Christianity has no real place. When it appears in the stories, it appears as stage furniture, sometimes as part of the symbolic materials. There are occasional priests and seminaries, but no confrontation with the Gospel. “Years ago,” she writes, “he had supposed Sundays sacred, his family had gone to church, but what happened there seemed to him never related to anything else: a game, a bore.”
This irrelevance is, however, explicable. Any clear revelation would contradict what we have defined as an essential point of Oates’s fiction: that there is no essence, no still point, merely a coming and going of sensation and reflection to which we assign names for temporary convenience. Correspondingly, the phantasmagoria of personality makes basic theological concepts unworkable. “How is it possible,” she asks, “to commit sin, that is, acts of conscious will, in a world of illusion—the most terrifying of all illusions being the mastery of the self by the ego?”
Of course, a world of illusion demands its own religion—a magic of naming. Wishing makes it so: this is a faith too, perhaps the only possible faith in the flow of illusion. Secularity has its own rituals; an America without a God will worship guns and fire. “The absolute dream, if dreamed, must deal with death.…” But to awaken us to the reality of our condition is itself a moral act; there is strong compassion in such a work as them. If Oates has yet to write a great book, she has nonetheless made a unique voice and vision. And a solid past of brilliant fiction, competent poetry, and subtle criticism makes the larger achievement a possibility, at least, among the many books sure to come.
LIONEL BASNEY
Lionel Basney is associate professor of English at Houghton College, Houghton, New York.
