Joyce Carol Oates, Chappaquiddick, & the Cthulhu Mythos -- Garbo
This post contains some sad details about true crime, so if that's more than is good for you at this dark time, you can always go find the post later in the blog archive. On the other hand, if you are like me, sometimes finding a way to look at terrible truths while still maintaining sanity and emotional balance seems right. If you are feeling the pain of many really bad human choices, this post might express something close to what you are thinking and feeling.
This is #5 in the Weirdo Writers series, but I didn't have room to jam that information (plus a colon!) into this week's title. This series of posts is about writers who've created fiction which could be sorted into the genre known as The Weird. Much of The Weird has been influenced by the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, whose body of work about monsters who live in caverns or on the ocean floor has been grouped by later writers and literary critics as the Cthulhu Mythos.
Cthulhu is that tentacle-face squid guy, often depicted with a scaly body and with wings, who Lovecraft co-celebrates, alongside the dreaded Yg, as a main monster among the squad Lovecraft called the Old Ones and/or the Deep Ones.
Another of the creatures was Dagon, a hideous creepy destructive force who arose from the watery depths to make demands on humans. In the second illustration below, warrior priests hold back villagers as a maiden is given to appease Dagon's wrath.
From the story "Dagon":
Lovecraft famously loathed certain races and cultures, while celebrating others. This white-supremacist worldview was ignored or downplayed by his colleagues and admirers for too long, but today's readers are more than aware of Lovecraft's intolerance of those he felt were racially or culturally undeveloped or simply criminal / evil.
And yet, like the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart who raved about sexual sin and then got caught breaking all kinds of rules (in addition to fornication), one can find oneself able to worship at one temple and then debase oneself at another.
From a news report:
In a famous video, Swaggart apologizes to his wife, to his congregation, and to God, while wearing the mask from "Phantom of the Opera." No, I'm kidding. That's his face.
The shakiness and confusion of Swaggart's moment of downfall and his attempt at redemption both remind me of Senator Edward Kennedy's accounts of his deadly accident. On Martha's Vineyard, Kennedy faced criminal charges stemming from a crash in which a car he was driving went off the road and flipped upside-down in deep water. The accident killed long-time Democratic party worker Mary Jo Kopechne, pictured here.
And here's lonely spot where the car went off a narrow dirt road -- there was no guardrail there on the night of the accident.
Kennedy famously both escaped the accident and failed to report the crash for hours. Later, he explained his state of mind:
Though the Senator explained that he'd simply been driving Mary Jo Kopechne back to her accommodations after a regatta party, many questioned why a married man with children and a pregnant wife at home was at a private event with several male friends and several single women. Kopechne's purse and hotel key were still back at the scene of the party even though she was supposed to be on her way to the ferry to go to the hotel where the female staffers were staying. Kennedy's response:
This tragedy happened in 1969, and writer Joyce Carol Oates has said that the incident haunted her for years. Here's a photo of Oates from the 1960s, when her first story collection was getting a lot of notice.
Lingering thoughts about Chappaquiddick eventually led to Oates' novella Black Water, much in the way that the torture-slaying of teenager Sylvia Likens in Indianapolis sent fellow writer Kate Millett to the typewriter to write the meditative book The Basement.
Here's an author photo of Oates at the time Black Water was being promoted.
Nonfiction and fiction books based on true crime have been bestsellers from the 1960s onward.
Neither The Basement nor Black Water are in the tradition of true-crime fiction, in which the main questions are usually about what makes crazy people tick and why we fail to protect the vulnerable. In contrast, both Millett's and Oates' books see the murder of young women as socio-political and as almost inevitable, the result of struggles over power added to the human refusal to examine the shadowy parts of the Self.
Ten years after Oates' 1992 Chappaquiddick-based book came out, there was a wave of Goth-inspired dark YA and adult fiction featuring female victimization, of which The Lovely Bones (later made into a film) is a prime example.
But Oates' Black Water is a very, very different book than Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones -- though both stories of murder are written from the victim's perspective. The latter is spiritual, meant to be an examination from a removed perspective which helps people understand and work out what happened without so much close-up suffering. But in Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates does the opposite: she takes us right into the submerged car, not in the exploitative look-what-thos-monster-did crime writing I associate with prosecutor-turned-writer Vincent Bugliosi, but more in way that says "A truly terrible thing happened, and this is the exact thing in all its terribleness." Or rather, I think that's what Oates intended to do.
Instead, I feel she took us all into the realm of The Weird. As I've mentioned, H. P. Lovecraft's monster squad is the core of early Weird fiction, and the creatures are omnipresent simultaneously with also being hidden in the depths. They can be summoned, but it's less that they were in one place and have traveled to the altar. It's more that they've been summoned up, called into being. And in Black Water, the dying character Kelly Kelleher (representing of course Mary Jo Kopechne) sees people -- hallucinatory visions, spirits, ghosts, or perhaps family members from the Other Side -- as when Harry Potter sees his parents in that magic mirror.
Speaking of the Harry Potter series, it was a very strange image of Daniel Radcliffe in the absurd dark comedy "Swiss Army Man" that flashed into my mind when I remembered reading Black Water in the early 1990s. In the book, the character of the Senator uses the young woman's body as a combination step-stool and flotation device to get himself out of the the sinking car. There is a scene in "Swiss Army Man" in which Daniel Radcliffe's character is dead and a marooned man uses his lifeless body to leave the desert island by floating above the waves.
I was both surprised and unsurprised to find myself thinking of gross comedy movies while also contemplating the real events on which Black Water is based. But that "how can I be feeling all of this at once?" experience is part of the nature of The Weird, to my mind anyway. It's like the grim jokes doctors tell each other after fourteen hours in the emergency department, of course. But there's also a kind of mental distancing that happens with me when reading Weird fiction with truly terrible things in it. I can look if I don't get too close.
Like half the world, I have some PTSD symptoms, and I've often found it helpful to use the high-in-the-stands-of-the-sports-arena method to cope with difficult memories. From way up, I can look down with concern and objective observation at some far-back moment from my life, and the realness of it can come through better when I'm not teeming with drama and emotional response to the event.
In a similar vein, I've observed the casual, even comedic uses of Cthulhu's image in current culture. Probably if you look on Etsy, you can find a tentacle-face-monster oven mitt. We need invented monsters, I guess.
Social media has brought awfulness into the consciousness of young and old, city mice and country mice, intellectuals and hardworking farm folk. It's too much for the human mind. We can't look directly int the abyss; we have to make metaphors and art and philosophy and folkloric studies.
Back to Harry Potter: You know, for a family-oriented book/movie series, we get a lot of what-lurks-in-the-deep stuff, starting with the giant squid in the lake on the Hogwarts grounds.
Did you know there's a whole fan base convinced that Dumbledore is an animagus who turns himself into the Cthulhu-like squid? You can watch an entire YouTube video about the idea
Then in another book/movie, we have the Hogwarts students kidnapped by the mer-people, in a murky frightening world which doesn't exactly have one humming "Under the Sea."
In the rescue challenge, Harry struggles to wake up the captives (who look more dead than asleep) to get them to free themselves. Failing that, he must figure out who to save, how to get those people unbound, while also fighting out aggressive sea-creatures.
And of course, as the saga advances and readers get older, the imagery gets even darker. Not only are some poor souls lost and trapped in the murk as inferi with skull-like faces, slimy white skin covering emaciated limbs like those of death-camp survivors, but Harry has been tasked with forcing his weeping mentor to drink a potion which stirs Dumbledore's deepest regrets, his sense of failure, and utter painful despair.
Going back to Joyce Carol Oates' Black Water: The novella won a number of awards, and for good reason. Beneath the terrible cynicism -- the imagery of the Senator clambering over a young woman's body to save himself is a clear metaphor for how many women were once stepped on to boost a successful man's career -- and the heartbreaking details (there was a long time window in which both the fictional and the real-life victim could have been rescued), there is meaning in what happened when Kennedy and Kopechne got into that car. And this meaning is on two levels, one of which involves The Weird and one which does not.
The latter is simply the meaning of the real Mary Jo Kopechne's life. In a typical true-crime book, the dead girl is always pretty much just the dead girl, right? Pretty or not, well-liked or not, virtuous or edgy, but at the end of the day, just someone who got killed.
Oates has not tried to tell Kopechne's true life story -- it's a novella, after all -- but she's painted a vivid, realistic portrait of Kelly Kelleher, a woman in her twenties struglling to make life work. She was a person before she became a victim of a famous man, and in Black Water, Oates shows us that.
So that was the non-Weird meaning Oates gave the events and her charactrs. But the marky, confusing, changing, floating memories which fills the pages take us out of the real and into The Weird. This gives the readers of this morality play a sense that what happens to the Senator and Kelly Kelleher is more than a set of events we are just observing. The actual crash with its aftermath is something that affected us all in real life, not just as a news event, but because we all voted and decided whether the Kennedy family would be viable politically. We all had views on romance, marriage, rules, drinking, expectations placed on public figures, and the role of religion. And we were (and are) inside our skins two people at the same time. At least two people.
Like the cartoon characters with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, we go back and forth being a self we know and a self we'd rather not know. We're up on the shore and we're down in the murky depths with Cthulhu and Yg and Dagon. Then when we emerge, we're confused and sense that things happened to us in our "absence." Yet we also inutit that we must integrate our conflicting wants and needs and make some allowance for our shadow selves if we are going to complete any of the potential growth cycle opportunities.
At this point, I want to include a quote from astrologer-author Dane Rudhyar on the nature of Pluto, which rules intense power surges, violence, compulsions and the parts of human nature we hide from ourselves. These last, in Rudhyar's view are both shared and universal.
He writes about lessons we can learn, even when life is very painful and feels terrible and cruel. The implication is that to ignore the lesson(s) is to take the meaning away from tragic events, and make all the destruction pointless.
Here's an excerpt from Rudhyar's essay on Pluto:
"...If the person experiencing the karmic consequences of previous acts learns from these experiences, this is fine; but the karmic force does not care. A society which punishes the criminal according to a fixed law with an impersonal character is normally unconcerned with what the punishment does to the person who broke the law and was caught doing it. For this reason justice is said to be 'blind.' Rare are the cases where a 'punishment' is meted purposely to create a controlled situation providing a deep catharsis and the possibility of moral and social rebirth."
I feel Oates' treatment of the Chappaquiddick nightmare is a search for some kind of lesson or meaning, while also acknowledging that the process is difficult, confusing, and soul-wearying. But the author's insistence on telling the story, using what could be described as elements of The Weird, may be better than letting the story fade away like a bad dream hoped to be forgotten.
To close, here's a charming photo of Joyce Carol Oates from about ten years ago:
If you are interested, this post (from another Blogspot writer) goes into more depth about the novella Black Water.
Next week: We leave the realm of The Weird and start on a series of funny people who wrote books on my favorite shelf at the Indianapolis Public Library when I was a teenager.
This is #5 in the Weirdo Writers series, but I didn't have room to jam that information (plus a colon!) into this week's title. This series of posts is about writers who've created fiction which could be sorted into the genre known as The Weird. Much of The Weird has been influenced by the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, whose body of work about monsters who live in caverns or on the ocean floor has been grouped by later writers and literary critics as the Cthulhu Mythos.
Cthulhu is that tentacle-face squid guy, often depicted with a scaly body and with wings, who Lovecraft co-celebrates, alongside the dreaded Yg, as a main monster among the squad Lovecraft called the Old Ones and/or the Deep Ones.
Another of the creatures was Dagon, a hideous creepy destructive force who arose from the watery depths to make demands on humans. In the second illustration below, warrior priests hold back villagers as a maiden is given to appease Dagon's wrath.
From the story "Dagon":
Lovecraft famously loathed certain races and cultures, while celebrating others. This white-supremacist worldview was ignored or downplayed by his colleagues and admirers for too long, but today's readers are more than aware of Lovecraft's intolerance of those he felt were racially or culturally undeveloped or simply criminal / evil.
And yet, like the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart who raved about sexual sin and then got caught breaking all kinds of rules (in addition to fornication), one can find oneself able to worship at one temple and then debase oneself at another.
From a news report:
In a famous video, Swaggart apologizes to his wife, to his congregation, and to God, while wearing the mask from "Phantom of the Opera." No, I'm kidding. That's his face.
The shakiness and confusion of Swaggart's moment of downfall and his attempt at redemption both remind me of Senator Edward Kennedy's accounts of his deadly accident. On Martha's Vineyard, Kennedy faced criminal charges stemming from a crash in which a car he was driving went off the road and flipped upside-down in deep water. The accident killed long-time Democratic party worker Mary Jo Kopechne, pictured here.
And here's lonely spot where the car went off a narrow dirt road -- there was no guardrail there on the night of the accident.
Kennedy famously both escaped the accident and failed to report the crash for hours. Later, he explained his state of mind:
Though the Senator explained that he'd simply been driving Mary Jo Kopechne back to her accommodations after a regatta party, many questioned why a married man with children and a pregnant wife at home was at a private event with several male friends and several single women. Kopechne's purse and hotel key were still back at the scene of the party even though she was supposed to be on her way to the ferry to go to the hotel where the female staffers were staying. Kennedy's response:
This tragedy happened in 1969, and writer Joyce Carol Oates has said that the incident haunted her for years. Here's a photo of Oates from the 1960s, when her first story collection was getting a lot of notice.
Lingering thoughts about Chappaquiddick eventually led to Oates' novella Black Water, much in the way that the torture-slaying of teenager Sylvia Likens in Indianapolis sent fellow writer Kate Millett to the typewriter to write the meditative book The Basement.
Here's an author photo of Oates at the time Black Water was being promoted.
Nonfiction and fiction books based on true crime have been bestsellers from the 1960s onward.
Neither The Basement nor Black Water are in the tradition of true-crime fiction, in which the main questions are usually about what makes crazy people tick and why we fail to protect the vulnerable. In contrast, both Millett's and Oates' books see the murder of young women as socio-political and as almost inevitable, the result of struggles over power added to the human refusal to examine the shadowy parts of the Self.
Ten years after Oates' 1992 Chappaquiddick-based book came out, there was a wave of Goth-inspired dark YA and adult fiction featuring female victimization, of which The Lovely Bones (later made into a film) is a prime example.
But Oates' Black Water is a very, very different book than Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones -- though both stories of murder are written from the victim's perspective. The latter is spiritual, meant to be an examination from a removed perspective which helps people understand and work out what happened without so much close-up suffering. But in Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates does the opposite: she takes us right into the submerged car, not in the exploitative look-what-thos-monster-did crime writing I associate with prosecutor-turned-writer Vincent Bugliosi, but more in way that says "A truly terrible thing happened, and this is the exact thing in all its terribleness." Or rather, I think that's what Oates intended to do.
Instead, I feel she took us all into the realm of The Weird. As I've mentioned, H. P. Lovecraft's monster squad is the core of early Weird fiction, and the creatures are omnipresent simultaneously with also being hidden in the depths. They can be summoned, but it's less that they were in one place and have traveled to the altar. It's more that they've been summoned up, called into being. And in Black Water, the dying character Kelly Kelleher (representing of course Mary Jo Kopechne) sees people -- hallucinatory visions, spirits, ghosts, or perhaps family members from the Other Side -- as when Harry Potter sees his parents in that magic mirror.
Speaking of the Harry Potter series, it was a very strange image of Daniel Radcliffe in the absurd dark comedy "Swiss Army Man" that flashed into my mind when I remembered reading Black Water in the early 1990s. In the book, the character of the Senator uses the young woman's body as a combination step-stool and flotation device to get himself out of the the sinking car. There is a scene in "Swiss Army Man" in which Daniel Radcliffe's character is dead and a marooned man uses his lifeless body to leave the desert island by floating above the waves.
I was both surprised and unsurprised to find myself thinking of gross comedy movies while also contemplating the real events on which Black Water is based. But that "how can I be feeling all of this at once?" experience is part of the nature of The Weird, to my mind anyway. It's like the grim jokes doctors tell each other after fourteen hours in the emergency department, of course. But there's also a kind of mental distancing that happens with me when reading Weird fiction with truly terrible things in it. I can look if I don't get too close.
Like half the world, I have some PTSD symptoms, and I've often found it helpful to use the high-in-the-stands-of-the-sports-arena method to cope with difficult memories. From way up, I can look down with concern and objective observation at some far-back moment from my life, and the realness of it can come through better when I'm not teeming with drama and emotional response to the event.
In a similar vein, I've observed the casual, even comedic uses of Cthulhu's image in current culture. Probably if you look on Etsy, you can find a tentacle-face-monster oven mitt. We need invented monsters, I guess.
Social media has brought awfulness into the consciousness of young and old, city mice and country mice, intellectuals and hardworking farm folk. It's too much for the human mind. We can't look directly int the abyss; we have to make metaphors and art and philosophy and folkloric studies.
Back to Harry Potter: You know, for a family-oriented book/movie series, we get a lot of what-lurks-in-the-deep stuff, starting with the giant squid in the lake on the Hogwarts grounds.
Did you know there's a whole fan base convinced that Dumbledore is an animagus who turns himself into the Cthulhu-like squid? You can watch an entire YouTube video about the idea
Then in another book/movie, we have the Hogwarts students kidnapped by the mer-people, in a murky frightening world which doesn't exactly have one humming "Under the Sea."
In the rescue challenge, Harry struggles to wake up the captives (who look more dead than asleep) to get them to free themselves. Failing that, he must figure out who to save, how to get those people unbound, while also fighting out aggressive sea-creatures.
And of course, as the saga advances and readers get older, the imagery gets even darker. Not only are some poor souls lost and trapped in the murk as inferi with skull-like faces, slimy white skin covering emaciated limbs like those of death-camp survivors, but Harry has been tasked with forcing his weeping mentor to drink a potion which stirs Dumbledore's deepest regrets, his sense of failure, and utter painful despair.
Going back to Joyce Carol Oates' Black Water: The novella won a number of awards, and for good reason. Beneath the terrible cynicism -- the imagery of the Senator clambering over a young woman's body to save himself is a clear metaphor for how many women were once stepped on to boost a successful man's career -- and the heartbreaking details (there was a long time window in which both the fictional and the real-life victim could have been rescued), there is meaning in what happened when Kennedy and Kopechne got into that car. And this meaning is on two levels, one of which involves The Weird and one which does not.
The latter is simply the meaning of the real Mary Jo Kopechne's life. In a typical true-crime book, the dead girl is always pretty much just the dead girl, right? Pretty or not, well-liked or not, virtuous or edgy, but at the end of the day, just someone who got killed.
Oates has not tried to tell Kopechne's true life story -- it's a novella, after all -- but she's painted a vivid, realistic portrait of Kelly Kelleher, a woman in her twenties struglling to make life work. She was a person before she became a victim of a famous man, and in Black Water, Oates shows us that.
So that was the non-Weird meaning Oates gave the events and her charactrs. But the marky, confusing, changing, floating memories which fills the pages take us out of the real and into The Weird. This gives the readers of this morality play a sense that what happens to the Senator and Kelly Kelleher is more than a set of events we are just observing. The actual crash with its aftermath is something that affected us all in real life, not just as a news event, but because we all voted and decided whether the Kennedy family would be viable politically. We all had views on romance, marriage, rules, drinking, expectations placed on public figures, and the role of religion. And we were (and are) inside our skins two people at the same time. At least two people.
Like the cartoon characters with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, we go back and forth being a self we know and a self we'd rather not know. We're up on the shore and we're down in the murky depths with Cthulhu and Yg and Dagon. Then when we emerge, we're confused and sense that things happened to us in our "absence." Yet we also inutit that we must integrate our conflicting wants and needs and make some allowance for our shadow selves if we are going to complete any of the potential growth cycle opportunities.
At this point, I want to include a quote from astrologer-author Dane Rudhyar on the nature of Pluto, which rules intense power surges, violence, compulsions and the parts of human nature we hide from ourselves. These last, in Rudhyar's view are both shared and universal.
He writes about lessons we can learn, even when life is very painful and feels terrible and cruel. The implication is that to ignore the lesson(s) is to take the meaning away from tragic events, and make all the destruction pointless.
Here's an excerpt from Rudhyar's essay on Pluto:
"...If the person experiencing the karmic consequences of previous acts learns from these experiences, this is fine; but the karmic force does not care. A society which punishes the criminal according to a fixed law with an impersonal character is normally unconcerned with what the punishment does to the person who broke the law and was caught doing it. For this reason justice is said to be 'blind.' Rare are the cases where a 'punishment' is meted purposely to create a controlled situation providing a deep catharsis and the possibility of moral and social rebirth."
I feel Oates' treatment of the Chappaquiddick nightmare is a search for some kind of lesson or meaning, while also acknowledging that the process is difficult, confusing, and soul-wearying. But the author's insistence on telling the story, using what could be described as elements of The Weird, may be better than letting the story fade away like a bad dream hoped to be forgotten.
To close, here's a charming photo of Joyce Carol Oates from about ten years ago:
If you are interested, this post (from another Blogspot writer) goes into more depth about the novella Black Water.
Next week: We leave the realm of The Weird and start on a series of funny people who wrote books on my favorite shelf at the Indianapolis Public Library when I was a teenager.
 |
| Garbo |
~adds "Black Water" to ever expanding book list~
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