Love Eclipsed: Joyce Carol Oates Faustian Moral Vision

Nancy Ann Watanabe

The very fact of Oates' Nobel Prize nomination in 1998 is in dispute, as the Nobel Committee stresses again and again that lists of nominees are never given, only winners; Celestial Timepiece, one of the most complete Oates sites on the Net, tells us “It has been reported numerous times in books, and in newspaper and journal articles, that JCO has been nominated or has been on the ‘short list' several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I have yet to locate a report that bothers to cite the source of their information. Whether or not Oates has been nominated, though, Nancy Ann Watanabe's 1998 book Love Eclipsed is dedicated to the Nobel Committee.

Seemingly coming to research Oates thanks to a shared interest the two have in Yeats, upon whom Oates has written a number of critical articles (one of Watanabe's other books, Beloved Image, is on Yeats), Watanabe seems both attracted and repelled by her subject, but the attraction wins out. Early on, she wishes aloud that she could have worked with expurgated versions of Oates' novels that cut out the rampant profanity, yet more than once she notes that said profanity has its place in the work (and is usually a symbolic point that strengthens whatever case Watanabe happens to be making at the time). This odd dichotomy is a rare occurrence in a critical work; a look behind the work at the author. It's one of the things that keeps Love Eclipsed compelling.

Not that any connoisseur of Joyce Carol Oates won't find much to savor in this slim (less than two hundred pages) critical overview, covering works from Oates' second novel, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), to the Rosamond-Smith-penned You Can't Catch Me (1995), and touching on a good number of stories and novels in between. While many of the facets of the recurrent themes Oates touches on in her works are easily connected by the casual reader, Watanabe goes farther in, linking the works of Oates to their historical precursors, comparing the author (rightly) to such previous lights as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Rousseau.

Watanabe's treatment of Oates centers on two different lines of thought; the minor one (a surprise given the title) is on Oates' characters' recurrent hubris, the quest for omniscience in a world that values ignorance, and the downfalls that occur because of it. Her main focus, however, is astronomical; she looks at the Greek symbols of Sun, Moon, and Earth, and their meanings in ancient Greek literature, and maps these meanings onto Oates' characters in such a way as to trace Oates' pedigree back as far as Western literature will allow. The end result is not only a book that portrays Ms. Oates as one of the finest American novelists of the twentieth century (again, rightly), but one who fits in with classic writers going back three thousand years and more. The research is well-done, with the attention to detail a critical work like this calls for (and is lacking in more and more books of this stripe these days); this is, in a phrase, the good stuff.

The book's main failing is not Watanabe's, which makes it all the more annoying. University Press of America is obviously in dire need of a good proofreader/editor, or the person who does it for them (and there must be only one) must have been suffering one nasty hangover the day this manuscript hit his desk. It's rife with spelling and grammatical errors that distract the reader at least once per page, especially toward the end of the book. I wondered more than once if, assuming the Committee really was considering Oates for the prize, whether the shoddy editing of Love Eclipsed was any influence on them. I certainly hope not (though the relative merits of Oates and eventual 1998 winner Jose Saramago really make me wonder even more).

Be that as it may, if one can look past the errors in proofreading and printing, and if you will forgive me the necessity of a truly awful pun, Love Eclipsed is a garden of earthly (and celestial) delights for the Joyce Carol Oates fan, and a book which is capable of handing the open-minded reader a deeper understanding of one of the five or six finest working authors in America today. Very highly recommended.