Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates (review)

Gavin Cologne-Brookes applies pragmatist theory to the study of Joyce Carol Oates’s novels. He argues that the trajectory of her career starts with her emphasis on the private, the individual, and the exclusionary and then progresses to the public, the collective, and the inclusionary, but he does not endorse the opposition of the personal and political. Rather, he demonstrates that even Oates’s semi-autobiographical novels are social novels, thus her characters often reflect Oates’s own pragmatic approach to her art, life, and social engagement. The result is a major work not only in the scholarship on Oates but also in the application of pragmatist theory to literary analysis. Moreover, its wit and readability make it suitable for students who want to see a model of pragmatist criticism.

Although his focus is on Oates’s novels, Cologne-Brookes addresses Oates’s short stories, poetry, plays, and non-fiction as they pertain to his discussion. He argues convincingly that her short story “A Theory of Knowledge” (1977) is pivotal in her transition from introspection to social commentary—from depicting nightmares to managing them. He shows that Oates’s changing emphasis marks her as a significant practitioner of the social novel. In so doing, he makes good on his claim that “she is the nearest America could currently have to a national novelist” (p. 2).

In Dark Eyes on America, the dark eyes are a metaphor not only for Oates’s viewpoint but also for the viewpoint of the dark eyes in America. Cologne-Brookes examines Oates’s recurring motif of single-sightedness. Many of her characters have one eye, which implies not just their literal but also figurative viewpoint. The dark eyes that are on America also connote the dark eyes of the world. With works like New Heaven, New Earth (1974), Oates refers to an American cultural metaphor dominant from John Winthrop to the present: “The eyes of the world are upon us.” But those eyes are now looking askance.

Cologne-Brookes’s analysis yields significant readings of Oates’s major novels. For example, he shows the influence of Death of a Salesman (1949) on What I Lived For (1994), demonstrates that Broke Heat Blues (1999) and Blonde (2000) are thorough critiques of American ideology, and argues that Oates shares some significant motifs with Norman Mailer. Even Cologne-Brookes’s asides are trenchant—for example, his comparison of Foxfire’s (1993) melange of adolescent girls to Tom Sawyer’s gang and his remark that the philosophical differences between William James and Bertrand Russell reflect their cultural differences.

The strand of pragmatism most important to Cologne-Brookes’s readings is American: Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and John Dewey. Some readers would prefer a concentration on Charles Sanders Pierce, George Santayana, Richard Rorty, and especially the feminist pragmatism of Charlene Haddock Seigfried. Similarly, some readers would prefer more emphasis on Europeans such as Arthur Schopenhauer, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, and especially Bertrand Russell. Apparently Cologne-Brookes’s could have done so because his commentary on these theorists, which he puts in supporting roles, reveals a gift for concise distillations based on erudition and discernment. For example, he remarks that Schopenhauer’s pessimism actually facilitates Oates’s social engagement because it counterbalances the optimism of American pragmatism.

Those more interested in the Foucauldian and Lacanian facets of poststructuralism will find this study overly influenced by Derridean poststructuralism’s more thoroughgoing skepticism about epistemology, especially the nature of truth and the possibilities of verification. Similarly, those who believe that the world shapes individuals more than individuals shape the world will also be less sanguine than Cologne-Brookes about the individual’s ability to bring about social progress. It would be a boon if this study spurs on such analyses, but nobody could do all of that in one volume, much less apply it to a prolific author. Cologne-Brookes’s range is quite...