Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Belatedly, after the father’s death from alcoholism and diabetes, when Rosemary and her mother have been reconciled, Rosemary learns from her mother of her parents’ initial, misguided idealism regarding the experiment with Fern:

  We thought . . . your father and I . . . that Fern would be with us forever. Your part of the study would end when you went off to school, but we’d keep working with Fern. Eventually you’d go to college . . . and she’d stay home with us.

  It is difficult to believe that any behavioral psychologist at a reputable university could be so naïve, but not difficult to believe that the nefarious Cooke has manipulated and exploited his trusting family as well as poor Fern and his eager and ardent cadre of graduate student assistants.

  Fowler seems to have thoroughly researched her fascinating subject. Some of the most engaging passages in We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves involve historical information provided by Rosemary who has researched the subject obsessively herself. (She discovers papers written by her father online, in which she is the behavioral psychologist’s child-subject.) Among the earliest experimenters in the United States were a couple named Kellogg who, in the 1930s, brought a chimpanzee home to live with them: “The stated purpose was to compare and contrast developing abilities, linguistic and otherwise. This was the stated premise of our study as well.” (The Kellogg experiment ended ignominiously with the “clever, docile little Gua” dying soon after being shipped back to a research lab.) With the exception of the most famous of research chimps Washoe, whose alleged ability to sign in American Sign Language was the stimulus for Herbert Terrace’s experiment, most of the chimpanzee stories have tragic endings. Taken into human families, “loved” and fussed over, then abruptly sent back to research labs or farms, the young chimps soon sickened and died. Ebullient and irrepressible Nim Chimpsky, dropped by his researcher, was himself shipped to medical labs until one of his former graduate students launched a public fund that released him to an animal sanctuary in Texas where he died at the young age of twenty-six.

  Fowler suggests that the chimpanzee experiments might have been misdirected. Instead of studying how well Fern could communicate with her human family, Professor Cooke might have studied how well Rosemary could communicate with Fern. “Here is the question our father refused to admit he was asking: can Rosemary learn to speak to chimpanzees?” While very young, Fern and Rosemary engage in preverbal idioglossia, “a secret language of grunts and gestures” which Professor Cooke chooses not to report.

  From the time she is one month old to the time of Fern’s expulsion, when Rosemary is five, Rosemary never knows a day when she isn’t the “twin” of a chimpanzee.

  I’d scarcely known a moment alone. She was my twin, my fun-house mirror, my whirlwind other self. . . . I loved her like a sister, but she was the only sister I ever had.

  After Fern’s departure, she senses herself a “counterfeit human”; she is cast adrift amid human children in grade school, who perceive her as “monkey girl.” She will always stir ambivalent responses in others because she doesn’t seem quite human. It’s the “uncanny-valley” response: “the human aversion to things that look almost but not quite like people.”

  While Fowler’s earlier novels Sarah Canary (1991) and Sister Noon (2001) are populated with strikingly rendered, serio-comic-grotesque characters, the hapless protagonist of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is numbed and inexpressive as one who has lost the most intense love of her life, and has been afflicted with amnesia regarding the loss; it is her “chimp nature” she has lost, as well as the actual Fern. Both she and her older brother Lowell, who runs away from home as a teenager, are presented as “traumatized” siblings—“Lowell appeared unstable in the most literal sense, like someone who’s been pushed off his balance.” Where Rosemary is a kind of cipher, drained of personality, Lowell is a militant, reckless animal rights zealot, wanted by the FBI for his participation in “domestic terrorism” as a member of the Animal Liberation Front. Lowell is nearly caught by authorities, but manages to escape, and his whereabouts are unknown at the conclusion of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.

  Given the almost entirely retrospective nature of Rosemary Cooke’s story, in which all that is significant in her life has happened before she was five, Fowler is challenged to make Rosemary’s present-day life as an undergraduate at UC-Davis engaging. There is a disadvantage in telling a story so obliquely—nothing really interesting happens to Rosemary until page seventy-seven, when she finally reveals that her lost sister Fern is a chimpanzee: “Some of you will have figured that out already. Others may feel it was irritatingly coy of me to have withheld Fern’s essential simian-ness for so long.” The prospect of a “premature and calamitous end” is dangled before the reader.

  We Are Completely Beside Ourselves provides an intimate, child’s-eye look at a Midwestern academic household of the 1980s. Before Fern is brought into their lives, the Cookes are presumably an ordinarily happy family; thereafter, they are revealed as dysfunctional, inhabiting a domestic limbo somewhere between satire and sorrow. Rosemary’s recollections come in fragments, a relentless dirge of loss; it may be difficult for the reader to fully sympathize with such trauma, as even Rosemary admits that she understood that her simian sister was “getting out of control” after Fern kills and disembowels a kitten in front of her. The stunned child is forced to think:

  That there was something inside Fern I didn’t know. That I didn’t know her in the way I’d always thought I did. That Fern had secrets and not the good kind.

  Rosemary will learn years later that there are other, equally alarming incidents involving Fern which she witnessed—but claimed not to recall: bitings, a savage and unprovoked attack against a graduate student, a lawsuit against the university.

  Once a loquacious little girl, like her simian twin a whirligig of energy, by the time we meet Rosemary Cooke she has become a stunted and suppressed young woman of college age, whose “monkey-girlishness” is in such denial that she has a panic attack while watching “The Man in the Iron Mask,” a parable of twins—“Something was rising from the crypt, and what I did know was that I didn’t want to see what it was.”

  By limiting her narration to Rosemary’s perspective, Fowler has sacrificed the myriad possibilities of alternative points of view that might have made of the story something more than a domestic catastrophe not unlike any exploration of a childhood trauma—death, loss, betrayal, abuse, incomprehension—that has crippled the survivor for life; the more considerable achievements of The White Bone and Project Nim arise in part from their wider range of viewpoints, which amplify and deepen their subjects. But Fowler’s decision allows for the emotional intensity of narrowness, as in the quintessential contemporary memoir in which crisis, collapse, and resolution are the point, not an amplitude of experience or illumination, even as the novel’s trajectory suggests the coming-of-age ritual of the young adult novel in which, in the end, there is uplift, and hope: Rosemary is reconciled with her mother, with whom she has written a children’s book about Fern; she has become a kindergarten teacher (“as close to living with a chimp troop as I’ve been able to get so far”); she and her mother live near Fern, now kept at an animal sanctuary in —. The novel ends with a poignant image, the more precious as it is transient, of sister-sister affirmation, when Rosemary visits Fern after an interval of twenty-two years, bearing a poker-chip talisman of their childhood:

  Fern stood heavily and came to me. She placed her own large hand opposite mine, fingers curling slightly, scratching, as if she could reach through and take the poker chip. I signed my name again with my free hand, and she signed it back with hers. . . . Then she rested her forehead on the glass. I did the same and we stood there for a very long time, face-to-face. . . .

  I didn’t know what she was thinking or feeling. Her body had become unfamiliar to me. And yet, at the very same time, I recognized everything about her. My sister, Fern. In the whole wide world, my only red poker
chip. As if I were looking in a mirror.

  Life may be meandering and irresolute, but an experiment must come to an end.

  We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

  By Karen Joy Fowler

  WIINDIGOO JUSTICE:

  LOUISE ERDRICH

  The loss of their land was lodged deep inside them forever.

  Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

  Dense with meaning, both symbolic and literal, the first scene of Louise Erdrich’s fourteenth novel, The Round House, involves an arduous attempt at the pruning of small trees that have “attacked my parents’ house at the foundation.” Only just seedlings with very few leaves, these small predators have nonetheless managed to squeeze through cracks in shingles and into a wall: “I thought it was a wonder the treelets had persisted through a North Dakota winter.” The foundations of the Coutts household are under assault from without; father and son will unite to protect it, but belatedly, and incompletely. The narrator Joe, thirteen years old at this time, in 1988, continues to “pry at the hidden rootlings” even after his father, a tribal judge, has given up the difficult task; so too will Joe, despite his youth, persevere in a desperate quest for justice in the wake of a brutal assault against his mother, even as Bazil Coutts, his father, finds himself powerless and humiliated.

  The setting of The Round House is a Native American reservation in North Dakota, near the fictitious small town of Hoopdance, in which “no one didn’t have a clan”; one of those lovingly annotated communities familiar to readers of Louise Erdrich’s fiction in which Native American and mixed-blood inhabitants “knew place in the world and [their] relationship to all other beings” and “Nothing that happens, nothing, is not connected here by blood.” Less idiosyncratically populated than Erdrich’s more characteristic novels Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House is a chronicle of individuals whose identities are inexorably bound up with their families, clans, tribal and interlocking histories—“an impenetrable undergrowth of names and liaisons”; it’s a mixture of lyrical narration, regional history, and digressive tall tales narrated by tribal elders that allow the author to establish the contemporary in the ancestral/mythic past. The novel resembles previous works of multigenerational fiction by Erdrich in which a crime, usually committed by a non-native against Native Americans, is the catalyst of a sequence of events involving decades and generations, but its tone is gravely analytical; a work of confessional summation, a looking-back over years, not unlike a legal brief. Instead of Erdrich’s multiple, colorfully unreliable narrators, The Round House is narrated by a single, reliable individual, Joe Coutts, speaking of a crucial period in his life and in the lives of his parents. Joe addresses the reader from an indeterminate present tense in which we know only of his adult self that he is married, and has become a lawyer like his father, with a law degree from the University of Minnesota; we understand that, whatever horror has been perpetrated at the start of The Round House, whatever violation of the soul of the Native American community, this Native American witness has survived intact.

  “WHERE IS YOUR MOTHER?”—this abrupt question, put to Joe by his father on a Sunday afternoon, is the first indication that something is wrong in the Coutts household. Joe’s mother, Geraldine, who works in the Bureau of Indian Affairs of their reservation as a tribal enrollment specialist, has been at the office just a little too long: “Her absence stopped time.” Immediately Joe becomes anxious:

  I was aware that what was happening was in the nature of something unusual. A missing mother. A thing that didn’t happen to the son of a judge, even one who lived on a reservation.

  Added to the sense of urgency is the knowledge that Geraldine Coutts’s job is “to know everybody’s secrets.” Not unlike the novelist-proprietor of a fictional landscape who is privy to interrelations and facts about individuals about which the individuals themselves might be ignorant:

  Children of incest, molestation, rape, adultery, fornication beyond reservation boundaries or within, children of white farmers, bankers, nuns, BIA [Bureau of Indian Affairs] superintendents, police, and priests. My mother kept her files locked in a safe. No one else knew the combination of the safe.

  Father and son drive hurriedly to the reservation to look for Joe’s mother, who unaccountably speeds past them in her car, on her way home; when they discover her in the garage of their house, still in her car, it’s immediately obvious that something has happened to her: “I could see it in the set of her body—something fixed, rigid, wrong.” Erdrich skillfully dramatizes the slow-dawning horror of the thirteen-year-old Joe as he’s forced to confront the fact that his beloved, beautiful, so-capable mother has been unspeakably violated, and that their lives as a family—a relatively privileged Native American family—have been irrevocably changed.

  It is not giving away too much of The Round House to note that Geraldine has been the victim of a particularly brutal rape and beating by an individual in the community whom she knows, and could identify to authorities, if she were not terrified of the consequences for herself and for her family of such an identification. (Yet more horribly, the rapist sprinkled gasoline on her with the intention of setting her afire, except the desperate woman managed to escape from him. The smell of gasoline on his mother’s clothing seems mysterious to Joe but not to the reader who understands immediately its meaning.) In any case, the situation is exacerbated by the traumatized victim’s inability to precisely recall where the assault took place: on tribal or North Dakota land.

  This ambiguity, this uncertainty, precipitates another sort of nightmare, a legal one: for it isn’t clear if the assault against Geraldine Coutts should be investigated by the State of North Dakota, the small town of Hoopdance, N.D., or by tribal police; initially, it isn’t even clear who’d committed it, an Indian or a non-Indian. Joe thinks:

  I already knew . . . that these questions would swirl around the facts. I already knew, too, that these questions would not change the facts. But they would inevitably change the way we sought justice.

  One of the (minor) problems with The Round House is the seeming precocity of the thirteen-year-old Joe who isn’t regarded, within the world of the novel, as exceptional or prodigious. Even less believable is his good friend Cappy who speaks, as surely no thirteen-year-old North Dakota boy has ever spoken, of loving a girl his age with a “true love”: “The Creator made us for each other. Me here. Zelia there. Space was put between us by human error. . . . Every bit of what we did was made in heaven.” (Cappy’s language would be difficult to take seriously no matter his age.) Interludes in which the boys behave with self-conscious “boyishness” are particularly forced, and feel like filler amid the serious narrative. The reader is advised to suspend disbelief when Joe seems to shift character, for Joe is our only witness in The Round House, the bearer of the author’s outrage, like those sharp-eyed child-witnesses in Erdrich’s Shadow Tag (2010) who see into the sick, festering heart of their parents’ marriage as neither of their parents can see and take on some of the omniscience of the author. Since the opening pages of Erdrich’s debut novel Love Medicine, Erdrich’s vision has been suffused with “magical realism”; The Round House is not so suffused, but its language is often highly charged and metaphorical, and not merely, or primarily, literal. Joe is the author’s instrument for seeing with a poet’s eye:

  The sun fell onto the kitchen floor in golden pools, but it was an ominous radiance, like the piercing light behind a western cloud. A trance of dread came over me, a taste of death like sour milk. . . . Her serene reserve was gone—a nervous horror welled across her face. The bruises had come out and her eyes were darkly rimmed like a raccoon’s. A sick green pulsed around her temples. Her jaw was indigo. Her eyebrows . . . were held tight by anguish. Two vertical lines, black as if drawn by a marker, creased her forehead.

  And, as Joe approaches the “round house,” the likely scene of the assault:

  A low moan of air
passed through the cracks in the silvery logs of the round house. I started with emotion. The grieving cry seemed emitted by the structure itself. The sound filled and flooded me. Finally, it ceased. I decided to go forward. . . . I caught the faint odor of gasoline. . . .

  . . . He had attacked her here. The old ceremonial place had told me—cried out to me in my mother’s anguished voice, I now thought, and tears started into my eyes. I let them flood down my cheeks. Nobody was here to see me so I did not even wipe them away. I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

  Of course, the very act of reading fiction is after all a willing, or willed, “suspension of disbelief.”

  The “round house” is a derelict tribal building, used, pre-1978, for religious ceremonies at a time when Indians were forbidden to practice their religion by white authorities. Surreptitiously, Indians would gather at the round house and if white authorities raided the building, “water drums and eagle feathers and medicine bags and birchbark scrolls and sacred pipes were in a couple of motorboats halfway across the lake. The Bible was out and people were reading from Ecclesiastes.” That Geraldine Coutts is raped and beaten in a “sacred space” is the more bitterly ironic, like the (legal) statute that protects a non-native from being prosecuted in a tribal court.

  DESCRIBED BY ITS AUTHOR as “a suspense novel masking a crusade” (Time, January 14, 2013), The Round House is a painstakingly narrated account of memory, and of guilt bound up with memory; if the novel is a sort of crusade, galvanized by the author’s outrage against the incursion of federal criminal law into tribal law and custom, it is also an elaborately structured literary work in which polemics are subordinate to the author’s sympathy for her (troubled, imperfect) characters and “suspense” is rather more theoretical than evident. Certainly no one would confuse The Round House, or its yet more minimally structured predecessor Shadow Tag (2010), with a generic suspense novel. Like earlier works of fiction by Erdrich, it is indebted to those novels of William Faulkner in which a brooding and eloquent narrator obsesses over an event, criminal or taboo, that comes to acquire a powerful symbolic significance; in Faulkner, the crimes of unrepentant slave owners like Thomas Sutpen (Absalom, Absalom!, 1936) constitute the “original sin” of an entire slave-owning society, the inhumanity of privileged whites against helpless blacks, and the tragic consequences that follow for both races. Recall the radiantly mad vision of Johanna Burden of Light in August, whose impassioned and torturous speech is very likely Faulkner’s own, as she evokes the violent deaths of her “carpetbagger” Burden relatives who’d been devoted to the cause of freed Negroes in Mississippi: