Wonderland

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Leave her alone,” Noel said.

  “Shelley, you’re not well. Let me take you home,” Jesse said.

  “She isn’t sick, it’s just the flu.…”

  “She’s very sick.”

  “The flu! Everybody up here has the flu, it’s nothing serious!” Noel muttered.

  “She’s got jaundice. She might have hepatitis. She’s going to die, she’s going to die of liver failure.…” Jesse said in a slow, dream-like voice. He kept staring at her—was this Shelley, this child? This emaciated child?

  He blundered into something on the floor, stumbled. Shelley cried out. Jesse said in that same thick, slow, dream-like voice, as if each word of his were rising with difficulty through a thick element, an air made gaseous and vile, “You want to come with me, Shelley. This is all over. You know you want to come with me. Come home.”

  Shelley pressed her hands against her ears. “Don’t let him talk to me, Noel—he’ll get inside my head again—”

  Noel was breathing heavily. He inched alongside Jesse, his hands moving nervously, wildly, as if he wanted to take hold of Jesse but did not dare touch him. “You can’t just break us up like this!” he cried. “That girl is my property, she willed herself to me—we have been married in a solemn ceremony—she told me how you tried to kill her all her life! Enough is enough! Last night she started crashing and it took two of us to hold her down, and tonight you show up in our kitchen, it’s too goddam much for my head, doctor, you want me to crack up? I can’t take all these agitations! I don’t trust you, you could be with the C.I.A., you could be evil! Evil!” And Noel, so grim and rational at first, began to shriek wildly. He tried to wrestle Jesse backwards, toward the door. Jesse broke loose. Jesse shoved Noel aside and was surprised at how weak Noel was. Nothing to him after all! The Noel of all the letters!

  “Shelley,” Noel cried, “he’s the devil himself, the devil! Jump out the window and save yourself!”

  Jesse ran and grabbed her before she could move. Her arm was like a matchstick. “Don’t hurt me, don’t kill me.…” she whispered.

  “He himself is the devil,” Noel said from across the room. He was flailing his arms around. He seemed to be addressing other people in the room, an audience of sympathetic observers. “He’s here to take her back into bondage. She was free here, the Angel, I made her nothing at all, I ground her down to nothing and freed her! She didn’t even know her name, when I was through! I set her free and now he’s got her again, she’s giving in to him like a bitch of a woman, she’s ready to lie down and open her knees for him, little bitch—pus-stinking whore—after I freed her and made her my own wife—”

  Jesse felt a surge of joy. He had won.

  “—all you need is a bath in Laverne’s tub, I suppose! Get yourself ready for it, I suppose!” Noel said mockingly.

  Jesse held Shelley with one hand and with the other reached for the pistol. He was utterly calm, triumphant. He had won. Hatred rose warmly in him and swelled the cords of his neck, all the vessels of his proud manly body—just to pull the trigger, to shoot that man in the face! What joy, to shoot him in the face! But Shelley leaned against him so passively, like the child she had been years ago, and Noel himself now looked so defeated, his lips damp with saliva; that Jesse paused out of pity.… If he shot this man, this stranger, what then? A corpse. What then? A pool of blood draining out from the smashed face. What then? What then?

  Noel was staring at him.

  “You’re going to kill us both,” he said.

  Jesse held his daughter tight. No getting away from him, no leaping out the window to escape.… He put his hand into his pocket, he felt the pistol. And, in that instant, he seemed to see Noel’s mocking, terrified face blasted: the life blasted out of it, the defeat and the terror themselves blasted, gone.

  But he did not move.

  Noel’s head began to nod in a series of slow, terrified movements. “You’re going to … going to … You have a gun, don’t you? You came here to kill us …? You.…”

  For a long moment they stared at each other.

  Then Jesse said, “Get out.”

  Noel was still nodding. And he began to back to the door carefully, carefully.

  “You … you won’t.… You won’t.…” Noel said.

  “Get out.”

  At the door he hesitated. He licked his lips. “If I open the door … you’re not going to … Do you have a gun with you? Do you … you … you’re not …?”

  Jesse saw again, as if in a flash of memory, Noel’s face pouring blood. And his own blood warmed, leaped at the thought. But he did not move.

  “No. Please. Get out,” he said.

  Nobody is going to die tonight. No dying tonight.

  Not on my hands.

  Noel made a sudden leap to the door, jerked it open, and in that instant Jesse gripped the pistol.

  But he did not pull it out of his pocket.

  “Nobody is going to die tonight,” he said aloud. He listened to Noel outside, Noel running away, escaping.… The blood still surged in him, powerfully, frustrated. When Shelley pushed against him he shook her still and felt the enormous power of his muscles, his blood, his brain, the power to hold her here and to keep her from dying.

  “Did he leave …? Where is he, Noel, did he leave …?” Shelley cried.

  Jesse waited for his heart to calm again. He waited for the beating to subside, for his brain to come back into control of itself: how he loved this control, this certainty!

  “He’s gone and the hell with him,” Jesse said shakily.

  “No. I don’t believe he—he—”

  He began to walk her to the door.

  She balked, she pushed against him. Wildly she looked around and Jesse was surprised at the strength in her body—it was a kind of fury, almost, a frenzy set against him.

  “Noel is—Wait—Noel is still with me, he—”

  “No.”

  “Noel is—”

  “Noel is gone and the hell with Noel,” Jesse said.

  Shelley looked around the room, her head turning slowly from side to side. She was like a child, and yet her body had that curious, stubborn, almost demonic strength.

  “He’s gone,” Jesse said.

  After a moment she gave in: he felt the tension ebb.

  “Nobody is going to die tonight,” he said again.

  She walked with him to the door. To the corridor, the landing. When she paused, swaying, he supported her and whispered angrily: “No, nobody is going to die. Not Noel. Not you.”

  “But you are still the devil,” Shelley said faintly. She pressed her hands against her face. “He said … he said you were the devil and I believe him … I …”

  “No, you don’t believe him.”

  “I believe him … I … I love him and I believe him.…”

  “No.”

  “… he said you were the devil and I … I think you are the devil … come to get me to bring me home.…”

  “Am I?” Jesse said.

  AFTERWORD

  Wonderland Revisited

  So much of a novelist’s writing takes place in the unconscious; in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.

  —GRAHAM GREENE

  We are led to value highest that which has cost us the most. Of my early novels, Wonderland, the fifth to be published, obviously the most bizarre and obsessive, stands out in my memory as having been the most painful to write. The most painful in conception and in execution. The most painful even in retrospect. For it was evidently so mesmerizing, so haunting, so exhausting an effort, I must have willed it to be completed before, in that regulatory limbo of the unconscious to which we have no direct access, it was ready to be completed. As Graham Greene so eloquently says, we remember the details of our story, we do not invent them. When I reread Wonderland after its hardcover publication I knew that the ending I’d written was not the true ending; in
the months between finishing the manuscript, and seeing it published, I had continued to be haunted by it, “dreaming” its truer trajectory. I knew then that I had to recast the ending, at least for the paperback edition and subsequent reprints. The original ending, and a brief hallucinatory prologue that framed the thirty years of the novel, were jettisoned, and the “true” ending supplied. Wonderland could not end with a small boat drifting out helplessly to sea (specifically, Lake Ontario); it had to end with a gesture of demonic-paternal control. This was the tragedy of America in the 1960s, the story of a man who becomes the very figure he has been fleeing since boyhood: a son of the devouring Cronus who, unknowingly, becomes Cronus himself.

  My practice as a novelist up to and including the composition of the similarly obsessive Son of the Morning, published in 1978, was to write a complete first draft in one long head-on plunge; by which, though this was perhaps not my conscious choice, I would be nearly as immersed in my characters’ experiences as they themselves were. The first draft completed, I would be exhausted; often, overcome by a sense of psychic derailment; my graphic vision of the runaway Shelley, wasted and ungendered and sickly-yellow with jaundice at Wonderland’s end, is an exaggerated self-portrait, meant perhaps to exert authorial control over the torrential experience of novel-writing—which is the formal, daylight discipline of which novel-imagining is the passion. Once the first draft was completed, I would put it away for some weeks or months, and, after an interregnum during which I took on more finite projects, including, for who knows what restoration of the soul, the intensive reading and writing of poetry, I would systematically rewrite the entire manuscript, first word to last. And this was the triumph of art, it seemed to me: the re-writing, the re-casting, the re-imagining of what had been a sustained ecstatic plunge. A novel is prose artfully structured, structure imposed upon prose. Control imposed upon passion. Wonderland’s theme of a protagonist who seems without identity (“You do not exist,” Dr. Pedersen tells Jesse) unless deeply involved in meaningful experience (who is more qualified than a neurologist to determine where brain and spirit fuse?) is an oblique portrait of the novelist as well.

  This book is for all of us who pursue phantasmagoria of personality—how boldly, how trustingly, Wonderland’s dedication exposes its secret heart! In the broadest terms, literature is of two distinct types: that which offers us a distillation of experience, and that which offers us experience itself. My method of composition in those years was ideally suited for my goal—that of offering, so far as literature may be said to offer anything palpable, tangible, “real,” at all, not a cool, intellectualized distillation of fictitious characters’ experiences, but experience itself, mediated by language and form. Instead of exploring the “phantasmagoria of personality” (the mystery of our selfness within our species-hood) obliquely, which is the more navigable way, Wonderland, from its first sentence to its last, plunges us into the vortex of being: we begin with a terrified fourteen-year-old boy who “knows” something terrible is going to happen to him, or has indeed already happened and is awaiting him at home; and we continue with him, adding on, as if in psychic replication, his wife and younger daughter, all of them caught up in this vortex of being as it confronts non-being—for that is the secret horror inside the costly microscope Dr. Cady has given his son-in-law Jesse. Do we exist? What is “personality”? Is it permanent, is it ephemeral?—can it be destroyed as easily as Dr. Perrault boasts, “with a tiny pin in my fingers”?

  Because such questions are the novel’s heart, its deep verticality and inwardness is driven by convulsive narrative leaps: months and even years pass, but only those actions possessing psychic significance are dramatized. Opening with an act of despair that seems to us so tragically American—the slaughter of a family by its “head,” who then kills himself—Wonderland moves from the Depression through World War II through the Korean War and the “Cold War” and the Vietnam War and the turbulent years of that decade (approximately 1963–1973: from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the end of the Vietnam War) known as The Sixties. Background is foreground, in a sense, only in terms of the Depression, which has devastated Jesse Harte’s father; the assassination of Kennedy, which is experienced by the Vogel family at a crucial time in their lives; and the grimly self-destructive yet intermittently radiant visions of The Sixties, to which both Jesse’s mock-brother Trick Monk and his daughter Shelley fall victim. Like virtually all of my novels, Wonderland is political in genesis, however individualized its characters and settings. It could not have been conceived, still less written, at any other time than in post-1967 America, when divisive hatreds between the generations, over the war in Vietnam, and what was called, perhaps optimistically, the “counterculture,” raged daily. (So too them, the novel immediately preceding Wonderland, could not have been written before the “long, hot summer” of urban race riots of 1967.) How specifically rooted in time and place Wonderland is, from the meticulously observed view of the Erie Canal, its cascading waterfalls and locks seen by Jesse from the perspective of a certain bridge in Lockport, to the demoralized street scene in Toronto, thirty years later, where the drug-addicted young, moribund, unsexed, affectless, begging from strangers, have “the appearance of victims of war, photographed to illustrate the anonymity of war.” (Yes, that was Yonge Street, Toronto, in those days. A “street of the young” in any large North American city, in those days.)

  For Wonderland, as a title, refers to both America, as a region of wonders, and the human brain, as a region of wonders. And “wonders” can be both dream and nightmare.

  After rewriting the ending of Wonderland for its paperback reprinting in 1972, I ceased thinking about it; I did not want to think about it; of my early novels, it was the one of which readers sometimes spoke in odd, rapturous-accusatory terms—“I was eighteen years old, my roommate at college gave it to me to read, I was up all night, I couldn’t put it down. Why don’t you write novels like that any longer?” I did not want to write novels quite like that any longer, nor even to reread this specific one, the very thought of which made me feel faint, as if in recollection of some close call, some old, survived danger. (Perhaps I should mention parenthetically that my interest in neurology, so evident in Wonderland’s long speculative middle section, was the consequence of an apparent medical condition, which necessitated one or more trips to a neurologist in Windsor, Ontario, where my husband and I lived at the time: but the “condition” turned out to be, not physical, or in any case not seriously physical, but a temporary confluence of symptoms caused by what is today called, so commonly, “stress.”) Approaching the novel now, a cavernous twenty-two years after its composition, I am probably most struck by what might be called its kinetic exuberance. I mean it as a purely neutral expression—neither laudatory nor condemnatory—to say that, both in its epic conception and its execution, Wonderland leaves me a bit breathless: as the narrative itself seems breathless, caught up in that vortex of being that is our human predicament.

  Indeed, so fuelled by energy was Wonderland, it spilled over into a play, Ontological Proof of My Existence, a dramatization and expansion of Jesse’s visit to Toronto, to win, or buy, his daughter back from her drug-dispenser lover; and into such short stories of that time as “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction, and Began My Life Over Again,” an analogue of Shelley’s experience as a runaway to Toledo. (In retrospect, it seems that Shelley Vogel was crying out for a novel of her own, a story that was not a mere appendage of her father’s; but this was a novel that I could not, or would not write. The material was simply too devastating.)

  Much in Wonderland has to do with memory. The escape from memory, the surrender to memory. Theories of memory. The “invention” of memory. Of all art-forms, the novel is the most indigenously equipped to take its populace through a delimited space of time, shoring up memory in both characters and readers; at a certain point, as if by magic, the memory of the novel is shared by both characters
and readers. So, in Wonderland, when the adult Jesse remembers, or fails to remember, the attentive reader is a part of his consciousness; we sense the onset of his breakdown when isolated figures and memory-shards out of his deeply suppressed past begin to intrude into his rigidly controlled present. No other art-form so builds upon memory so necessarily, as the novel: in this it mimics, as Dr. Cady suggests, personality itself. (For there can be no person without memory.) And no other art-form is so dependent upon and so infatuated with memory, as the novel: the novelist might be defined as one who, in the guise of fiction, is involved in a ceaseless memorialization of the past. (Wonderland includes a postmodernist snapshot of a kind, when, in the concluding pages of the first section, the beleaguered Jesse, pausing in his desperate drive from Lockport to Buffalo, spies upon a young family in a green swing behind a farmhouse—Carolina and Frederic Oates and their three-year-old daughter Joyce.) The uses we make of our homesickness!

  For the melancholy we feel when completing a novel is akin to the melancholy we feel when, by the inexorable process of time, we are expelled forever from home.

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  January, 1992

  ABOUT THE INTRODUCER

  ELAINE SHOWALTER is professor emeritus of English at Princeton University, where she taught courses on contemporary fiction, women’s writing, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. The author or editor of eighteen books on English and American literature, she has reviewed contemporary literature and culture both for scholarly journals and for periodicals such as The Guardian Review, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, The Washington Post Book Review, and the Los Angeles Times. Her current project is a literary history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.