Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates
"This is not a confession. You will see, I have nothing to confess."
What did I like about Beasts by Joyce Carol Oates? What kept me reading it? I feel so anxious after reading it.1 My tummy aches, also because I am miserably furious about the fall of our nation and I’m waiting to hear back from On the Premises about their latest contest, in which my story “A Signal Echoing through Radiospace” is a finalist.
Anyway, my tummy aches.
The story of Beasts is placed inside two frames. Unusual and cool.
The first frame:
The narrator, in 2001, in the Louvre, sees a totem that triggers a memory a quarter-century old. “I was thinking of the deaths of two people I’d loved, a long time ago. They’d died horribly, and their deaths were believed to be accidental.” Then a few lines on, more ominously, “This is not a confession. You will see, I have nothing to confess.” She has a lot to confess, it turns out.
The second frame:
January 20, 1976. The narrator is a college students. In her dormitory, in dead winter night, the fire alarm goes off. But it is false. Heath Cottage is not on fire. In the town of Catamount, 99 Briery Lane burns. Gillian, the narrator, seems to know exactly that this house is burning in the distance. She is unable, though, to tell us how she could know such a thing—that untangling is the whole story.
The guts:
There is a lot of being unable to tell the reader anything in this story. The rest of the narration follows a mostly-linear path through the events preceding the fire on January 20. Gillian is in an elite poetry seminar. All of the women in the class are in love with its teacher, Andre Harrow. Gillian is unable to admit this—to the reader, to herself, or to the residents of Heath Cottage. She rarely speaks in class. Mr Harrow calls her Philomela.
“Andre Harrow was verbose, bullying. He was kind, and condescending. He was forever interrupting us even as he urged us to ‘speak your own mind—or someone else will speak it for you.’ ” He is an asshole. The kind people lust for.
Philomela is one of the characters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She lost her tongue and transformed into a bird. “It was witty of Mr Harrow to call me by this name, if a bit bullying.”
But her love of Mr Harrow isn’t all that Gillian won’t talk about.
She won’t talk about the fires.
Someone has been setting fires around Catamount College. One, even, was set beneath the window of Mr Harrow’s office. Gillian never explains who is setting the fires. The reader doesn’t need her to. Oates’s mastery on display.
Gillian is unable to tell us how she could know which house is on fire—that untangling is the whole story.
I’ve postulated in other Gothic Book Club installments that what makes a book gothic is the irony. An appalling disconnect gaps the reader from the narrator. The narrator often sees nothing wrong with what is happening to them or what they are doing. They cannot even imagine that something could be wrong. They are lying, or deceiving themself.
That theory holds up here. Beasts is Gothic as all of Hell. Gillian deceives herself, the reader, Andre Harrow, her friends, and it all goes up in smoke.
But Beasts helps me to sharpen and refine what I think of as American Gothic. A tension is necessary. Oates does a terrific job with that best storyteller’s trick: she tells us exactly how the story is going to end before we’ve hardly begun. Hard thread punches through this story, two double-stitches. In the first chapter, we learn only that the totem is disturbing, that it connects directly to the deaths of two people Gillian loves. In the second, we learn there is a fire, Gillian knows exactly what house is on fire, and that she won’t tell us she knows that information.
Those two hard threads hold the book open. They force our eyes down. We want to a) confirm our suspicion that Gillian is a pyromaniacal liar and b) figure out why a wooden totem in the Louvre is so upsetting to her.
Moreover, the tension we feel, that forces us to keep reading this story, comes from the constant refrains of darkness—sexual violence, graphic content, and pagan imagery all abound. Are those necessary components of American Gothic? No, I don’t think so. I don’t think so, but they do surefire help.
Three major characters play into Beasts’s love triangle: Gillian, Andre, and Andre’s partner, Dorcas. Everyone in this triangle wants to fuck everyone else in this triangle. The other eleven girls of Heath Cottage function like a Greek Chorus, and not like one. Many of them have or yearn to have the same things Gillian wants—first, accolades for their poetry, later the attention and affection of Mr Harrow. They carousel through Gillian’s life as rivals, advisors, colleagues, neighbors, and darlings.
If Andre is the antagonist then Dorcas is a plagiarist. She creates grotesque wooden statues of the female form, but exaggerated in every way—bulimic, buxom, fecund, virginal, powerful, weak. She calls them ‘totems.’
In the novel’s first chapter, Gillian sees one in the Louvre. But this one is 200 years old. And most of Dorcas’s burned down. And none were any good. How can that be?
Either Dorcas imitates the Native sculptures, or she downright has stolen them and presented them as her own. She’s a piece of shit. I wouldn’t put either past her. But it doesn’t matter. It is either or both. The point is how artificial either makes her.
Herself not a beauty, Dorcas is preoccupied with the beauty of Andre’s girls (there have been many before Gillian). She sells her work modestly, but never in New York. She gets exhibited at Catamount College because Andre arranges it for her. Her work is provocative, yes, but hated and defaced by students as misogynistic. She is a misogynist herself. She abuses women for her own sexual gratification.
The couple drugs their girls, emotionally abuses them, makes them into their slaves, photographs them doing lewd things—their own faces always obscured—and even submits these pictures to porn mags. That’s the only way they can get published.
And that’s the really important part. That’s the only element of them that “gets” them anything. The only way they can get any modicum of recognition as artists is by drugging, raping, and stealing. They cannot create.
As an artist, in addition to as a human, Andre sucks similarly. He is a bad poetry teacher for a number of reasons. He has one note of advice, ever, to give his poetry students: “go for the jugular.” What does that mean? It means nothing concrete, which a student could employ directly into her work. It means to be gory, offensive, to push the envelope, to bare your own soul. Not all good poetry does that, just the stuff Harrow thinks is good. His constant mentor, DH Lawrence, whom he reads sensually to seductively to the students when he can’t think of anything else to do in class, wouldn’t say that about poetry. Harrow doesn’t even understand poetry.
His other way to guide students is to mock and berate them. He finds their work “like a crossword” if he doesn’t like it. But what is a student to do with such an insipid critique? He never demonstrates an ear for poetry, and his grades depend on whether or not he likes a student—wants to fuck her, or if she hasn’t yet rebuked his tongue slithering down their throat.
Near the end, in among the stash of photographs of raped and abused girls, the porn mags, hides his own “cheaply printed,” book of poetry. Oates tells us so very much about this charlatan by describing this quaint little book. Icarus Poems, it is pretentiously called. “The poems seemed to have been influenced by e.e. cummings and Allen Ginsberg. I became distracted reading them, and stopped.” His poems are so bad, that Gillian, at the height of her obsession with Andre, can’t even read them. She finds them derivative. If Timothée Chalamet came out with a collection of poems tomorrow, imagine how much ass they would have to suck before all the people who croon over him would admit they weren’t all that good.
Oates creates this understanding through a thousand individual moments, just as she creates our understanding that Gillian is untrustworthy, even to herself.
Beasts is a compact book, easily read in a couple of hours. I highly recommend.2
Gothic Book Club is a series I do when I feel like it. This is the third installment. Read the first installment here.
Next time we hit Gothic Book Club, we will probably be talking about “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gillman. Or maybe Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I make no promises.
That’s a compliment.
It’s always a smart move to find a copy through your local library. Now more than ever. If you’re going to buy it through the above link, I make a commission. All the more reason to get it from the library instead.