Bellefleur (101 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
And the burden of revenge?
I don’t know what to believe, Jedediah cried aloud, clutching the glove in his hand.
The “key” to most works of fiction is a voice, a rhythm, a unique music; a precise way of
seeing
and
hearing
that will give the writer access to the world he is trying to create. (Yet this world is sometimes so real in the imagination that its construction, in terms of formal art, seems rather like a re-creation, a re-construction.) Sometimes one must wait a long time for this key to present itself—sometimes it comes rather quickly. In the case of
Bellefleur
I waited several years.
The entire novel grew out of a haunting image: there was a walled garden, luxurious but beginning to grow shabby; overgrown, “old,” yet still possessing an extraordinary beauty. In this mysterious garden the baby Germaine was to be rocked in her regal cradle; and a less fortunate baby was to be carried off by an immense white bird of prey. My vision gave me the Bellefleur garden with an intimidating clarity, yet I could gain entry to it only by imagining all that surrounded it—the castle, the grounds, the waters of Lake Noir, the Chautauqua region, the State itself with its turbulent history, and the Nation with its still more turbulent history. In the foreground the Bellefleur family emerged as prismatic lenses by which the outer world is seen—an “outer” world abbreviated and in some cases mocked by the Bellefleurs’ ambition for empire and wealth. It had always interested me that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America wealthy men were eager to establish themselves as “nobility” of a sort by reconstructing immense castles, and in many cases importing great sections of European castles for this purpose. (A castle, after all, is a castellated structure—that is, it is fortified for war.) The American castles were fascinating in themselves (the most notorious being of course Hearst’s San Simeon) and in what they symbolize. Naturally the walled garden was a garden attached to a castle—though the Bellefleurs, with an air of unconvincing modesty, preferred to speak of their home as Bellefleur Manor.
It took several years for me to acquire the voice, the rhythm, the tone of
Bellefleur.
Before I finally began writing it I had acquired more than one thousand pages of notes—some of them mere scraps of paper, some fairly complete dramatic scenes that would emerge, in the novel’s narrative, without many changes. It became the most demanding and the most mesmerizing novel I have written. Though I came to think of it as the months passed as my “vampire novel”—for it seemed that it was draining me of vitality in ways I could not control—I passed through a spell of what might be called acute homesickness after completing it, and feel rather melancholy now, at times, when I think of Bellefleur—the landscape, the castle, the people whom I came to love in odd surprising ways.
The imaginative construction of a “Gothic” novel involves the systematic transposition of realistic psychological and emotional experiences into “Gothic” elements. We all experience mirrors that distort, we all age at different speeds, we have known people who want to suck our life’s blood from us, like vampires; we feel haunted by the dead—if not precisely by the dead then by thoughts of them. We are forced at certain alarming periods in our lives not only to discover that other people are mysterious—and will remain
mysterious
—but that we ourselves, our motives, our passions, even our logic, are profoundly mysterious. And we sense ourselves accursed at times; and then again blessed; singled out, in any case, for what feels like a special destiny. We are superstitious when events—usually coincidences—argue that “superstition” may be a way of grasping an essentially chaotic world. All these factors the novelist who wants to write an “experimental Gothic” will transpose into Gothic terms. If Gothicism has the power to move us (and it certainly has the power to fascinate the novelist) it is only because its roots are in psychological realism. Much of
Bellefleur
is a diary of my own life, and the lives of people I have known. It must be significant that my father, Frederick Oates, as a young man, succumbed to the lure of flying, and took me up innumerable times in small planes; it must be significant that my mother, Caroline, was, like Leah, a very
young
mother whom I can remember as young—only a girl, really. But “Gideon” and “Leah” are by no means modeled on my parents.
Bellefleur
is more than a Gothic, of course, and it would be disingenuous of me to suggest otherwise. It is also a critique of America; but it is in the service of a vision of America that stresses, for all its pessimism, the ultimate freedom of the individual. One by one the Bellefleur children free themselves of their family’s curse (or blessing); one by one they disappear into America, to define themselves for themselves. The castle is destroyed, the Bellefleur children live. Theirs is the privilege of youth; and the “America” of my imagination, despite the incursions of recent decades, is a nation still characterized by youth. Our past may weigh heavily upon us but it cannot contain us, let alone shape our future. America is a tale still being told—in many voices—and nowhere near its conclusion.
[Originally published in 1980 in The First Edition Society edition of
Bellefleur.
]
Joyce Carol Oates
is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers
We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde
, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the
New York Times
bestseller
The Falls
, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.
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BELLEFLEUR
. Copyright © 1980 by Joyce Carol Oates, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST ECCO PAPERBACK EDITION
2013
ISBN 978-0-06-226916-4
EPub Edition JULY 2013 ISBN: 9780062269171
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DIX/RRD
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