The Joyce Carol Oates Short Story - Literature review Example

Music Is the Devil in “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” The Joyce Carol Oates short story, “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” is filled to the brim with music. While there is the obvious association of Arnold Friend with the devil (Easterly 537; Coulthard 505; Piwinski 196; Urbanski 202), the not-so-obvious association of “music as the devil” has not been mentioned. Rock music is believed to be the devil’s work, or tool, in some circles, and Oates has done a fine job here of making music into a seductive, evil influence that steals the soul of one particular American youth. Oates uses music in a couple of different ways in this story. There is first of all the obvious and frequent mention of music coming from various radios. Second, there is the music that is inside Connie’s head or that is produced by other characters but “unheard” in the “real” world. These two types of music contribute to making music not just a plot device but also a character in the story. Music moves from outside Connie at the beginning of the story, to inside her and outside her, and then is finally stripped away by Arnold Friend and her own screams. Music moves from being harmless noise on the radio, to becoming Connie’s lover, to possessing her like the Devil and taking her away from her home. In the end, there isn’t even music, just “vast sunlit reaches” of land (Oates 512). If we understand that music itself is the devil, not just Arnold Friend, then we see how it is personified throughout the story. Oates uses the radio as background music for her story, but she doesn’t mention any particular song that was playing at any given time. In 1966 when the story was first published, Oates and her characters were certainly listening to “The Ballad of the Green Berets” (#1 song for 1966, Sgt. Barry Sadler), “You Can’t Hurry Love” (#11, the Supremes), “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’” (#13, Nancy Sinatra), “Paint It Black” (#21, Rolling Stones), and most certainly a little Bob Dylan (#82 on the charts, but the story is dedicated to Bob Dylan). Dylan’s lyrics when read as poetry are often disjointed and dreamlike, and contain many references to things which are not apparent in the lyrics, just as this short story contains cultural cues and references the reader may not “get” on the surface. Since the songs were hard and fast and on FM radio, Connie/Joyce probably wasn’t listening to Simon and Garfunkel and Neil Diamond, although both charted several times in 1966 (MusicOutfitters.com, 2009). While no song produced in 1966 can match the shrieking of heavy metal music, most of the songs that were popular that year were rock hits with fast music and lyrics that are easy to sing along to, and there is a fair share of rock love ballads in the mix for a young girl like Connie to admire. Certainly, there was the idea blossoming at the time that rock music was the direct product of the devil, beginning with Elvis, of course. Throughout the piece, the music is there, dependable, perpetual; like a good friend. Music starts to become personified through the internal music that is a very real part of Connie’s existence. This “imaginary friend” is mentioned most prominently in the sentence, “But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July” (Oates 511). There is no music playing at the moment described here; it is only in Connie’s dream and imagination. By this point in the story, Connie has absorbed, and been absorbed by, the music. The most interesting music is that which is heard in the language of the story rather than by the characters. The musical nature of Oates’s language is prominent but not heavy-handed (Hurley 373). If read aloud, the sentence “…XYZ Sunday Jamboree, record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs she sang along with” uses hard consonants and abrupt syllables to imitate both a radio DJ’s manner of speaking and the easy words lyricists use in their songs (Oates 512). It even rhymes (XYZ and jamboree and an off-rhyme with shrieking; songs and along). Connie may be listening to this music out in the real world, but she herself is enclosed in a lullaby, as the next sentence’s language tells us: “And Connie paid close attention to herself, bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that seemed to rise out of the music itself and lay languidly about in the airless little room, breathed in and breathed out with each gentle rise and fall of her chest” (Oates 512). In this sentence we hear many long “o” and “a” vowels, and the consonants are gentle “l” and “s” sounds. This sentence also rhymes (close, glow, slow; the repetition of rise and rise and breathed and breathed). Most importantly, music has stepped out of its boundaries of being something heard to being something felt, something that is real enough to be a lover (Urbanski 201). It is interesting to note that Arnold Friend has no music of his own. He tells Connie, “Hey, Ellie’s got a radio, see. Mine broke down” (Oates 513). It is very interesting that he says this in response to Connie’s disgusted comment, “Look, I don’t even know who you are.” Connie doesn’t know who he is because he has no music. Just before Connie saw Arnold for the first time, she was leaving the restaurant with Eddie, and that was the first moment she became lost in the music, both external and internal (“…it might have been the music” (Oates 513)). Arnold makes a failed attempt at music when he taps time with his fists, but the beat is in time with Ellie’s radio, not Connie’s (even though they are playing the same song). Then, Connie wonders where Arnold came from, concludes that he came out of nowhere, and that “everything about him and even about the music that was so familiar to her was only half real” (Oates 515). She is beginning to lose her music; or rather, her imaginary friend is disappearing because it has turned into Arnold Friend. Music has stepped out of her imagination and become real in the form of Arnold Friend, the devil personified. Since music is the devil, once it has taken over Connie the joy of it is gone. In the space of just a few paragraphs, Connie loses her power of speech, and a few moments after that she loses her music to a “tiny roaring” in her ear (Oates 520). Her screaming is the last sound from her, although she does think of her mother and never seeing home again. She becomes locked inside the sound of the screaming and then there is no more music in the story, either external or internal. What started out as a great friendship ends up destroying her soul. While there are many theories floating around about what Oates meant when she wrote the story, including the fact that she borrowed the whole incident from a real life serial killer, the idea that music is the devil that steals Connie’s soul isn’t one that rises readily to the front. If one were to read the story as an allegory (Urbanski 202), this theory is just as plausible as any other out there. There is certainly enough in the story that it’s not a big leap to come to that conclusion. Works Cited Coulthard, A.R. “Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ As Pure Realism.” Studies in Short Fiction 26.4 (1989, Fall): 505. Accessed 27 April 2009 from Academic Search Premier EBSCO host. Easterly, Joan. “The shadow of a satyr in Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Studies in Short Fiction 27.4 (1990, Fall): 537. Accessed 27 April 2009 from Academic Search Premiere EBSCO host. Hurley, D.F. “Impure Realism: Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Where are you going…’” Studies in Short Fiction 28.3 (1991, Summer): 371. Accessed 27 April 2009 from Academic Search Premier EBSCO host. MusicOutfitters.com. “Top 100 Hits of 1966/Top 100 Songs of 1966.” Accessed 27 April 2009 from . Piwinski, D.J. “Oates’s Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Explicator 49.3 (1991, Spring): 195. Accessed 27 April 2009 from Academic Search Premier EBSCO host. Urbanski, Marie Mitchell Olesen. Existential Allegory: Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’” Studies in Short Fiction 15.2 (1978, Spring): 200. Accessed 27 April 2009 from Academic Search Premier EBSCO host. Read More