Love For The Other

Joyce Carol Oates, a well-known contemporary American novelist, was once called as "America’s finest novelist since Faulkner" by Robert H. Fossum, the famous literary critic.(Fossum285) Oates portrays the "kaleidoscope" of American society with her sharpening pen:class, gender, race, history, religion, and medicine, etc.Oates wins many awards by her great productivity, the profound thought and the brilliant writing style in her works, but she faces conflicting reviews about the violence she wrote. Some accuse her works as "a charnel house of Gothic paraphernalia", and the violence in the fiction is less authentic for it is quite literary. Violence is used to resolve every situation and violence is so high and so regular that readers become immune to it. The fiction with such violence in it does not matter much. While others insist that Oates is an American allegorist, who defines her own aesthetic world with the conjunction of the realistic and the symbolic mode. They believe that telling the truth is the ultimate aim of Oates’fiction——however violent, however cruel and brutal, however unpleasant and distasteful sometimes the truth is.Facing the praises and charges of critics, Oates has her own opinion about violence. She believes the violence she depicted is the exploration of American society interpreted in a realistic mode and it is also from a part of American national character. Oates feels an artist’s job is to reveal the human tragedy and chart those who get out of their dilemma to survive.When interviewed by me, Oates said,"When I was writing, I didn’t intentionally put Emmanuel Levinas’s Other theory into my works, but the Love for the Other and the concern for the Other are always my focus during my creation." This dissertation is to explore five ethical concerns behind the violence Oates wrote in her five novels through the moral values of art Oates advocated. Meanwhile, Nietzche’s philosophy about the Will to power, Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical thoughts, Luce Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference and some related sociological theories on violence will be involved in this dissertation. When one’s individual personality is distorted and his real identity is erased under Will’s violence, the crisis of the ethics of identity will arise. Oates tries to use Love for the Other to restore human’s sincere feelings and expects the establishment of ethical relationships by being responsible to the Other; Facing the violence between social classes, Oates does not propose violence to be the means of class-uprising, but shows great sympathy to the bottom class people who suffer from pain, anxiety and helplessness and are forced to resort to violence finally. Oates affirms their lives’ passion and will, and makes inquiries of the survival ethics; In the patriarchal society, women are under double violence of system and body. Women who are subject to violence become victims of the male hegemony. Women who fight violence by violence are disciplined by laws. Oates questions the male hegemony and inquires the gender ethics; Faced by the slow violence between races in the American society, Oates longs for races’ fusion and equality, and attempts to use the Love for the Other to establish the "dialogue" between races, expecting the construction of racial ethics; In the presence of the violence of history writing, Oates has rewritten real historical figures and events to deduce the infinite possibility and ductility existing in history. The truth of history is doubted and the ethics of history writing is called to be aware of. By close reading, five ethical concerns of the Love for the Other will be explored behind the violence in Oates’s fiction.