The almost obligatory topic with which to introduce Oates is, in fact, the amount she has published. A survey of her work may suggest a compulsive writer and maybe even a lack of self-criticism. Her poems … are often jagged and metrically uncertain, and sometimes over-packed with superfluous words; but frequently they can crystallize with electrifying clarity inexplicable moments of experience on the edge of fear, despair, terror, or joy. Many read, in fact, like passionate footnotes to her stories or novels…. As well as overlapping with her fiction, her criticism, it should be noted, is often extraordinarily suggestive, especially in the way it opens up, by analogy or brooding meditation, startling psychological and philosophical perspectives.

It is in the short stories perhaps that Oates's best work is to be found…. Many of the stories are certainly repetitive or trivial. But some—"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," "Unmailed, Unwritten Letters," "Accomplished Desires" from The Wheel of Love, "The Sacred Marriage" from Marriages and Infidelities, to mention a few of the best—are so bewilderingly evocative that they must rate along with the masterpieces of the genre…. [But] it is with her novels that her reputation and importance must rest. It is there that her prophetic urgency, the obsessive desire to "dream America," emerges at its most tantalizing, frustrating, and evocative. The early novels, although technically more cautious, nevertheless share the same obsessions as the mature works of the seventies, where Oates attempts to dramatize the mystery of the human spirit struggling amongst our personal and shared nightmares. (pp. 2-4)

Alongside most of her contemporaries, Oates does stand out as a curiously chameleon figure. "America outdoes all its writers," observes Richard, the narrator of Expensive People, and Oates takes her role seriously as searching for ways of surviving within the flux of modern America. At times … she moves vigorously towards postcontemporary fictionists like Robert Coover or Donald Barthelme, but even in such stories, "the social and moral conditions of my generation" are kept consistently in view. Rather waspishly, she criticizes "new fictionists" and "black humorists" for their refusal to "deal with the utterly uncontrollable emotions that determine our lives." (p. 6)

Biographical trivia aside, there is a real sense in which, in Oates's words, "all art is autobiographical." It is initially the record of an artist's psychic experience, an attempt to explain something to himself. Just as in her novels and stories the "real" Detroit becomes "transparent" in her imaginative X ray of the felt experience of living there, so her everyday life as woman, writer, wife, professor, or housewife, provides only a superstructure of a literary personality: quiet, passive, yet fiercely creative, crystallizing not (or not only) her own but her era's deepest, most tangled, obsessions…. We can see that there is an explorative unity in Oates's work; despite its surface variety, like D. H. Lawrence's, the diversity of her writing is already forming itself into what we might term an emotional autobiography, although one that is hardly a mirror of the surfaces of her own life. Looking at obvious affinities, we can set her early writing in a realist tradition, then note the frequent flirtation with the antirealists or fabulators in the late sixties, and see her, in the seventies, taking up a cautiously experimental but hardly avant-garde place in the contemporary city of words. (pp. 8-9)

But a more interesting means of defining the importance and power of her fiction can be achieved by a less academically predictable route. Oates's fictional mode, more than most novelists', has developed as a distinctive state of feeling thrust at her reader. Some of the most compelling writing in contemporary fiction, her stories force upon readers an often frightening sense of our own fears, obsessions, and drives. Indeed, her work operates in terms best described by that increasingly fashionable motif in contemporary fictional theory, the notion of the "implied reader."…

[In] Oates's fiction we have a vivid example of how a writer must rely heavily on the emotional cooperation of the reader. Her geographical landscapes evoke our own emotional or moral dilemmas and allegiances and in reading her we attend not so much to the shifts of plot or scene but to our own changing emotional reactions. (p. 9)

In order for her novels, to use D. H. Lawrence's phrase, to "inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness," Oates's fiction plunges us into a distinctively felt atmosphere. All the novels are similarly structured, often as triptychs (with an occasional summary addendum, as in Do With Me What You Will), usually concentrating on three phases of a central character's growth to self-awareness. The underlying pattern of discovery in the novels is evoked by the charisma of emotional extremism: actions seem inevitably violent, speech is ejaculative and hostile, underlying fears constantly burst through the surface of the action. Oates's typical imagery reinforces this extremism: imprisonment, shattering glass, bursting and breaking, explosions dominate the emotional field of the action…. As Phyllis Grosskurth points out, crazy is a favorite word in the novels, and all of Oates's important characters live just on the boundaries of sanity as they clutch and claw at the possibility of momentary order in the flux of their lives. Her intention is partly to achieve a shock of emotional extremism which will involve both attention and recognition in the reader's experience…. The form, or formlessness, of her work, then, is deliberately perspectival as we, her readers, are driven to create the form, or formlessness, of our own lives and our own private fictions…. (p. 11)

[There] is also in Oates's fictional world something of what she perceives in Lawrence's poetry, where one finds "literally everything: beauty, waste, 'flocculent ash,' the ego in a state of rapture and in a state of nausea, a diverse streaming of chaos and cunning."… In Oates's novels such chaos is invariably situated in the emotions, in the convulsive eruption of obsessive feeling, in the pain, anguish, distraught embarrassment, and violence of the personality…. Our understanding of Oates's fiction depends on our sensing how the "meaning" … is as much in the voice as in the words: the reader is asked to respond to an unusual extent to mood, timbre, and modulation of voice. We may, of course, be nauseated, appalled, fearful, and hostile. But once seized by that voice, we cannot choose but listen, and to submit to Oates's world is to enter a realm of psychic violence potentially disturbing to any sensitive reader. Oates has an unusual ability to bring out the reader's own hidden fears and psychic nightmares…. The real "events" by which Oates's characters are motivated lie deep within the protean chaos of the personality, and her readers are directed back into the depths of their own inner worlds, perhaps to encounter chaos there. (pp. 11-12)

Oates's fiction can be tellingly approached through a Lawrentian perspective. Her brilliant account of Lawrence's poetry—surely, despite its brevity, one of the most suggestive pieces of Lawrence criticism in recent decades—speaks of him in terms that strangely reverberate upon her own approach to the artist's role…. Fascination with flux, with art as prophecy, with the therapeutic exposure of the self—these central Lawrentian motifs are fused and re-created in Oates's work. (pp. 12-13)

It is because of the seriousness with which Oates takes the novelist's role as prophet that we might judge her by Lawrence's understanding of "morality" rather than by purely aesthetic criteria, or within the conventional formal terms of fiction…. His argument was that only the novel could express its reader's deep awareness of the age's perspectival relativism…. Only the novel, the bright book of life, could reflect and direct the dynamism of the age. (pp. 14-15)

[It] is above all the novelist's responsibility to "re-create and reinterpret the world," to provide, even though forced to employ the slipperiness of words, the impetus towards what Lawrence called "the Deed of life." Paradoxically, even tragically, the writer " is committed to re-creating the world through language…. The use of language is all we have to put against death and silence." The destiny of the novelist is therefore to simultaneously subject himself to and evoke for us the chaos within, exorcising and exhorting at once, providing the reader, one would hope, with the challenge of a profound waking dream. Our dreams offer to show us the deepest roots of our creativity: we hunger for significance and art satisfies that hunger. So the novelist's role, today, becomes that of "dreaming America," an attempt to master in fiction the "chaos outside and inside ourselves," occasionally "winning small victories," then facing the inevitability of "being swept along by some cataclysmic event of our own making." The novelist, [Oates] writes, encounters Lawrence's "madness for the unknown," his "diverse streaming of chaos and cunning" and attempts to render a stasis in his own fiction and, through our receptivity, in the fictions we ourselves constantly create, revise, and re-create. (pp. 15-16)

But it is [the] emphasis on the apocalypse beyond and through corruption, or in Oates's own terms, the transcendence achieved through obsession, that she shares fundamentally with Lawrence. Oates apparently came to Lawrence relatively late, but she must have sensed immediately a genius whose characteristic stance uncannily challenged her own obsessions, leading her to assert that ultimately only someone spiritually attuned to Lawrence could comprehend his work.

The most obvious connection between Lawrence and Oates is their fascination with sexuality…. Like Lawrence, Oates is fascinated with the power and the dynamic of sex. She focuses repeatedly on the numinous aura of sexuality, on how sexuality contributes to, or so often mocks, our attempts to order our lives…. [While] Oates's view of sexuality acknowledges its embodiment of our hunger for purpose, she also notes that love must be acknowledged as a violent and unstoppable force, not simply an instinctive urge to achieve rest of transcendence. Again, an interesting comparison is with Lawrence. In both writers sexual relations are relations of possibility and power. They may be like the destructive preying of Gudrun upon Gerald, the fierce battle for equilibrium between Birkin and Ursula, or in Oates's work, what she terms "the totally irrational, possessive, ego-destroying love, which can't be controlled and is, perhaps, a pathological condition of the soul," such as the relationship between the lovers in Do With Me What You Will or the tragically unfulfilled desires brought out in stories like "Scenes of Passion and Desire" or "I Must Have You." The most painful and evocative scenes in Oates's work focus on the power of sexual attraction and repulsion and it is in her concentration on sexual desire as an unpredictable and awesome force for change in the personality that her closest thematic connection with Lawrence is found. In love, all we have fixed and made "permanent" … may be suddenly and fearfully shattered. Life becomes fragmentary and unpredictable; where once we had lived by rationality and comfort, in love we become defined primarily by fear and fragility. As in Lawrence's fiction, with Oates's best work we are involved in the affective dimension of the writing. Its rhythmic surges and melodramatic intensification make us face, in ourselves, that same fear and fragility.

As readers we are forced by Oates's concentration upon our feelings to focus on the intense state in which her characters make discoveries about themselves. The typical Oates character, usually a woman, is continually bombarded by sensation—fear, insecurity, a sense of formlessness from within, pursuit from without. (pp. 17-18)

Like [Lawrence's] Ursula desperately climbing the tree to escape the horses to tumble "in a heap on the other side of the hedge" and realizing that she is "trammelled and entangled" and "must break out … like a nut from its shell," so Oates's women characters must make some radical act of the whole integral personality to discover their true inner direction.

It is perhaps the very totality of both writers' obsession for the importance of sexual connections that makes them reach for what Lawrence saw as a dimension of experience found through and yet somehow beyond sex. Both writers link human sexuality with the Nietzschean vision of the self struggling to overcome itself…. [Pain,] memory, and fear are transformed as sexuality becomes, in its mystery, terror and joy, part of the neutral rhythm of the circumambient universe, the life of sensation and emotions by which men and women transcend time, place, and limitation. From such connections, not only do all life-affirming human commitments grow, but humanity is challenged to reach beyond itself. Lawrence's thought here, Oates has argued, "is really revolutionary; it is a total rejection of that dogma of the West that declares Man is the measure of all things."…

Lawrence's vision of sexual transcendence often strikes readers as paradoxical in a writer so obsessed with sexual attraction and repulsion; but at its strongest, sexual connection was for Lawrence a means of finding a nourishing relationship with nature and the universe: perhaps, he wrote, the human race is dying, but there is "a flame or a Life Everlasting wreathing through the cosmos for ever and giving us our renewal, one we can get in touch with." Fifty years later, less ideologically explicit, but with equivalent passion and evocation, Oates's prophetic vision attempts to define the tragedy of our age, in which individuals yearn towards a new consciousness, sensed through and yet ultimately transcending sexuality, by exploring similarly the way passion and its necessary violence "redeem and may perhaps make a kind of eternity."… (pp. 19-21)

In Lady Chatterley's Lover the mechanism of industrialization is a symbol of the repetitive, mechanical forces of human reason and repressed emotion. With the woods increasingly shrinking back from the encroaching mines and factories, for Lawrence it was increasingly urgent to seek the dark flame of human spontaneity, and the deed rather than the word of life. Similarly, from Oates's work we sense just how crucial it is to move beyond the limitations of our isolated self-concentration. We must ultimately open ourselves to the obliteration of the ego and our fixation with its uniqueness. Just as Lawrence saw the fulfillment of the individual consisting in going beyond the individual, to a relationship of star-equilibrium, so Oates looks beyond the guilt-obsessed individuality of our era. (p. 23)

Lyrical prophecy is usually irritatingly unanalyzable; it is exhortatory not descriptive, demanding the assent of faith not logic. But in these two writers there is an accompanying grasp of sensual reality that roots their vision in the world. Lawrence's apocalyptic mysticism was based on a vision of a transformed individuality; Oates speaks of "the potential of normality" and of the growing contemporary realization "(so clear in imaginative literature, so muddled elsewhere) that it is here, in the soul, inside the fantastically complex phenomenon of man, that the salvation of the world will take place." (p. 25)

Both Lawrence and Oates … are only superficially novelists of place and landscape. "Landscape," wrote Lawrence, is "meant as a background to an intenser vision of life." So Oates's Detroit …, like her Eden County or her California, like Lawrence's Derbyshire or Swiss Alps, exist not as settings in their own right but are created through the leaps of lyrical, passionate feeling with which they are experienced by the characters and the reader. Throughout Oates's fiction, details of setting are habitually chosen for their associations of feeling. In "Ruth," from The Goddess and Other Women, the incipient violence within a decaying marriage is evoked by the deceptively realistic opening description…. The concentration of natural surroundings—the original wood, the swamp, the dying trees mysteriously connected with the highway—not only set a mood, they provide the reader with an initial emblem, a moral focus for developments later in the story. Similarly, although evoked tactilely, at times almost photographically, Oates's Detroit in Them particularly possesses the vivid significance of an X ray rather than the gaudy realism of a Kodakchrome print. In a not dissimilar way, Lawrence's Derbyshire in The Rainbow or his Australia in Kangaroo are imbued with the spirit, not the pictorial details of place. (p. 75)

Oates's vision of places like Detroit similarly arises from her concern with the city as symbol. She is obsessed not merely by the social profusion of America, but by the ways eddying, brooding currents of feeling tie our society together, and her fiction evokes the city as a revelation of psychological rather than social realism…. The sense of victimization, the rootless bewilderment and paucity of relationships are all rooted in the psyche, and they emerge in our involuntary movements, or cryptic, frustrated ejaculations of command or insult. Likewise, the autonomy of transcendence that may liberate us in the city is possible only from within ourselves. Detroit is everywhere. We cannot escape its pressure upon us, but we may transcend it through the resources we discover within our inner lives. (pp. 75-6)

As with setting, so with character. Lawrence's famous letter to Edward Garnett outlines a view of character which has been strikingly influential in subsequent fiction and psychology, and it is, I suggest, as helpful a key to many of Oates's characters as the American romance-gothic tradition into which she more obviously fits. "You mustn't," he wrote, "look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognizable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we've been used to exercise to discover are states of the same single radically unchanged elements." We respond to his characters, in their violent, rhythmical lyricism, as states of feeling, as vivid, personified intuitions of human potential, attracting or repulsing other centers of feeling (including the reader's). The very concept of a fixed self was for Lawrence a disastrously over-conscious conception of being, not only in fiction but in life, a solidification of experience that ignores the risk and chaos in the personality…. In a similar way, and despite her careful attention to surface detail, to the social trivia of the farm, city, hospital, or university, Oates concentrates on the moving, shifting surges of the personality that not only respond to but create their surroundings. Her most significant characters curiously combine, in the way romance characters do, heightened cliché and symbolic vividness that resound back upon their surrounding world—and then out to the reader's own world. The horrendous Dr. Pedersen in Wonderland, the dead Andrew Petrie in The Assassins, the ambitious Clara in A Garden of Earthly Delights are all evoked as centers of passionate consciousness, not depicted in the clear objectivity of the "stable ego" of personality. We fix on insignificant objects or incidents and project our inner urges upon them. Thus, minor details of setting, incident, or surroundings are heightened by and are reflections of the personality's obsessive subjectivity…. Tiny details of life suddenly, terrifyingly seize upon us and become obsessions. (pp. 78-9)

Her characters are seized upon by obscurely motivated, inexplicable urges which frequently erupt obsessively, turning apparently solid reality into something else, forcing us tragically to confront our limits and battle unsuccessfully to transcend them. (p. 80)

Because Oates's characters tend to exist as the foci of such obsessions, not as case histories of social or political development, they are frequently depicted in stereotypical form. (p. 81)

Even though Oates's work in the seventies shows more experimentation, her choice of form continues to be determined by the material of the story; she is not interested, it seems, in simply playing with fictional forms. She once criticized Donald Barthelme for his reliance on fragments, quoting a remark in one of his stories, that "fragments are the only forms I trust." It is therefore ironic, and perhaps heartening, to see the skill with which she too can employ fragmentary, open-ended fictions even if she uses fragments without the playful panache of Barthelme or Sukenick. Her … two novels, The Assassins and Childwold, show just how she has developed in her longer fictions. Childwold, in particular, presents us with a polyphony of dislocated epiphanies—scraps of dialogue, isolated memories, written and unwritten fantasies, long naturalistic scenes, few (and sometimes no) transitions, ritual chants, diary entries, quotations from philosophers, snatches of action, long Faulknerian sentences, blocks of space, disjointed paragraphs. Paradoxically, behind the randomness of the novel's surface story is not only an impressive intensification of conflict and self-discovery but a deeply pessimistic story of moral consequence and fearful accident. Rather than producing an atmosphere of cosmic randomness, the formal incertitude of the novel reinforces Oates's grimly coherent vision. The spaces, dislocations, and frayed ends of her fiction invariably point to the apocalyptic state of contemporary America. There are inevitably echoes of her earlier novels … but her technical control and experimentation … are startling. Probably never before has Oates handled such a difficult fictional form so effectively, especially the transition she achieves at the novel's end, as an apparent, if complex, order dissolves into chaos and randomness. (p. 84)

Oates has searched, often repetitively and restlessly, for forms which will be appropriate vehicles of her vision. The world around us appears material and trustworthy, rational and comprehendable—and she sees our salvation as lying in the gaps between the material things and the rational thoughts of our world. Dislocation, fragments, and evocative incoherence may be the way her vision is articulated, but in a sense, her vision chooses her…. Whereas we cannot see Oates in the forefront of the explorers of the postmodernist terrain, her recent work especially shows her capable of leading bivouacs over the most difficult areas of that terrain. (p. 85)