SOURCE: Carrington, Ildikó de Papp. “The Portugal of Joyce Carol Oates.” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 4 (fall 1994): 675-82.

[In the following essay, Carrington explores the metaphor of translation as well as other aspects of the stories in The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese.]

Remembering Adrienne Rich's “Notes toward a Politics of Location,” Elspeth Probyn cautions against dangerous maneuvers for women writers and critics: “In creating our own centers and our own locals, we tend to forget that our centers displace others into the peripheries of our making” (176). When we open Joyce Carol Oates's volume of short fiction, The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese, we experience these supposed translations as deliberate displacement of Portugal and its literature into a marginalized other, to a periphery where they are possessed, appropriated, and expropriated in a literary act that seeks to explore the ironic pretense of its author having herself been appropriated by “an imaginary author” of “an imaginary work, Azulejos” (15). Refractions aside, Oates gazes directly at her specular invention, the “mystical ‘Portugal’” (15) and finds, not surprisingly, herself, just as character after character in the collection looks at the other to sense at once confirmation and dissolution.

Oates tells us immediately that the author of these stories is a Fernandes de Briao (the usual diacritical marks of the Portuguese language do not occur in the Oates text), whom she calls her “very real” guide (15) in a process that brings her to “recognize” within herself “authority” (15). That authority is double at least (one invented author, one possessed author, each doubling the other) and extends over “a world-view quite antithetical” (15) to Oates's.

The name Fernandes is a name Oates gives to several writers in the collection. In “The Letter,” for instance, Fernandes figures as a well-connected banker who has written a letter to his lover. He hides in fear of blackmail and of dishonor to his family because of this letter. And in his attitude is a superiority to the apparently illiterate, humble, and boorish man he loves, whose body's “surfaces … undulate like the streets” of Lisbon (156). This wealthy man now seeks to re-claim the letter to keep his own cover secure; he finds instead amidst the clutter of his lover's room a different love letter, one he did not write. As happens so often in this collection of short stories, the writer of one text merges with the writer of another, almost compulsively yielding and assuming authorial identity: “I am this other person” (157), Fernandes muses. “What does it matter which of the two men I am?” (158), he concludes.

Thus, Oates comments on her own ironic strategy of claiming and denying authorship and authority over the texts of The Poisoned Kiss [The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese]. What does it matter?, she makes us ask. What does it matter that one author (the wealthy banker one) keeps the other unknown and anonymous? What does it matter that this same author assumes a name to protect his privileged interests over those of another author and of an unnamed readership he deems inferior in education and in status? It matters immensely if we pay attention with Oates to the uses of power and authority.

Oates admits of a power drawn from the privileges of wealth and lineage and of a sexual power used by men against both men and women. So, in the Afterword she says she “was besieged by Fernandes” (188) who, without some compromise, “would have overwhelmed” her (188). What was possessed in “The Letter” was the text the banker had not written as well as the lover as reader (or illiterate addressee) whose time and body were bought in exchange for shelter and clothing. In The Poisoned Kiss Oates possesses the texts while mocking simultaneously the appropriation by Fernandes in a kind of trompe l'oeil effect similar to the ones that beguile the wife into powerlessness and fear in the story titled “Husband and Wife.”

In claiming to be the translator of these stories, Oates allows translation to work as a powerful metaphor in The Poisoned Kiss. The book purports to be translation, and it opens with a translation, Roy Campbell's of a verse from “En una noche oscura” by St. John of the Cross. Already in The Poisoned Kiss's epigraph, Roy Campbell as translator changes the Spanish text written by a man in the voice of a woman. St. John writes: “Oh noche, que juntaste / Amado con amada, / Amada en el Amado transformada!” (26). Campbell's translation, though, re-writes the transformation of St. John the “amada” into the divine “Amado,” the female into the male. By such changes the translation refuses to acknowledge the power that is in (and lost in) the transformation and the translation. Campbell's text says that the night joins “the lover / To the beloved bride / Transfiguring them each into the other” (27). So, too, Irving Malin tries to see Oates's works emerging out of this epigraph as “marriages” (39), somehow benign. And Oates as woman author-translator asserts the use, and submits to the use, of the same power that Roy Campbell exercised over St. John's text. However bodiless Oates may wish to seem in her writing—and I am thinking of her argument in “(Woman) Writer: Theory and Practice”—she yields (and ironically does not yield) her identity and authority up to a male author, this imaginary Fernandes, in a literary erasure in the sense that she develops the image in her essay on “Pseudonymous Selves.”

There, Oates wants to believe that this kind of “erasure of the primary self” (385) has therapeutic value as it can bring about the release of “another (hitherto undiscovered?) self” (385). She argues that a woman's assumption of “a male or a male-sounding pseudonym” (385) can “stimulate the imagination in unanticipated ways” (385). It can be an act of “redefining oneself” (388).

While Oates “explains” in her Afterword to The Poisoned Kiss that “the Fernandes stories came out of nowhere” (187), at least as an idea they must have come out of M. C. D'Arcy's introduction to Roy Campbell's translation of St. John. There D'Arcy ends by saying that “translation can be a stimulus and an original pleasure to a genuine poet” (24), a worthwhile, if self-serving, literary and personal experiment. Years later we hear Oates echo D'Arcy's words in her essay on pseudonyms.

The “Letters to Fernandes from a Young American Poet” comments on the metaphor of translation. The young American poet is himself a translator, here of the work of Antonio (again, the expected accent in the Portuguese name of Antonio does not occur in Oates's text), a poet detained by the Salazar regime. Just as Antonio's work (let alone Antonio himself) is in danger of being erased (141), so too the translator feels the threat of this political canceling out of his being, the threat of disappearance, of a fall even deeper than that into anonymity. “When the language is erased we will all be erased” (141). Since she recognizes the privilege of the politically powerful to erase words, why then does Oates in “Pseudonymous Selves” stand behind some therapeutic value in self-erasure? Twice in the “Letters to Fernandes” the young American poet joins with the translated author, becomes that author. Early on he writes that his “blood was drained” (140) into the translation, and at the end again he claims his “blood has gone into translations” (148) of Antonio. He continues:

I am he and he is myself. Let the world sit in judgment on how his Flesh is Resurrected in my Midwestern soul. Poets & translators. Poets & lovers. Men & language. Men & men. Language.

(148)

What is the process of translation here? Is it a betrayal of self? Is it some kind of negative capability? Or is it the exercise of power that takes flesh and blood for the self's own stimulation, here portrayed, as so often in the collection, as homosexual? Once again, the link between possession, sexual appropriation, and violence disturbs. Can Irving Malin be right in calling the supposed act of translation in The Poisoned Kiss part of a strategy of “joining opposites” (39)? If there is joining, it is not without a force that results in the disappearance of the translated work and of the author Antonio in favor of the young American poet.

In “Plagiarized Material” Oates again seems to decry art that erases, that annihilates “all private and public experience” (171), art that is so lacking in originality that it is itself a copy of other works and is endlessly re-copying itself. In the story, Cabral, a Portuguese author so full of himself he cannot consider his own insignificance (emphasized in all the references to miniature qualities), loses his sanity and his life as he sees text after text he is writing merge with texts by others. He fears these other texts and their authors (which and who, of course, in his aesthetics do not exist but still manage somehow to produce in him Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence); “They will appropriate you,” he hears a cautionary voice say (167). Here we do sense some of the tension in being overwhelmed that Oates writes of in the Afterword as she imagines herself appropriated in the act of appropriation.

We establish, then, one source in the desired stimulus translation may provide and also a motive: metaphor. Do we routinely misread the last sentence of Oates's Afterword, misread its deep irony? It claims that “In truth none of it [the possession by Fernandes, the stories themselves] was metaphorical, any more than you and I are metaphorical” (189). Each of us, of course, is metaphor, now and then one or another of the “lost selves” (91) of the characters in the stories, just as each of these “parables” is a pernicious metaphor for colonialism in literature. In her own quite humorous debunking of Simone Weil's mysticism (whose lack of originality Oates opposes to the originality of St. John of the Cross), Oates ridicules the idea of a dispossessed self. Her review of Weil glosses the Afterword to The Poisoned Kiss as it points without hesitation to its irony and to the irony with which Oates can view her own work: “Is Weil speaking in parables? and is the body [my emphasis] of her multifarious prose pieces really a kind of poem or extended metaphor … ?” (149).

While this collection masquerades as translation, so the work masks a kind of anachorism when it comes to Portugal. Sure, there are plentiful references to real places, to Lisbon and its Alfama quarter, to Estoril, to Sintra, for example, most of them piled on in “Plagiarized Material.” Can we accept G. F. Waller's understanding of—or excuse for—Oates's obsession with a Lawrentian “spirit of place” (163) and “not with its surface or geographical details” (163)? James R. Giles argues less convincingly that “the Portuguese setting allows Oates to use overt fascism as a metaphor for corrupted American democracy” (145), and Irving Malin offers a puzzling justification that lets critics and authors “write about ‘Portugal’ but our ‘Portugal’ is not the real country—we use it (or are used by it) for our ceremonies” (40). He sees the stories as “ceremonies of creation—sexual, artistic, theological” (41). What little ceremony is here if we understand ceremony as initiation into or celebration of some transcendent value. With no reverential or ceremonial gesture at all toward Portuguese literature, Oates substitutes her own literature for that of a country she claims not to know (187). We must fall back on Giles's realization that the settings in The Poisoned Kiss “more closely” approximate “allegory than Portugal” (141).

When Joyce Carol Oates looks at Portugal, she sees herself. Mirroring, specular gazing, provides another metaphor for the translation process. In story after story in the volume, a character looks upon or endures the gaze of the other, only to become the other. In the most well developed story, “Our Lady of the Easy Death of Alferce,” the statue of the Madonna experiences such translation into the other. Immobile, she lives an inner life that extends her vision and her effect outside the confines of the statue so that she knows the social and natural quotidian. That vision transports (or should I say, translates?) the religious figure beyond itself for momentary relief from the constant burden of adoration, of being the other, the one who holds the Christ Child but cannot see his face or know his affection. Distance, then, prevails, whether of time as in the centuries during which Mary has not gazed upon the Child or of space in the yards (no metric measurements in this Portuguese village church) of pews that separate the women who pray from the woman to whom they pray for intercession. Mary's petrified body yearns for a response forever denied: a voice, an expression of surprise, an embrace for those who adore her with a “trembling hot love” (18). The distance deepens as we see the Virgin Mary further petrified by the ages of artistic and literary representations of simultaneous virginal and motherly beauty. When the miracle happens, when Mary cries one tear on behalf of a boy who loves her in a “panicked rage” (19), she gains momentary release again from the reified body her worshippers demand. That release, though, leads to a redefinition (or, more accurately, a paralysis or loss) of self that the mother of the young boy now insists on in light of her son's having been taken away, we know not where. So the mother attacks Mother Mary as “thief, a murderer” (23), as one who has “poisoned” (23) her son. In her anguish, the boy's mother breaks off and steals the Christ Child, leaving the statue to endure the re-placement of a replica “in place of the Son of God” (24). Mary's motherhood drains away into the boy's mother, draining away all but “madness” (24) in a woman now “blank” and “darker than the shadows ever get …” (25).

Likewise, specular gazing figures as a metaphor for the translation process in Oates's story “Loss.” There, a woman, displaced from home in Portugal to Rome, gazes at and is gazed upon by a male figure. Like the Madonna of Alferce, the female character V in “Loss” senses the self in paralysis and is seen as paralyzed: the voice of the other who watches her from behind a window in an adjacent building refers to her “perfectly immobile … body” (29). When this voice intrudes into the narrative, it talks of V's body in ways that can only be heard as invasive and violent, as possessive: we hear of the “body of a bride” (29), the woman's “supple, full body” (31), its blond hair tied tightly to the “skull” (32) and leading down to the “graceful neck and torso, bare arms, a small waist” (34) on to the “wide, fleshy thighs” (34) of “a new bride” in “white clothing that covered but did not contain her body, her gleaming nakedness” (35). Finally, as the voice and the figure of V's husband merge in their violence, the owner of the voice intrudes to loosen the woman's hair and tug and tear at her dress (36). She ends in the story under “heavy and stifling” bed covers that “seemed bunched up around her, as if bunched up about a human body” (38). Joanne V. Creighton's analysis of “Loss” misses the violence; she sees the voice as belonging to one who “responds sensitively to” V (137), “creating graceful prose translations of her appearance and movement …” (137). Indeed, the words are translations of V's person but with none of the grace we expect from translators. Rather, translation becomes a violent act of power. Creighton goes on to argue that the on-looker's “disappearance shatters” the woman's “self-esteem” (138). It is not the disappearance of the voice or of the on-looker we must regret; rather, the voice becomes clearly that of the husband and even of the wife who internalizes his values. The on-looker does not disappear; V, as self and perhaps as body, disappears. Contrary to Creighton's notion that the loss of self occurs because of the disappearance of “this flattering reflection and imaginative re-creation” (138), V loses because the woman's identity is threatened with annihilation in marriage. The building from which the shadowy man speaks and observes “architecturalizes” the threat V feels and he so anonymously figures: the building has walls of a “green, muddy color” (31) and balconies phallically “decorated with dull spikes and spirals” (31) in a “masculine style” that “looked weary and heavy” (31). In this threat V's self becomes one with the stranger who looks upon her: he becomes her mirrored self as she assumes descriptions earlier given only to him, as a soul in “a glow of light” (35) and “a kind of shadow within intense light” (35). Is she experiencing herself and the man, as Toni Morrison's Sula experienced Nel (119), simultaneously as self and other? Or is it a more noxious loss of self within marriage that allows the look and voice of the other to colonize and transfigure the self (as in the mystical marriage merging the “amada” into the Amado”), leaving it indistinguishable after the intrusion? Near the end, V seeks in the avoiding darkness of a church “to illuminate the part of her mind in which she herself existed” (37). That search for the self lost to the other in marriage finds only a self with a fragment of a name, V, a blur of an age as “a young woman” (37), and the beginning of a status as “a bride” (37). “But for some reason she could not remember herself” (37), and she remains “absolutely anonymous” (37), translated out of essence into the transfixed soi pour autrui.

Similarly, other stories from the collection suggest the ways in which characters lose themselves in specular strategies. “Distance,” for example, is a story that, from a male side, mirrors “Loss.” It views the loss of self through the specular strategies of a displaced and nearly anonymous P on assignment from Lisbon to the embassy in London. He gazes out the window of his flat at the “inert bodies” (59) of vagrants in a park, only to lose the self in the mirrored image by the story's end. And in “The Secret Mirror,” a transvestite dresses himself and gazes upon his specular invention, “hypnotized” (91) and in despair at being “untouched, unpursued” (91). And “The Cruel Master” has Dr. Thomaz, another paralyzed figure, endlessly dreaming of a scene of a suffering peasant boy on whom he gazes through a window until the dreamer cannot be in any world other than that of the dream.

All of these stories that treat of specular strategies also treat of the kind of brutal violence Joyce Carol Oates incorporates in her fiction. The Madonna of Alferce is Our Lady of the Easy Death; V's body seems doomed to repetitive violations; P in “Distance” considers killing the vagrants and shudders “with disgust” (63) at the possibility of one of the vagrants being a woman; the transvestite before his mirror imagines the assault and shaming with which a derisive public would meet him and yearns for a female body able to be penetrated (91); and Dr. Thomaz's repeated dream with variations of a boy trampled by a horse evokes the kind of playing with the plot in which Robert Coover's sado-masochistic characters engage in Spanking the Maid. Oates does choose more authority over her narrative. Still, in considering all the violence in Oates's work, I do remember Mary Campbell's preface to Roy Campbell's translation of St. John of the Cross. Writing of Roy Campbell, she assures us that the “apparent violence in his life or work was not the most characteristic side of him” (13) and that “the violent side of his character was used as a cloak for a vulnerable contemplative soul” (13). Perhaps Oates seeks a public with a similar assessment of her and her work as author and “translator.”

James R. Giles does not see the “parables” of The Poisoned Kiss as “a thematic departure for Oates” (146), though he urged her to return to “a realistic prose foreground” (147). As I read the parables, though, they do represent a departure from Oates's work elsewhere in “sanctifying the real world by honoring its complexities” (188), a task she embraces for her work in the Afterword. Giles is correct and enlightening in seeing in these stories an elaborate satire by Oates of those “minimal” (141) artists who refuse the sanctifying role. Oates herself refuses that role in these stories “from the Portuguese.” Just as the stories force us to face the lure and the consequences of anonymity and the look of the other, so Oates's possessed authorship of a little bit of literature for Portugal forces us to face the danger of such work rendering Portugal's literature anonymous, of inscribing it only in and by the look of an American other.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Campbell, Mary. Preface. John of the Cross 9-15.

Coover, Robert. Spanking the Maid. New York: Grove, 1982.

Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: Twayne, 1979.

D'Arcy, M. D., SJ. Introduction. John of the Cross 17-24.

Giles, James R. “Oates' The Poisoned Kiss.” Canadian Literature 80 (1979): 138-47.

John of the Cross, St. Poems. Trans. Roy Campbell. Baltimore: Penguin, 1960.

Malin, Irving. “Possessive Material.” Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Ed. Linda W. Wagner. Boston: Hall, 1979. 39-41.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Knopf, 1973.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “‘May God Grant That I Become Nothing’: The Mysticism of Simone Weil.” The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews. New York: Dutton, 1983. 147-58.

———. The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese. New York: Vanguard, 1975.

———. “Pseudonymous Selves.” (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities. New York: Dutton, 1988. 383-97.

———. “(Woman) Writer: Theory and Practice.” (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities. New York: Dutton, 1988. 22-32.

Probyn, Elspeth. “Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local.” Feminism/Postmodernism. Ed. Linda J. Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1990. 176-89.

Waller, G. F. “Through Obsession to Transcendence: The Lawrentian Mode of Oates's Recent Fiction.” Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Ed. Linda W. Wagner. Boston: Hall, 1979. 161-73.