Wonderland (79 page)

My practice as a novelist up to and including the composition of the similarly obsessive
Son of the Morning
, published in 1978, was to write a complete first draft in one long head-on plunge; by which, though this was perhaps not my conscious choice, I would be nearly as immersed in my characters’ experiences as they themselves were. The first draft completed, I would be exhausted; often, overcome by a sense of psychic derailment; my graphic vision of the runaway Shelley, wasted and ungendered and sickly-yellow with jaundice at
Wonderland
’s end, is an exaggerated self-portrait, meant perhaps to exert authorial control over the torrential experience of novel-writing—which is the formal, daylight discipline of which novel-imagining is the passion. Once the first draft was completed, I would put it away for some weeks or months, and, after an interregnum during which I took on more finite projects, including, for who knows what restoration of the soul, the intensive reading and writing of poetry, I would systematically rewrite the entire manuscript, first word to last. And this was the triumph of art, it seemed to me: the re-writing, the re-casting, the re-imagining of what had been a sustained ecstatic plunge. A novel is prose artfully structured, structure imposed upon prose. Control imposed upon passion.
Wonderland
’s theme of a protagonist who seems without identity (“You do not exist,” Dr. Pedersen tells Jesse) unless deeply involved in meaningful experience (who is more qualified than a neurologist to determine where brain and spirit fuse?) is an oblique portrait of the novelist as well.

This book is for all of us who pursue phantasmagoria of personality
—how boldly, how trustingly,
Wonderland
’s dedication exposes its secret heart! In the broadest terms, literature is of two distinct types: that which offers us a distillation of experience, and that which offers us experience itself. My method of composition in those years was ideally suited for my goal—that of offering, so far as literature may be said to offer anything palpable, tangible, “real,” at all, not a cool, intellectualized distillation of fictitious characters’ experiences, but experience itself, mediated by language and form. Instead of exploring the “phantasmagoria of personality” (the mystery of our
selfness
within our
species-hood
) obliquely, which is the more navigable way,
Wonderland
, from its first sentence to its last, plunges us into the vortex of being: we begin with a terrified fourteen-year-old boy who “knows” something terrible is going to happen to him, or has indeed already happened and
is awaiting him at home; and we continue with him, adding on, as if in psychic replication, his wife and younger daughter, all of them caught up in this vortex of being as it confronts non-being—for that is the secret horror inside the costly microscope Dr. Cady has given his son-in-law Jesse.
Do we exist? What is “personality”? Is it permanent, is it ephemeral?
—can it be destroyed as easily as Dr. Perrault boasts, “with a tiny pin in my fingers”?

Because such questions are the novel’s heart, its deep verticality and inwardness is driven by convulsive narrative leaps: months and even years pass, but only those actions possessing psychic significance are dramatized. Opening with an act of despair that seems to us so tragically American—the slaughter of a family by its “head,” who then kills himself—
Wonderland
moves from the Depression through World War II through the Korean War and the “Cold War” and the Vietnam War and the turbulent years of that decade (approximately 1963–1973: from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy to the end of the Vietnam War) known as The Sixties. Background is foreground, in a sense, only in terms of the Depression, which has devastated Jesse Harte’s father; the assassination of Kennedy, which is experienced by the Vogel family at a crucial time in their lives; and the grimly self-destructive yet intermittently radiant visions of The Sixties, to which both Jesse’s mock-brother Trick Monk and his daughter Shelley fall victim. Like virtually all of my novels,
Wonderland
is political in genesis, however individualized its characters and settings. It could not have been conceived, still less written, at any other time than in post-1967 America, when divisive hatreds between the generations, over the war in Vietnam, and what was called, perhaps optimistically, the “counterculture,” raged daily. (So too
them
, the novel immediately preceding
Wonderland
, could not have been written before the “long, hot summer” of urban race riots of 1967.) How specifically rooted in time and place
Wonderland
is, from the meticulously observed view of the Erie Canal, its cascading waterfalls and locks seen by Jesse from the perspective of a certain bridge in Lockport, to the demoralized street scene in Toronto, thirty years later, where the drug-addicted young, moribund, unsexed, affectless, begging from strangers, have “the appearance of victims of war, photographed to illustrate the anonymity of war.” (Yes, that was Yonge Street, Toronto, in those days. A “street of the young” in any large North American city, in those days.)

For
Wonderland
, as a title, refers to both America, as a region of wonders, and the human brain, as a region of wonders. And “wonders” can be both dream and nightmare.

After rewriting the ending of
Wonderland
for its paperback reprinting in 1972, I ceased thinking about it; I did not want to think about it; of my early novels, it was the one of which readers sometimes spoke in odd, rapturous-accusatory terms—“I was eighteen years old, my roommate at college gave it to me to read, I was up all night, I couldn’t put it down.
Why don’t you write novels like that any longer?”
I did not want to write novels quite like that any longer, nor even to reread this specific one, the very thought of which made me feel faint, as if in recollection of some close call, some old, survived danger. (Perhaps I should mention parenthetically that my interest in neurology, so evident in
Wonderland
’s long speculative middle section, was the consequence of an apparent medical condition, which necessitated one or more trips to a neurologist in Windsor, Ontario, where my husband and I lived at the time: but the “condition” turned out to be, not physical, or in any case not seriously physical, but a temporary confluence of symptoms caused by what is today called, so commonly, “stress.”) Approaching the novel now, a cavernous twenty-two years after its composition, I am probably most struck by what might be called its kinetic exuberance. I mean it as a purely neutral expression—neither laudatory nor condemnatory—to say that, both in its epic conception and its execution,
Wonderland
leaves me a bit breathless: as the narrative itself seems breathless, caught up in that vortex of being that is our human predicament.

Indeed, so fuelled by energy was
Wonderland
, it spilled over into a play,
Ontological Proof of My Existence
, a dramatization and expansion of Jesse’s visit to Toronto, to win, or buy, his daughter back from her drug-dispenser lover; and into such short stories of that time as “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction, and Began My Life Over Again,” an analogue of Shelley’s experience as a runaway to Toledo. (In retrospect, it seems that Shelley Vogel was crying out for a novel of her own, a story that was not a mere appendage of her father’s; but this was a novel that I could not, or would not write. The material was simply too devastating.)

Much in
Wonderland
has to do with memory. The escape from memory, the surrender to memory. Theories of memory. The “invention” of memory. Of all art-forms, the novel is the most indigenously equipped to take its populace through a delimited space of time, shoring up memory in both characters and readers; at a certain point, as if by magic, the memory of the novel is shared by both characters and readers. So, in
Wonderland
, when the adult Jesse remembers, or fails to remember, the attentive reader is a part of his consciousness; we sense the onset of his breakdown when isolated figures and memory-shards out of his deeply suppressed past begin to intrude into his rigidly controlled present. No other art-form so builds upon memory so
necessarily
, as the novel: in this it mimics, as Dr. Cady suggests, personality itself. (For there can be no
person
without memory.) And no other art-form is so dependent upon and so infatuated with memory, as the novel: the novelist might be defined as one who, in the guise of fiction, is involved in a ceaseless memorialization of the past. (
Wonderland
includes a postmodernist snapshot of a kind, when, in the concluding pages of the first section, the beleaguered Jesse, pausing in his desperate drive from Lockport to Buffalo, spies upon a young family in a green swing behind a farmhouse—Carolina and Frederic Oates and their three-year-old daughter Joyce.) The uses we make of our homesickness!

For the melancholy we feel when completing a novel is akin to the melancholy we feel when, by the inexorable process of time, we are expelled forever from home.

J
OYCE
C
AROL
O
ATES
January, 1992

E
LAINE
S
HOWALTER
is professor emeritus of English at Princeton University, where she taught courses on contemporary fiction, women’s writing, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. The author or editor of eighteen books on English and American literature, she has reviewed contemporary literature and culture both for scholarly journals and for periodicals such as
The Guardian Review, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, The Washington Post Book Review
, and the
Los Angeles Times
. Her current project is a literary history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.