Joyce Carol Oates

One of her most famous short stories is:

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

by Joyce Carol Oates

First published in Epoch, Fall 1966. Included in Prize Stories : O Henry Award Winners(1968), and The Best American Short Stories (1967).

Copyright © by Joyce Carol Oates

for Bob Dylan

Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn’t much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. “Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you’re so pretty?” she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie.

“Why don’t you keep your room clean like your sister? How’ve you got your hair fixed—what the hell stinks? Hair spray? You don’t see your sister using that junk.”

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There are short stories I read and respect.  The author wrote them well, perfect technique, clever words, and fine, fine phrases.  Just one of those phrases, I know, would take decades for me to conjure.  Thanks to the spread of writing workshops no one will ever again be at a loss for finely crafted short stories such as these.

But there are also stories that after reading leave me raw in the gut.  These stories also have perfect technique and clever words and fine, fine phrases, but they possess another mysterious element that makes them seem written for me alone.  Their revelations are so true that I feel not so much taught as reminded.  They remind me of my nature and my past and give words to the indefinite parts of my being.

This for me is one of those stories.  I could find it nowhere else online, and the collection it is from is hard to find in bookstores.  So here is

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz

I

I think it is the year 1909. I feel as if I were in a motion picture theatre, the long arm of light crossing the darkness and spinning, my eyes fixed on the screen. This is a silent picture as if an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps. The actors too seem to jump about and walk too fast. The shots themselves are full of dots and rays, as if it were raining when the picture was photographed. The light is bad.

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