Published by The Hogarth Press on 16 June Mania: StoriesThe 49th collection of Joyce Carol Oates. That same day, “America’s Leading Female Writer” posted and reposted 40 times on X, commenting, among other things, on Dick Cavett, Tiger Lily, cats, and, repeatedly, police brutality. A storehouse of extraordinary short stories, frenzy has already received rave reviews, yet Oates’ tweets will likely garner even more attention. With nearly 200,000 followers, the renowned author has an audience on social media that far exceeds her reading public.
Stephen King (6.7 million), Margaret Atwood (1.7 million), Gary Shteyngart (487,000), and a few other novelists have more followers on X-Bots than Oates. Yet Oates has far more talent for going viral on the increasingly conservative social media site. In 2022, critics condemned Oates for her infamous tweet emphasizing the unrecognized value of “young white male writers… who can be really talented, and critical of their own ‘privilege'”. Three years later, he received praise online for brutally firing Elon Musk, the first of many criticisms.
Oates wrote, “So curious that such a rich man never posts anything that indicates he enjoys or is even aware that virtually everyone appreciates it.” “The poorest of the poor on Twitter may have access to more beauty and meaning in life than the ‘richest person in the world’.” Offering a lively mix of satire, wit and empathy to scrollers and Twitterers, Oates consistently attracts large numbers of views.
Of course, not everyone likes this. Frustrated by some early tweets, gawkerWhereas, Michelle Dean urges removal of @JoyceCarolOates Lit HubEric Thurm was concerned that the posts would tarnish Oates’s literary reputation. Recently, the author’s anti-MAGA posts have drawn praise from Sophie Lee culture magazine Oates was dubbed a “Gen Z Twitter meme” and Mary Kate Carr AV Club He is being celebrated as perhaps the most dangerous “gunslinger” in the Wild West of X.
But what about Oates’s imagination? How do his nearly one hundred novels and collections impact his online celebrity? Oates’s “social feed” is not his “greatest contribution to literature” GuardianPatrick Lenton cheekily claims, however, that his writings may have informed his astonishing Internet popularity. Like many 21st-century posters and influencers, Oates has long found disturbing news integral to his work. National Book Award Winner Them (1969) depicts the Detroit riots of 1967; black water (1992) is based on the Chappaquiddick incident; zombie (1995) based on the story of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer; blond (2000) reimagines the life and death of Marilyn Monroe; And to give up (2015) focuses on the Tawana Brawley case. Long before Twitter and Instagram, Oates devoted himself to the graphic representation of disturbing figures and events.
This willingness to pursue and sometimes encourage public controversy continues frenzyNot with the fictionalization of a headline story, but with the representation of a more ambiguous phenomenon: the crisis of selfhood in the digital age. With this volume, as in recent publications such as “Subaqueous” (2021) and “This Is Not a Drill” (2023), Oates highlights the frustrating effects of technology on contemporary life, drawing our attention to spatial isolation and dissonance in our cell-phone age. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the literary queen of Despite their utter ubiquity, Oates points out that these devices are hardly the sole cause of our problems.
Oates does not join in the predictable condemnation of social media. She may have claimed that Twitter is “largely a waste of time”, but she also believes that we sometimes scapegoat technology to avoid confronting its limitations and failures.
The titular story suggests as much. Mania cites protagonist Matthew Cassidy’s experience of watching a cannibalistic orgy of fish off the New England coast (“silvery bodies writhing in the dark water, feeding mercilessly”) but it’s not hard to understand the bloody scene as a metaphor for the brutality of American capitalism. Deeply interested in economic inequality – his novels confirm this – Oates is well aware that in our society the big fish usually eat the small fish.
This insight also applies to the frenetic world of X, but Oates doesn’t engage in predictable condemnation of social media. She may have claimed that Twitter is “largely a waste of time”, but she also believes that we sometimes scapegoat technology to avoid confronting its limitations and failures. Devoted to his own midlife crisis, Matthew has no qualms about cheating on him with family friends’ nineteen-year-old daughter Brianna, but finds her inability to “stop scrolling through email or Instagram, TikTok” and commit himself to their Jersey Shore endeavor objectionable.
Enraged that Brianna has “forgotten about her existence, completely immersed in her damned phone”, Matthew throws his young lover’s iPhone into the ocean. Brianna considers this act a complete betrayal, and she responds in kind. Yet Oates hardly suggests that we should side with Matthew. His desire to live “off the grid,” like his aggressive reaction to Brianna’s behavior, says more about his selfishness than his uncritical regard for communication technology. In this story – perhaps Oates’s finest short story since “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” (1966) – the cell phone is not so much an obstacle to meaningful human relationships as a mirror reflecting a middle-aged man’s infidelities.
Oates’ fascination with the dynamics of self and other continues in “The Fear,” a heartbreaking story about Janet and Juliet, two nearly identical cousins who develop jaw cancer and then undergo multiple surgeries. The story’s title refers to the fear of physical difference that underpins demonization and violence. As the narrator says when describing the teenage boys’ reaction to Juliet’s unusual face, marked by multiple operations on her mouth and eye: “Like looking into a mirror. Seeing something extremely unfamiliar, unexpected in your own (familiar) face. Unfathomable.” Horror at the vagaries of human embodiment leads to mob-like behavior, and Oates is, as always, exceptionally sensitive to the brutal treatment of young women in modern America. Primarily focused on how Janet struggles with her failure to accept her sick cousin, this beautifully crafted story asks us to consider how we fearfully reject the other because of our transience. “Fear” teaches the reader that deep-rooted human anxieties about being watched and objectified, isolated and dissected exist within and outside of the world of digital technology.
Oates is also very aware of the loneliness of contemporary life, and she comments in various stories on what it means for humans to interact primarily through cell phones. Maude, the first-person narrator of “The Return”, understands that her widowed friend Audra longs for real contact, “not to talk to her, to fall apart coolly like an email” but “to talk with her.” Maude informs the reader, “Seeing someone on a computer screen, in an email or a text message, there is no sense of intimacy.” Indeed, if one reads “The Return” in light of Oates’s long experience with
Yet Oates also makes clear that any attempt to avoid this dilemma is doomed to failure. In “The Refuge”, Marcus, a self-loathing techie who is intolerant of his wife Lorraine’s interest in computers, goes “off the grid” in search of enlightenment. He visits a local Buddhist temple, but instead of finding enlightenment and peace, he becomes mentally unstable and then commits suicide. For Marcus, abandoning “stupid devices like cell phones” taps into something far worse than the isolation and cruelty of online culture: the human capacity for physical violence. In the world of “The Refuge,” the brutality of even the most despicable posts pales in comparison to the terrifying prospect of bloodshed.
Continuous frenzyOates does not attempt to understand Apple and X dialectically, our culture of cell phones and social media. He forces the reader, like Matthew, to confront the uncomfortable reality that our use of and response to technology says far more about us than the software and hardware that is an integral part of our lives. Digital culture, even oligarch-controlled digital culture, is not the problem; It’s what humans say on and through forums that is the real cause for concern for Oates. Machines are simply things we create, and, thanks to this talented author, we are reminded that sometimes we can actually force them to speak in subversive ways.
