An Alternative Approach To Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

Part I

This is an immediately fascinating short, in no small part because it encourages a good deal of reader participation. The confusing events which unfold in the story usually spark intense efforts to find an angle which will put things in perspective. The internet is soaked with variations on a biblical/numerological approach which attempt to establish the story as some kind of morality piece about inviting evil into one’s home, or the dangers of vanity or something else along those lines. For our part, we would like to take an alternative approach.

The story is about a teen-aged girl who, like many teen-aged girls, does not get along with her mother, has two different modes of existence – one for home, one for social life, and is very concerned with her appearance. She also, and this is important, is very much involved in the popular culture of her day – this we estimate to be the late 60’s early 70’s. The events of the story can be easily laid out: Connie, our heroine, who likes music and the mall, goes out one night with a friend to watch a movie. The movie, of course, is just the cover and the real intent is to flirt with boys. While in the company of a young man named Eddie she encounters a strange individual, only briefly and in passing, who proclaims to her with a wagging finger, “Gonna get you, baby.” The strange man’s description is very similar to that of Bob Dylan, to whom the story was originally dedicated. After this ominous portent, the girls are picked up by Connie’s friend’s father, and Connie has a queer sense embarrassment for having been looking at her reflection in the windows of cars before the strange boy made his proclamation. The following Sunday Connie’s whole family, save herself, heads off to a pick nick leaving Connie at home alone. After a brief stint sunning in the yard, Connie goes inside and turns on the hip music station “XYZ Sunday Jamboree” and listens to “record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs”. Following this, the real terror begins. We are reintroduced to the strange boy, who arrives in his old jalopy with his friend, Ellie Oscar, and reveals his own name: Arnold Friend. The ensuing encounter between Arnold and Connie is a seemingly inexplicable, and admittedly semi-magical, episode of predatory seduction. With obviously nefarious intentions (the first line of the story is: “Her name was Connie” – a past tense very suggestive of the heroine’s death), Arnold Friend is able to talk the terrified girl into leaving her home and joining him in the old jalopy for a ride from which she will likely never return, without any physical force or even physical threat. The unavoidable “How” in this mysterious interaction is the motor behind all of the internet religious and occult speculation. This standard approach settles on the supernatural effect of evil to explain how Connie is persuaded, clearly against her will, to submit to demands of Arnold Friend without any more than verbal protest. Satisfied with this, these interpretations move to bolster the argument by showing (with some convenient omissions and unfounded additions) that Arnold Friend is really An Old Fiend (his name less the Rs) and that the title of the story vaguely resembles a bible passage that can be identified if the numbers on the old jalopy are manipulated properly.

What we do know about the back ground of this story is that Oates was inspired by the story of Charles Schmid, the Pied Piper of Tucson; a strange but charismatic little man who committed murder and bragged about it to his dedicated clique. The parallels with Oates’ narrative are obvious: Schmid stuffed his boots to increase his short stature – “One of [Arnold Friend’s] boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn’t in it”; Schmid wore thick makeup and stretched his lip to resemble Elvis – “[Arnold Friend’s] whole face was a mask, she thought wildly, tanned down onto his throat but then running out as if he had plastered make-up on his face but had forgotten about his throat”. The inspiration for the appearance is obvious and Oates even admitted so in an interview – but this still doesn’t explain how Arnold Friend’s seduction worked because, in fact, the same mystery surrounded the magnetism of Schmid. And this is where the real analysis of Oates’ story should begin, our thesis being: the narrative of Connie and Arnold is not simply a fictional retelling of the Schmid story but is instead an attempt by Oates to explain through fiction the psychological possibility of a real but stupefying phenomenon. How, in other words, did a strange and sociopathic little man like Schmid have such a persuasive influence over his clan of followers and the women that were drawn to him? In her story, Oates rejects both the mystified evil explanation and the overly simplistic condemnation of the victim as either vain or stupid. Instead what she gives is a brilliant illustration of a form of seduction that petitions not the biological urges or base desires of the subject but rather aligns itself with the coordinates of the subject’s desire structuring fantasy.

Probably the easiest and most convenient comparison for this dynamic would be the story of Cortes and his conquest of the Aztec empire. In both the old (and increasingly out of fashion) version in which Cortes is mistaken for the white and bearded god Quetzalcoatl, and the newer, more politically correct version in which the surrendered empire was really a customary insult lost in translation (a gift in Aztec custom carrying an insulting connotation) the essential point is the same: a by-no-means exemplary soldier, with about 500 troops, was able to subdue an empire because of an opportunity presented by a fluke, a simple confusion. What exists in the animal kingdom in the form of tricking the instincts – take for example the snapping turtle or the angler fish, which use a deception of the predatory instincts of their prey to lure them to their death – is reflected here in the space of culture or the ideal. The obvious discontinuity of this analogy being that both fraud (tricking the intellect, or confidence in the case of con-men) and standard seduction (appealing to desire or rousing instincts) already exist in human interaction by their own right and are more apt analogs to this kind of predator/prey animal trickery since the mechanism at work is the same for both (i.e. a scheme built upon inclinations and tendencies already existing in the target). In the case of the Aztecs and Connie their natural instincts and or intellect (intuition or Reason) were not the key to their manipulation (indeed, Connie’s agonizing fear and confusion in the story shows just how aware and apprehensive she intuitively was). Rather: the avenue used by Cortes and Friend is precisely the ideal (the realm of custom, rite, ceremony, culture, myth, ideology or if you prefer the symbolic order). It was by happening upon a chance resemblance to an important element in their symbolic order or by adventitiously misreading the nature of their custom that Cortes was able to cause so much damage with so little effort; likewise, Friend (and following the narrative thesis presented by Oates: Schmid) cloaked himself in the insignia of the most poignant icons and themes of the current pop cultural depiction of reality - in other words, the cognitive map constructed from the music of Elvis or Bob Dylan.
Aside from the overt clue (the aforementioned dedication to Dylan) there is much more support throughout the story to suggest that Bob Dylan’s lyrics are the proper ground (as opposed to the bible) for exegesis. When the girls skip the movie to hang at the seedy restaurant we are told that, “They sat at the counter … and listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background like music at a church service; it was something to depend on.” Here the music is foundational, the coordinates used to situate oneself in the world, like the function of religion implied in the simile. Further on we are given this bit of exposition which reveals a specific function, or the content of the form fit to the base:
“She and that girl and occasionally another girl went out several times a week that way, and the rest of the time Connie spent around the house – it was summer vacation – getting in her mother’s way and thinking, dreaming, about the boys she met. But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July.”
And an even more explicit demonstration of the materialization of this constructed doxa is the description of Connie’s imbibing of the songs played during the XYZ Sunday Jamboree: “…Connie paid close attention herself, bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself and lay languidly about the airless little room, breathed in and breathed out with each gentle rise and fall of her chest.” Metaphorically the music and the popular cultural values communicated through it are the air she breaths and on an even deeper level this is a demonstration of Connie’s ritual appropriation of a basic biological imperative, instinct, into the service of the symbolic order. The actual character of the this cultural framework which directs and sustains her complex of instincts and desires, and which presented a rubric through which Friend (and by extension Schmid), by assuming its appearances, was able to seduce Connie against her animal instinct for survival, we maintain, is accessible only through an analysis of the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s popular songs of the time.