PerfectlyWritePoetry: It's Never, Ever, 'All Over'.

Sunday 20 December 2015

It's Never, Ever, 'All Over'.

Bob Dylan's song, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, prompted the theme of veteran US writer Joyce Carol Oates's most noted short story, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

The lyrics are difficult. Some critics argue that they are strongly influenced by the symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud while lines like "take what you have gathered from coincidence" reflect the I Ching philosophy which uses a type of divination called cleromancy and states that coincidence represents more than mere chance. This in turn produces apparently random numbers.

Oates's story has prompted as much debate as Dylan's song, partly because of her description of the graffiti of rough doodles and random numbering adorning the villain's gold-painted, open-top car.

"'Now, these numbers are a secret code, honey," Arnold Friend explained. He read off the numbers 33, 19, 17 ...'"

Other scholars say the numerals allude to several biblical passages, especially Judges 19:17 in the Hebrew bible. This verse appears in the story about a man who tries to prevent a male guest from being sodomised by offering his daughter and the guest's concubine in their place. The concubine is gang-raped throughout the night, collapses, then dies. Then as the story unfolds, we learn that the incident causes a civil war with mass slaughter on both sides.

My own feeling is that while Oates is an atheist, that she may also be acutely aware of the rabbinical dictum of there being no such thing as coincidence; that everything happens for a reason.

After all, she is from a part-Jewish background and was very close to her paternal grandmother, Blanche Woodside who concealed her heritage after her own father killed himself. It seems self-evident to me that Oates drew on this link via Dylan's music and also through her villain, 'Friend', who bears a common Jewish surname.

Elsewhere, Oates uses parts of her grandmother's life story in her novel, The Gravedigger's Daughter. Most recently, the final tale in her new short-story collection, The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, refers to the frequent use of 'coincidence' as a popular plot device in 19th century fictional literature.