Read Online In Rough Country by Joyce Carol Oates - Free Book Online Page B

cartoon monster-mother, George conducts improbable experiments with white rats, determining that the female of the rat species is more sexually rapacious than the male, even when death by electrocution is involved; it’s no surprise that he falls prey to a female parishioner with the ominous name Roach whose face is covered with a “pale carpet of fuzz” and whose enormous mouth, threatening a kiss, is “huge and wet and cavernous.” Soon, in a parody-paroxysm of female sexual desire, Miss Roach begins to “grunt and snort like a hog” crying, “Don’t! Don’t, Mummy!” George finds himself sucked into the woman’s very mouth where, after a ludicrous struggle reminiscent of certain of the mock-heroic adventures of Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver among the giant Brobdignagians, the virginal bachelor is swallowed: “I could feel the slow powerful pulsing of peristalsis dragging away at my ankles, pulling me down and down and down…”
    Dahl’s punished figures are not exclusively sexual victims: in “Taste,” a nouveau riche wine connoisseur is insulted at hisown dinner table by a “famous gourmet” in “The Pig,” as in a cautionary Grimms’ fairy tale for greedy children, a young man who cares too much for food is led off to be butchered with other pigs strung up by their ankles: “taking Lexington gently by one ear with his left hand, [the slaughterer] raised his right hand and deftly slit open the boy’s jugular vein with a knife.”
    Not all of Dahl’s stories end so grimly, and not all of Dahl’s satire is sadistic. The funniest story in the collection, and one in which no one gets killed or even humiliated, is “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” an eerily prescient fable of 1952 in which an aspiring young writer invents a computer-printing press to churn out ingeniously formulaic books:
    First, by depressing one of a series of master buttons, the writer made his primary decision: historical, satirical, philosophical, political, romantic, erotic, humorous or straight. Then, from the second row (the basic buttons), he chose his theme: army life, pioneer days, civil war, world war, racial problem, wild west, country life, childhood memories…The third row of buttons gave a choice of literary style: classical, whimsical, racy, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce, feminine, etc. The fourth row was for character, the fifth for wordage…ten long rows of preselector buttons.
    Within a year, the machine has produced “at least one half of all the novels and stories published in the English language.”
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    Except for writers of major stature, in whose lesser work there may be some archival, extra-literary, or morbid interest, theindiscriminate all-inclusiveness of a “collected stories” is not a good idea. What a dispiriting sight, a table of contents listing forty-eight short stories with no divisions into books and dates, as the author himself had intended! (No short story writer, like no poet, would simply toss a chronological arrangement of his work into a form so lacking in interior structure: individual collections of short stories and poems have beginnings, middles, and ends that have been judiciously pondered.) Though the advantage of a purely chronological arrangement of work is that the reader may perceive the development of a writer’s style, his growth, and the prevailing themes that make his work distinctive, the disadvantage is that the reader may perceive the deterioration of the writer’s style, his decline, and his reliance upon predictable themes. Of the forty-eight stories, scarcely more than one-third seem truly notable, and these come relatively early in Dahl’s lengthy, forty-five-year career. The volume trails away in affable narrated anecdotal sketches, as if Dahl had lost interest in the craft of storytelling as he seems to have lost the sting of vengefulness.