Night-Side
Night-Side: Eighteen Tales is a collection of 18 works of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates published by Vanguard Press in 1977.[1][2]
Stories[3]
Those stories first appearing in literary journals are indicated.[4]
- "Night-Side" (Queen’s Quarterly, Autumn, 1977)
- "A Theory of Knowledge"
- "The Thaw" (Viva, February 1977
- "The Murder"
- "Daisy"
- "Exile" [5]
- "Famine Country" (Yale Review, Summer 1977)
- "Fatal Woman" (The Fiddlehead, Summer 1977)
- "Further Confessions" (Chicago Review, Spring 1977)
- "The Translation" (Triquarterly, Fall 1977)
- "The Blessing"
- "The Giant Woman" (Kansas Quarterly, Winter 1976)
- "The Widows" (Hudson Review, Spring 1975)
- "The Dungeon" (Iowa Review, Winter 1975)
- "The Sacrifice" (Fiction International, 1975)
- "The Snow-Storm" (Mademoiselle, September 1974)
- "The Lover" ('Exile', 1974)
- "Bloodstains" (Harper’s Bazaar, August 1971)
Reception and Analysis
Literary critic Greg Johnson notes that these stories are designated as “tales” [6] in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe: “Night-Side inhabits a realm of storytelling with its own distinct conventions. Unlike the realistic, carefully plotted short story, the tale allows the narrative freedom of brisk pacing, improbable events, and idiosyncratic characters and settings.”[7]
Literary critic John Romano, writing in The New York Times, also emphasizes that Oates registers these stories as “tales,” evoking the Gothic works of Hawthorne and Poe, as well “lurid mass market paperbacks” found in contemporary pulp fiction.[8] Romano praises Oates for her “handy competence” in depicting “borderline insanity” and creating “a gallery of people haunted, spooked, driven mad or victimized in general by invasions from outside the sane, rational borders of consciousness.”[9]
Romano contrasts the work in Night-Side with Oates’s earlier short fiction that deals with human suffering:
If there's a difference between the strange mental worlds in this volume and those Miss Oates has taken us to before, it is that the pain pervading the new book is peculiarly lonely and private...In Night-Side's nearly 400 pages, there's hardly an instance of two people understanding one another…[10]
Theme
The stories are unified by interrelated themes which she names in the collection's epigraph, Walt Whitman's poem "A Clear Midnight:"
This is thy hour O soul,
thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art,
the day erased, the lesson done
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing,
pondering the themes thou lovest best:
Night, sleep, death and the stars.[11]
In fact the stories are less concerned with everyday reality than with the "night-side" of the human mind, the area psychologists usually refer a to as "the unconscious," and its effects on a character's life.[12]
References
- ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 218-221: Selected Bibliography, Primary Works
- ^ Lergangee, 1986, pp. 7-47
- ^ "The Glass Ark: A Joyce Carol Oates Bibliography". Retrieved 2022-10-27.
- ^ Lercangee, 1986: See Short Stories and Tales, pp. 7-47
- ^ Lercangee, 1986, p. 15: Reprinted in Tales, Summer 1978
- ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 84-85
- ^ Johnson, 1994 p. 85
- ^ Romano, 1977
- ^ Romano, 1977
- ^ Romano, 1977
- ^ Oates, Joyce Carol (1977). Night Side. New York: Vanguard Press. pp. iv.
- ^ Severin, Hermann (1986). The Image of the Intellectual in the Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates. Frankfurt am Main, Bern, New York: Peter Lang. p. 155. ISBN 3-8204-9623-8.
Sources
- [Johnson, Greg. 1994. Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne’s studies in short fiction; no. 57. Twayne Publishers, New York. ISBN 0-8057-0857-X
- Oates, Joyce Carol. 1986. Night-Side: Eighteen Tales. Vanguard Press, New York. ISBN 978-0814907931
- Romano, John. 1977. “A Way With Madness” The New York Times, October 23, 1977. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/10/23/archives/a-way-with-madness-madness.html Retrieved 5 October 2023.
- v
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- Expensive People (1968)
- Them (1969)
- Wonderland (1971)
- Bellefleur (1980)
- A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)
- Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)
- My Heart Laid Bare (1998)
- The Accursed (2013)
- With Shuddering Fall (1964)
- Do with Me What You Will (1973)
- The Assassins: A Book of Hours (1975)
- Childwold (1976)
- Son of the Morning (1978)
- Cybele (1979)
- Unholy Loves (1979)
- Angel of Light (1981)
- Solstice (1985)
- Marya: A Life (1986)
- You Must Remember This (1987)
- American Appetites (1989)
- Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990)
- Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993)
- What I Lived For (1994)
- Zombie (1995)
- We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)
- Man Crazy (1997)
- Broke Heart Blues (1999)
- Blonde (2000)
- Middle Age: A Romance (2001)
- I'll Take You There (2002)
- The Tattooed Girl (2003)
- The Falls (2004)
- Missing Mom (2005)
- Black Girl / White Girl (2006)
- The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007)
- My Sister, My Love (2008)
- Little Bird of Heaven (2009)
- Mudwoman (2012)
- The Sacrifice (2015)
- Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars. (2020)
- Black Water (1992)
- First Love: A Gothic Tale (1996)
- Beasts (2001)
- The Corn Maiden: A Love Story (2005)
- A Fair Maiden (2010)
- By the North Gate (1963)
- Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories (1966)
- The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (1970)
- Marriages and Infidelities (1972)
- The Goddess and Other Women (1974)
- The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975)
- Crossing the Border (1976)
- Night-Side (1977)
- All the Good People I've Left Behind (1979)
- The Assignation (1988)
- Demon and Other Tales (1996)
- I Am No One You Know: Stories (2004)
- High Lonesome: New & Selected Stories, 1966–2006 (2006)
- The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense (2007)
- Wild Nights! (2008)
- Dear Husband (2009)
- The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (2011)
- The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror (2016)
- "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1963)
- "Stalking" (1972)
- "The Temple" (1996)
- Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002)
- Small Avalanches and Other Stories (2003)
- Freaky Green Eyes (2003)
- Sexy (2005)
- After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away (2006)