"An Inexpressible Sweetness Laced with Terror"

by Joyce Carol Oates

Draft version of an afterword to Mysteries of Winterthurn, to be reprinted by Ontario Review Press, May 2008.

I will maintain that an aritist
needs this: a special world of
which he alone has the key.

André Gide, Notebook

Of my [quintet] of (post-Modernist) Gothic novels Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), The Crosswicks Horror (written in 1981-1982, withheld from publication), Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984), [and My Heart Laid Bare (1998)], it is Winterthurn that has always been my favorite, though Bellefleur is far better known, and A Bloodsmoor Romance is more ambitious. It had not seemed like an entirely quixotic plan to write a quintet of “genre” novels linked by political, cultural, and moral (specifically “feminist”) themes, set in a long-ago / mythic America intended to suggest contemporary times: a Gothic family saga, a nineteenth-century “romance,” a saga of Gothic horror with its antecedents in H.P. Lovecraft’s bizarre and riddlesome works of “mythic” fiction, a “novel of mystery and detection,” [and a family memoir of confidence artists]. It had not seemed quixotic—but then, it never does, for otherwise we would not have outsized and unclassifiable works of art, of any kind—to hope that there might be readers for such novels, that seek to transform what might be called psychological realism into “Gothic” elements: taboos involving forbidden knowledge, the powerful attraction of “opposites,” in the case of Winterthurn the seduction of the devoted and virtuous detective by his very nemesis, the (unrepentant, remorseless, defiant) murderess. The Gothic novel differs from the realistic novel in mostly superficial ways, as a dream can be said to “differ from” the dreamer’s waking life, yet is clearly a transmogrifation of that life, rich with images, symbols, unarticulated wishes that seem to taunt us, that we might decode them. (But who has ever truly “decoded” a dream? To describe a dream after the fact is a futile endeavor, for a dream is primarily feeling; a dream is a kind of interior music, not to be described in mere words.) Great surreal art isn’t the obverse of realistic art but its extension into the privacy of the nocturnal imagination. We relate to classic Gothic works (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Edgar Allan Poe’s “tales of the grotesque and arabesque,” Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the “weird tales” of H.P. Lovecraft) not because they are entertaining fantasies of escape from our lives but because they are, in their unique ways, mirrors held up to our innermost lives. “Realism” might reflect what we look like externally, how we live, in what kind of houses, and where; but the mirror of the surreal reflects what we look like, what we are, inwardly.

No wonder that (distorting) mirrors and (unflattering, alarming) Döppelgangers so frequently emerge in Gothic art, like prankish gargoyles that have somehow seized control of our “rational” beings.

And no wonder that, for many readers, such surreal visions are an affront, while, for other readers, the surreal exerts an appeal that is obsessive, if not addictive.

It was in the late winter and early spring of 1982 that the narcotic-like spell of Winterthurn first settled over me, and would remain the most obsessive interlude of writing I have experienced, more mesmerizing even than the composition of Expensive People in 1967; not until, in the summer of 2002, when I rewrote approximately four-fifths of my 1968 novel A Garden of Earthly Delights, for a Modern Library reprint, would I feel such a protracted, intense, unwavering and uncanny involvement with any novel. Such experiences are a kind of hypnosis, yet a “hypnosis” in which the novelist is somehow both the hypnotist and the subject. For a very long time in the winter of 1982 it was impossible for me to begin to “write” Winterthurn, though I worked every day, many hours every day, taking notes, drafting chapters and scenes, frustrated and depressed at my lack of progress. Entries in my journal from that time, when the working title of the novel was Mysteries of Winterthur, suggest my fascination with the novel as if it had an existence eerily independent of my own:

Mysteries of Winterthur. An inexpressible sweetness laced with terror. The very fact, the feel, the aura of … Winterthur, which means mystery, which means Xavier, that fragment of my soul. Growing up in Winterthur; being expelled from Winterthur; outliving Winterthur… “The blessed day is imminent. My faith shall never slacken. God have mercy on us all.”
(Journal, March 20, 1982)

Winterthur, my Wonderland. Through the looking glass …
(March 28, 1982)

… a very real, very tangible desire not to finish (Winterthur) but to stay with congenial Xavier Kilgarven forever. Where will I find a character quite like my “detective” after this?
(June 29, 1982)

(Nowhere. Never.)

Exactly why Mysteries of Winterthurn, or, more specifically, the youthful detective-hero Xavier Kilgarvan remains so close to my heart is something of a mystery to me. It must be that Xavier, the painstaking, often frustrated, balked, discouraged and depressed amateur detective so misunderstood by his public, is a self-portrait of a kind: after Xavier has achieved a modicum of fame, or notoriety, in his “hazardous” profession, he comes to feel that his public image is terribly misleading, since the public can have no awareness of the “painstaking labor, the daily and hourly ‘grind,’ of the detective’s work: and is woefully misled as to the glamorous ease with which mysteries are solved” as novels may appear, at a distance, to be “easily” written if the novelist has a reputation for being prolific. In fact Xavier’s “accursèd profession” is even more exhausting and harrowing than the novelist’s, for Xavier retires from it abruptly at the age of forty, after the presumed solving of the most difficult case of his career, “The Bloodstained Bridal Gown.” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s boastful wish, or wishful boast, I make my circumstance, quoted on Xavier Kilgarven’s “consulting detective’s” card, is surely an allusion to, if not a slyly ironic acknowledgement of, the author’s Transcendentalist optimism. (See also William James’s My first act of freedom is to believe in freedom.) While I wouldn’t claim “Xavier Kilgarven, c’est moi” in the way of Gustave Flaubert famously claiming identification with his fictional Emma Bovary, it’s obvious that novelist and detective-hero are cousins of a kind, Xavier far more steeped in evil than I, who merely chronicles it, in prose; and that both of us are exiled forever from mythic “Winterthurn”—the long-ago, the far-away, the lost, the inaccessible, the despoiled yet beloved Eden.

Joyce Carol Oates, June 2007

page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/winterthurnafterword.html