Title: Sex, Violence, and Philosophy in You Must Remember This
Abstract: SEX, VIOLENCE, AND PHILOSOPHY IN YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS Victor Strandberg* In the summer of 1987, television sets across America displayed a scene that might have held thousands of pugilistic enthusiasts immobilized in mid-air. Just before the HBO showing of the Mike Tyson-Bonecrusher Smith title fight, a middle-aged ectomorphic lady with gentle eyes and a soft voice previewed with incontestable professional authority the likely exchanges of left hooks, right crosses, and tooth-loosening uppercuts to the jaw. Thus did Joyce Carol Oates, devoted boxing fan since childhood and author of a recent book of reminiscences about the sport, cheerfully demolish a long-standing wall of gender demarcation. It was appropriate that this televised vignette occurred simultaneously with the publication of You Must Remember This, a novel in which boxing attains serious cultural meanings. Clearly violence, that male preserve of power so purely rendered in the boxing ring, exerts a subversive appeal upon this author's feminist sensibility. In considering the role of violence in her latest family chronicle, it is important to trace Oates' distribution of responses to violence among her four main characters: two male intellectuals , one pubescent girl (a future artist), and one professional master of violence, the boxing champion Felix. Perhaps these four figures represent a composite of their author's personality, reflecting her extreme diversity as philosophical novelist, women's advocate, and boxing enthusiast. For Joyce Carol Oates, violence is literally an issue of philosophical significance. An English major and philosophy minor at Syracuse University (where she earned valedictorian and Phi Beta Kappa honors), Oates sprinkles references to favorite writers and thinkers throughout this novel. Although Oates says that "art is mostly unconscious and instinctive,"1 her dialectical pattern of allusions in You Must Remember This suggests a deliberate structuring of ideas along the lines of intellectual counterpoint. The two opposing heavyweights in this ideological match are Schopenhauer and Spinoza, each supported by appropriate handlers and seconds. The Schopenhauer "group" includes such pessimistic thinkers as Thomas Hobbes, Mark Twain, Nietzsche, Theodore Dreiser and Jack London, Dostoyevsky ( The Devils), Ecclesiastes, Shakespeare as tragedian, "Victor Strandberg, Professor of English at Duke University, has published on a wide variety of American writers, from Herman Melville and Walt Whitman to John Updike and Joan Didion. His books include The Poetic Vision ofRobert Penn Warren, A Faulkner Overview : Six Perspectives, and Religious Psychology in American Literature: A Study in the Relevance of William James. 4 Victor Strandberg Sophocles, and Jonathan Swift.2 In some instances, readers are left to infer their own melancholy connections to Twain's late misanthropy, to Dreiser's determinism, to Hobbes' sense of life as "nasty, brutish, and short," and to the final injustice of Ecclesiastes: "that which is crooked cannot be made straight" (1:15). But elsewhere, Oates explicitly refers to Sophocles' envy of non-being in Oedipus at Colonus (p. 349), twice to King Lear's madness (pp. 198, 211), and three times to Swift's notorious defamations of humanity , such as calling men "the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth" (p. 199). But of course the most significant member of this reference group is Schopenhauer himself, who appears four times by name and once by implication (pp. 34, 80, 109, 111, 429). Schopenhauer's chief work, The World As Will and Idea (1818), proposed that the whole of reality is the expression of a Cosmic Will that manifests itself in irresistible natural forces ranging from gravitation in the world of physics to sexuality in the realm of organic life. For each individual the Will is identified with the pleasure, pain, and desire he knows within his own body; the universe outside his body cannot be so experienced and so comes to him as "Idea": "Besides will and idea nothing is known to us or thinkable."3 Everywhere on Earth the Will discloses its mindless, amoral character in the violence by which life maintains and propagates itself: ". . . Each animal can only maintain its existence by the constant destruction of some other. Thus the will to live everywhere preys upon itself. . . ."4 By extending this activity through the continuum of...