Edit: that somehow turned into a link to the void - how appropriate. — unenlightened
But, then again, maybe it was more personal than the story lets on - like it happened to the writer or a friend of the writer. — Moliere
Good point, I forgot the detail that Robert indicates he doesn’t go the bars in this area himself. Maybe the idea is that him drinking despondently alone is an intentionally constructed tableau he hopes she’ll see. (I’ve actually done this, younger)Though to preserve ambiguity I'd say that Robert would have to not show up at her bar, too. That already shows the lie.
I agree that the ending turns in into something like this, but I think, before that, it does something more interesting - all those tropes are there, floating around, but there's a lot more of them too (there's a weird class dynamic going on, there's a mutal drawing from the manic-pixie quirk well etc.) but they're all bumping around in a kind of incoherent way. I think the story is good in that, until the end, it doesn't commit to any one of these tropes definitively. They're more like a mental environment, or half-conscious background, that's both part of the date, and also a frantic attempt to make sense of the date. You could say, I think, that the collection of tropes present is incompossible, so both Margot & Robert are just kind of tossed around from one to another ( I think you're right, that if we saw Robert's point of view, something similar would be going on)The whole thing is just Age Gap Romance twisted with subverted Beast and Beauty by finally affirming the monstrosity of the beast (Robert). Add a pinch of subverted Single Woman Seeks Good Man by making it an explicitly internalised motivating narrative for Margot, in contrast to what she actually wants, and you're done — fdrake
Or rather, we play games that we don't even know that we're playing; Or, we have these hazy outlines, absorbed through a mishmash of observation, gossip, some mixed experiences, and we do - or think we do - what we're 'supposed to', and you commit yourself to this network of expectations you (or your partner) didn't even quite know you've bought into. And normally this is fine (life is like that) except no one wants to talk about this stuff because sex is still treated as this weird and dirty thing that you can only whisper about, even as we're meant to be this sexually liberated society - which ends up confusing things even more — Street
I think both Robert and Margot know the game, but are both utterly clueless about the meta-game: the motions are right, and there are real consequences of those motions, but the meta-game is incredibly fuzzy for both of them ('Do I want what it is I'm supposed to want? Do they?' - Margot to her credit, asks this question, even though she doesn't quite act on it; Robert remains oblivious). At the story level, one thing that's striking is the lack of any real, motivated 'decisional' action, I think. The whole relationship - with maybe the exception of the initial asking out - is built off reactions. Both are consistently unsure about what the other is thinking, and you consistently have this weird retroactive confirmation of motivation where each acts decisively only ever based on some expression of vulnerability in the other (with the vulnerability evoked by the other to begin with). — Street
For some reason, he’d chosen a movie with subtitles, — Story
She wondered if perhaps he’d been trying to impress her by suggesting the Holocaust movie, because he didn’t understand that a Holocaust movie was the wrong kind of “serious” movie with which to impress the type of person who worked at an artsy movie theatre, the type of person he probably assumed she was[...]
[...]He kept coming back to her initial dismissal of the movie, making jokes that glanced off it and watching her closely to see how she responded. He teased her about her highbrow taste, and said how hard it was to impress her because of all the film classes she’d taken, even though he knew she’d taken only one summer class in film. He joked about how she and the other employees at the artsy theatre probably sat around and made fun of the people who went to the mainstream theatre, where they didn’t even serve wine, and some of the movies were in imax 3-D. — story
I'd give it an F. It's badly-written, boring, and painfully contrived. — Baden
You are a tough grader. — Bitter Crank
I think that the New Yorker story is passed along because it resonates with people's experience. — Moliere
I see some similarities between the two, but I felt the New Yorker short story was something that could happen, where the Oates story has this quasi-magical feel to it. — Moliere
(1) youre a monster — csalisbury
Gonna give the carol oates a read once I’m back home — csalisbury
One is a cardboard cutout "modern" villain where "modern" means emasculated and somewhat pathetic. — Baden
I recommend anyone try this exercise. Read "Cat Person". Then read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates.
https://www.cusd200.org/cms/lib/IL01001538/Centricity/Domain/361/oates_going.pdf — Baden
She's confused; we're confused; and though we might more or less resonate with her experiences (depending on who we are), we're not deeply engaged with her desires (or fears) because they're not well-drawn. We don't know who she is any more than she does and we don't care all that much. Or I didn't anyway.
There's a sense in which I think confusion is - or should be - the point. 'We' don't know, as a society, how to play amorous games very well; we're confused, right at the level of desire itself, whether our desires are themselves what we want. This is what accounts for the ambivalence of affect that seems to be exhibited by both Margot and Robert - they're both profoundly unsure about what they do/should be doing, even as they do it. So I guess I'm taking the sketchiness of the characters at face value: they're thinly drawn because they really are 'thin people', at least with respect to their romantic lives. — StreetlightX
here's something 'everyday' about Cat Person, it means - I think - to capture a particular experience that (can be) resonant and I think did resonate with alot of people: that strange nexus of feelings/ambiguities that happen around bad dates and/or bad sex. — StreetlightX
I'm looking for evidence in other aspects of the text that this is a consistent and strong feature rather than a bug or simple side-effect, and I'm not really finding much. In other words, what I'm seeing seems indistinguishable (apart from being a bit tighter) from a university creative-level writing attempt by a competent but undeveloped writer whose teacher for some reason has yet to hit her with the rule "No kitsch". And that's more or less the crux of my criticism, not that there's nothing at all to talk about here in terms of the plot, but that the story doesn't offer much, if anything, artistically. — Baden
Was his reaction at the end merely evidence of feeling emasculated from the experience - like when she laughed or when he received the text message from Tamara - or was it because he is one-sided in the experience and could not understand at all how his behaviour was wrong. — TimeLine
Then read "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been" by Joyce Carol Oates. — Baden
As the story is written in first-person, I can only go by what the protagonist explains and I think that since she is consistently unsure about what he is thinking, that underlying intuitive response telling her that 'he could be a murderer' or that he has no cats etc, is telling of the authenticity of her actual motivations, that she really is afraid. — TimeLine
I agree that the ending turns in into something like this, but I think, before that, it does something more interesting - all those tropes are there, floating around, but there's a lot more of them too (there's a weird class dynamic going on, there's a mutal drawing from the manic-pixie quirk well etc.) but they're all bumping around in a kind of incoherent way. I think the story is good in that, until the end, it doesn't commit to any one of these tropes definitively. They're more like a mental environment, or half-conscious background, that's both part of the date, and also a frantic attempt to make sense of the date. You could say, I think, that the collection of tropes present is incompossible, so both Margot & Robert are just kind of tossed around from one to another ( I think you're right, that if we saw Robert's point of view, something similar would be going on) — csalisbury
What does Bitter Crank think? — schopenhauer1
This stuff has been happening since the beginning of time — schopenhauer1
Jesus is coming: stay where you are
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