Blonde: A Novel

Survival of the Misfittest

I.

Marilyn, Marilyn, Marilyn.

Her sexual energy and her unconscious life lay on the surface, and just at the moment when the abstract expressionists were driving perspective up to the surface of their paintings. The color-draining iciness of her face made explicit a fact of female sexuality, and just around the time of the Kinsey Report. She became a great comic actress and undid her own alabaster myth, and just as the myth of white superiority was about to be dismantled by civil rights legislation. Her dark lashes and her dark eyes (though actually blue, they always look dark, even when her image appears in color) hint with a droll irony at another personality behind the sex, as if this very archetype of feminine sexuality were really a slapped-together fraud, and this just at the moment when a political consciousness was stirring among gay men. Her voluptuous posterior slowly amplifies her figure, especially when she is wearing white, almost like an inversion of the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as if in cherishing her, men and even women throughout the world could sublimate the horrors of recent history into sweet thoughts of love. And so on. And so on. And so on.

In other words, a question arises. Just how ridiculous is it to use Marilyn Monroe as the symbol of all things arousing or important, as an instrument for the interpretation of society, culture, politics, as people have been doing for nearly half a century? Is she really the world-historical figure into which our culture has promoted her? There is a Marilyn Monroe encyclopedia, just published. Now, too, in front of the HarperCollins building in New York, you can see a painted sculpture of Marilyn Monroe that depicts her standing over the subway grate with her skirts famously rising. The architectual critic Herbert Muschamp has compared Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao to Monroe. The mills of Hollywood still seek out actresses who will reproduce her manner and her erotic atmosphere. Everyone with access to pen and paper seems to have had a literary shot at her; she is to certain modern writers what strangely raffish Madonnas were to certain Italian painters in the Renaissance.

Monroe brought out the raw essence of the people who wrote about her. Truman Capote transcribed a conversation with her, entitled "A Beautiful Child," using the occasion wearily to pretend that the most authentic kind of innocence is the most enviable kind of louche sophistication.

Marilyn: Did I ever tell you about the time I saw Errol Flynn whip out his prick and play the piano with it?

After Monroe's death Diana Trilling wrote an essay about her, wise and compassionate, but at times a little too solemn in its regard for its subject, and a little too moist in its expression of popular sympathies: "How mean-spirited can we be, to have denied her whatever might have added to her confidence that she was really a solid person and not just an uninhabited body?" Trilling ended grandiosely, in transports of misplaced high criticism: "I think Marilyn Monroe was a tragedy of civilization, but this is something quite else again from, and even more poignant than, being a specifically American tragedy." Sartre thought her the greatest living actress. Norman Mailer discharged an overwrought and once-celebrated book about her. ("She was our angel, the sweet angel of sex, and the sugar of sex came up from her like a resonance of sound in the clearest grain of a violin.") Gloria Steinem replied with a dour book of her own. ("A student, lawyer, teacher, artist, mother, grandmother, defender of animals, rancher, homemaker, sportswoman, rescuer of children - all these are futures we can imagine for Norma Jeane.") And now Joyce Carol Oates has joined the company of lettered stargazers in a nearly 800-page fictionalized version of Monroe's life.

Monroe is certainly the most famous movie star who ever lived, and her face has got to be the most reproduced visage in history since the work of art submitted to the age of mechanical reproduction. Though few people under forty seem to know much about her aside from her face and her aura, we cannot seem to get her out of our heads. She has achieved the equivalent of beatification in contemporary America: she has become an "icon."

In America, there is no end to status. If the rank of celebrity was about as alpine as it gets in America, it is that no more. Celebrity has been outstripped by iconicity. Of Marilyn the icon, a single human lifetime would not suffice to track down all the evidence. According to Adweek, when Baldwin & Stone, an advertising company, created a marketing campaign for "a new line of high-end recessed light fixtures for upscale homes and offices," it hit on the concept of evolution and came up with "Evolution of an Icon," a three-pager portraying the obscure Norma Jeane Baker developing into "the pop-culture phenomenon." Women's Wear Daily attributes the jeans revival to "icons" such as Monroe. In a discussion of Monroe's brief marriage to Joe DiMaggio, Sports Illustrated speculates that "never had two bigger icons come together in marriage." (What a mess that must have made!) Ladies Home Journal describes Monroe as an "icon of sexuality combined with vulnerability." For Psychology Today, being an icon is just one quality among many qualities in a very busy existence: Monroe was "icon, actress, birthday serenader, model and immortal vixen."

Dissolve, for a moment, to Byzantium. About 1,300 years ago, there was once a backlash against the fashioning of icons. Around the beginning of the eighth century, the so-called iconoclasts rebelled against what they believed to be the blasphemy of depicting Christ in human form. Since the fifth century, early Byzantine artists in the Orthodox Eastern church had created portraits of Christ to serve as aids to prayer and meditation. Hauntingly beautiful, the portraits attempted to capture the mystical dimension of divinity. But then the artists grew more ambitious - or less ambitious, depending on where you stand - and began to make their pictures increasingly realistic. They argued that "every image is declarative and indicative of something hidden ... the image has been invented for the sake of guiding knowledge and manifesting publicly that which is concealed." For the iconoclasts, however, a visible Christ corrupted the divine nature. They believed that realism lay in the preservation of what was hidden: they railed against "the painter [who] fashions with his impure hands things that are believed by the heart and confessed by the mouth." The "realistic" portrayal of the incarnation of Christ, in their view, flattened an essence into a thing and sundered faith from the nurturing soil of imagination. They feared that earthly icons might create the aesthetic framework for a worldly skepticism.

It would appear that the function of icon-making really has not changed since the fifth century. In a swirling, fluid culture, "icons" are what pass for "guiding knowledge." When our pundits wish to sum up and to compress complicated dimensions of experience, they deploy the icon phrase, which has the effect of reassuring us that complicated dimensions of experience are not all that elusive or threatening. "Sexuality combined with vulnerability" is the poorly worded version of one of the deeper riddles of human nature; but an "icon of sexuality combined with vulnerability" is a cozy mental bromide with which to personalize neatly this riot of fortune, and also to wave it away from all our ordinariness, so that we may loosen reality's grip upon us and live vicariously, in an inflamed passivity, in which fascination is our most intense experience.

Yet if, for the iconoclasts, icons lost the divine in the imposition of the human, today's icons lose the human in a mocking simulation of divinity. Contemporary icon-making and celebrity-anointing pretend to affirm an originality of character and an individuality of accomplishment, but they are actually caricatures of the original and the individual. Iconitude and celebritude detach the famous personality from its actual attainments. They reflect democracy's deep ambivalence about the ideal of individual excellence, which is one thing as a public ideal, but quite another as a fact of life staring you in the face when you are trying so hard yourself to live up to the public imperative to be all you can be. Thus the downward motion of all this popular acclaim. (Betty Boop and the Three Stooges are also American icons.) Icons and celebrities are the embodiments of envy with the face of adoration. The subjects of icons are, in fact, always dead.

Icons are an assault upon their subjects. After all, they can be either people or things. For Newsweek, Monroe is an "American cultural icon," but so is McDonald's. For a journal called World Trade, football is an "American icon." For Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies, convertibles were "an icon of America's aesthetic, economic technological, and cultural superiority over the Soviet Union." When Warhol famously reproduced Marilyn's face over and over again, implying that the woman had been turned into an object to be passed on through the marketplace, he was on to a truth about our public alchemies even as he was complicit with them. The essential operation behind today's icon-making is to construct an aesthetic framework for the conversion of people into things, and things into entities with a moral value. Oh yes, and with a commercial value. To be an iconoclast today would be to assert the worth of human beings beyond the marketplace, to become a fine Kantian pain in the ass.

II.

In Blonde, Joyce Carol Oates has produced a stupefying novel of iconicity. Though Oates has fused some real people into composites, and invented some characters and events out of whole cloth, she has stuck vampirically close to the details of Monroe's biography. She begins with the two-year-old child, and takes us through Monroe's upbringing with her mad mother, and then the mother's institutionalization, and the guardians, and the orphanage. Attempting to embellish chronology with an inner life, driving her narrative not with any kind of plot but with the leitmotifs of innocence, fantasy, sexual exploitation and Hollywood baseness, Oates gets very intimate indeed.

It is something of an accomplishment, to make a novel so riddled with facts and yet so unwarranted in its imaginings. Thus we are there in the bedroom watching Monroe have sex with her first husband, and we are there as she is anally violated by a ruthless Hollywood executive - modeled on Daryl F. Zanuck, who probably never touched Monroe. We are there through Monroe's intense relationship with her first agent, Johnny Hyde, who did all he could for his client, and who is called in this book I.E. Shinn and portrayed as betraying his client in the end. We witness Monroe's marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, and her dramatic divorces from same. We experience Monroe's menstrual periods, which were supposedly so painful that they kept her in bed and on painkillers for days. There are the drugs, the multiple attempts at having a child and the many miscarriages and abortions, the insanity, JFK and RFK, the pathetic "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" episode, and the suicide - or murder - in Brentwood, at the age of thirty-six. (This is the same Oates who famously complained that a different genre of American writing had become "pathography.")

Oates leaves nothing out. She is straining to establish her own vision of America through the reimagination of Monroe's experience. Now, such is the power of icon-making that Monroe's image has become so saturated with public meaning that you simply cannot talk about the literal facts of her life without making her stand for one thing or another, and you cannot treat her artistically without yielding to the astounding facts of her life. This is the wall that Oates has run into. For Monroe became romantically entangled with America's most famous athlete, its most renowned playwright, and its most celebrated political figure. C. Wright Mills once described the structure that ruled American life as a triangle consisting of politics, entertainment, and sports: Monroe was hurt at the most rarefied heights of social power.

Oates has her hands full. The givens of Monroe's life have such a velocity that they slow the imagination down and entice it into taking up the factual slack. So Oates, who is obviously enthralled by Monroe's mystery and elusiveness, ends up plotting her life along the lines of bland socio-cultural-political analysis. Her book is full of mundane cultural notations; she bogs her novel down in a literal and hackneyed thematic framework. Monroe, in Blonde, becomes the victim not just of the Kennedys, but of American patriarchy and American hegemony.

These sinister forces are embodied in the character of the Sharpshooter, an enigmatic figure employed by the forces of McCarthyism, who shadows Marilyn throughout the novel: "Yet the Sharpshooter, a practiced professional, is swayed by neither beauty nor power. The Sharpshooter is in the hire of the United States, and beyond the United States in the hire of Justice, Decency, Morality. You could say in the hire of God." This demon finally kills her, at the behest of the Kennedys, with an injection of Nembutal.

This is not an act of imagining, it is an act of fictionalizing. So great is the lure of the literal to Oates in this book that she will construct a metaphor and then explain it. It is as if she is afraid to stop writing. Early on, Oates has Gladys, Marilyn's insane mother, give Norma Jeane a doll, "a goldenhaired doll, a doll with round blue glass eyes and a rosebud mouth." It is the very image of passivity, an inert fabrication of an unlovely cultural ideal, a thing, an object. Though transparent, it is an adequate image for the girl's adult fate. The rosebud mouth, with its allusion to Citizen Kane, is a nice touch. But this is not enough for Oates. She returns to the doll again and again, making the symbolic relationship between Monroe and her childhood toy explicit. ("A misstep, a moment of doubt, and she might fall to the ground limp as a broken doll but this would not happen...'" " `I like them to kiss me, mostly, and I love to cuddle. Like with a doll. Except I'm the doll.'") The metaphor gradually becomes a cautionary lesson in the machinery of metaphor.

It is painful to watch Oates trample on her own gifts. Imagining the first time Marilyn posed for nude photographs, Oates has her suddenly become conscious of the vulnerability of her naked feet. "`Could you p-promise not to show the bottoms? The soles? Of my feet? Otto, please!'" The moment is intrinsically real and modestly poetic, but Oates is not content:

Why was it so important suddenly? The soles of her feet. Unprotected and vulnerable and exposed. She couldn't bear to think of men staring lewdly at her, and the proof of her animal helplessness her pale naked feet.

At times, Oates seems as ardent to be understood as Monroe was ardent to be loved.

Oates usually has a strong and adventurous imagination. I don't know of a more powerful evocation of what it must be like to drown than her descriptions of such a death in Black Water, her retelling of the Mary Jo Kopechne story. But Black Water crumbled under the weight of some of the same flaws that overwhelm Blonde. In both books, she stops imagining the particulars and starts thinking the Big Themes.

Oates can slip into an alien experience with a visceral accuracy. No living American writer, except for Norman Mailer, describes violence as skillfully as she does, as in the following passage (marred only by the self-conscious, discordant mimicry of the word "fucker"):

and without another word Widdoes climbed out of his car and as Norma Jeane looked on in horror calmly unholstered his Smith & Wesson revolver and pistol-whipped the fucker across the face, cracking his nose in a single blow and spraying blood; Clarence sank to his knees on the pavement and Widdoes rammed him on the back of the neck and down goes the fucker like a shot, his legs twitching, and he's out cold.

Oates on sex is a different story. Mailer, in his book about Marilyn, was psychologically licentious and sexually restrained - for all his erotic bravado, he hardly touched on what he thought Monroe's sexual nature might have been. Oates is psychologically restrained, because her sympathy for her subject keeps her from construing Monroe's thoughts as anything other than communiqués from the archetypes. But with sex she is poetically licentious.

The hardest challenges to artistic representation are the ability to convey irony in music, to draw a horse in motion or an infant sleeping, and to describe the sexual act in words without being solemn or pornographic or risible ("I hovered over her buttocks like a skydiver..."). In Blonde, Oates is crudely invasive where she thinks she is artistically daring. She hurls herself at Monroe's sexual experience again and again, as if to win back her subject's sexuality from the clutches of the male sensibility; but in their literalness, and in their self-congratulatory tone, and in their mock-objectivity, these sexual passages are hard to read:

Never had he weighed so much and never was his weight so dense, so furious. His penis was a thick squat rod that prodded against her belly, blindly at first... Taking hold then of Elsie's wrists and stretching her flailing arms perpendicular to her sides... pumping with furious yet methodical strokes and she would see in the dark his sweaty face contorted, lips drawn back from his teeth in a grimace...

he kissed her between the legs, rubbing, nudging, poking, in a rhythm like a giant pulse, Norma Jeane's legs twined about his head and shoulders desperately, she was beginning to buck her hips, beginning to come, so Eddy quick and deft as if he'd practiced such a maneuver many times shifted his position to crouch over her, as Cass was now crouching over her head, and both men penetrated her, Cass's slender penis in her mouth, Eddy's thicker penis in her vagina, pumping into her swiftly and unerringly until Norma Jeane screamed as she'd never screamed in her life...

The passage has Monroe cavorting with two men who are also homosexual lovers, and they are the only ones able to give this woman, so injured by straight male appetites, sexual pleasure. ("God she missed them. Her Gemini lovers. Through two boring marriages to good decent heterosexual men.") The execution of the idea, which is entirely Oates's invention so far as I know, is fairly wild. And yet it is also wholly unexciting, banal, the boilerplate of one strand of contemporary sexual discourse.

Oates has always piled on the Big Themes in her fiction, but in Blonde they come more rapidly and thickly than ever before. In a sense, this novel is an unwitting case study in how celebrity resists artistic treatment. The book proves that it is pointless to compose a representation of a representation. As soon as art's particularities-without-end touch such a pseudo-reality, they balloon into reiterations of inflated meaning. Oates's enterprise is like running a red crayon over the contours of a marble frieze. For all her abundant inventiveness, after hundreds of pages, you know only what you knew all along, that Marilyn Monroe lived out an American nightmare in the guise of an American dream.

III.

Oates's massive book appears at a peculiar moment in the career of the American imagination. Decades of accelerated consumerism have had a dramatic influence on the arts. From every corner, the society summons the self to acquire and to expand, to be other things, to be all things, to inhabit any form of life that it wishes to inhabit. The result in the realm of art is a near-total collapse, to stay just with literature, of genres. Biographies get made up, fiction resorts more and more to the facts, memoir bleeds into fiction, fiction blurs into memoir, the novel takes up the work of biography. It used to be said that the difficulty for the contemporary novel is that the imagination cannot compete with contemporary reality. Now the imagination hardly bothers to try.

Oates's identification with Monroe is extraordinary. Her grand theme of people down on their luck, born in the midst of nowhere, struggling through cruelty and violence and mistreatment to advance in life, is a dominating element in her writing; and in Monroe she has found the real-life counterpart to her ruling obsession. That is why Blonde runs on so long. Its real subject is the nature of Oates's own potent yet lurid fascinations. It is not a novel; it is a document of its author's temperament. Though interminable, it never really begins.

Carl E. Rollyson Jr., in his splendid critical biography of Monroe, describes how she would incessantly regard herself in the mirror. Monroe herself recounted, maybe apocryphally, the time when the superintendent of her orphanage powdered the child's face and had her look at her reflection. "This was the first time in my life I felt loved - no one had ever noticed my face or hair or me before." For Rollyson, as for Mailer and Oates, the mirror-incident was the first stage in Marilyn's schizoid division of her identity into the damaged Norma Jeane and the actor Marilyn Monroe. Reading Rollyson's book, which Oates generously acknowledges having done, must have been a fateful encounter for her. Thirty years ago, she began her novel Them in this way:

One warm even in August 1937, a girl in love stood before a mirror. Her name was Loretta. It was her reflection in the mirror she loved, and out of this dreamy, pleasing love there arose a sense of excitement that was restless and blind - which way would it move, what would happen? Her name was Loretta; she was pleased with that name too, though Loretta Botsworth pleased less. Her last name dragged down on her, it had no melody.

Them, like Blonde, like many of Oates's books, is also a novel based on fact. It is about a girl named Maureen, Loretta's daughter, who inherits her mother's "sense of excitement" about her future, as well as Loretta's sense of being dragged down. Maureen, in other words, is an early phase of the Marilyn of Blonde. Like many of Oates's characters, Maureen learns how to survive by playing roles, or by acquiring new lives like playing a role. Oates herself inhabits her characters as much like an actor as like a writer. The note of mimicry - as in the word "fucker" in the violent passage I quoted above - often appears in her third-person descriptions. She cannot help jumping into her characters' heads and speaking their language even during the most neutral, impassive exposition. This is one of the tricks of the trade, of course - but fictionally re-animating the lives of real people is closer to what an actor does with a part that she has been given than to what a novelist does with characters that she has made.

It is no wonder, then, that acting is the dominant theme of Blonde. And this is the real value of Oates's virtuoso failure of a novel. Putting quotes from Stanislavsky and the acting teachers Mabel Todd and Michael Chekhov at the head of some chapters, making up her own handbooks to acting and then quoting from them (some of these fictional precepts are very striking: "Your life outside the stage is not your accidental life. It will be defined as inevitable"), Oates sees acting at the heart of American identity. Submerged in this extravagant, purposeless, forceful calamity of a book is a powerfully intriguing image of a collective obsession with Hollywood actors, with a profession that may in some way be the exemplary American activity.

For there really was a Marilyn Monroe. She was not an icon, or a celebrity, or a tragic-symbolic amalgamation. She was an actor. And there is a reason to remember her as an actor. A moment occurs at the beginning of The Misfits that throws light on exactly why Monroe has become the cynosure of serious scrutiny. There are, first, the background details. Arthur Miller, realizing that his marriage to Marilyn was on the skids after the disastrous months in England making The Prince and the Showgirl - Monroe and her co-star Laurence Olivier despised each other - and after her affair with Yves Montand, sat down to write a farewell script for her. It was the "ultimate motion picture" in the words of its producer, because its movie-star actors - Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift - both play their characters and themselves more explicitly than actors had ever done in an American film.

Monroe plays Roslyn, the lonely, broken-hearted woman from back East, who has arrived in Reno to get a divorce. She is staying with another divorcee, the older Isabelle (Thelma Ritter). A mechanic, Guido (Eli Wallach), finds himself strongly attracted to Roslyn, and he introduces her to his friend Gay, played by Gable. Soon the four of them drive out to Guido's house in the desert. At the house, Guido plays some wild jazz on the phonograph. After maudlinly and manipulatively reminiscing about his dead wife to Roslyn, he begins to dance with her. Isabelle, who has her arm in a cast and a sling, stands watching. The music gets wilder, and Guido dances closer and closer, leering and spinning Roslyn around. Gay, sitting in a chair, grins and watches with bright, feral eyes. A sense of menace hangs all about the vulnerable Roslyn. A hurt could befall her, these men could do something brutal to her out there in the wilderness.

Then everything changes. Roslyn says something sharp and hurtful to Guido about his wife, and about the true nature of his relations with his wife. He stares at her helplessly and his entire body sags. Isabelle starts beating time to the music with a knife on her cast. The party ends with Guido chastened and reduced, and Roslyn powerful and safe. In a matter of minutes, in other words, Monroe has gone from being defenseless as a lost child to being a sly, even dangerous adult. It is as if she has used the damaged part of her being to expose Guido's own damaged self. She has made her wound into a weapon. (Miller has Isabelle driving the rhythm of the scene with a knife on her injured arm.) The lesson is that Monroe was not merely a victim. One of her acting teachers, who was also a beloved friend, remarked about her that "whenever she explained something, her right hand darted forward, weaving to the left and right like a serpent. It was a gesture of evasiveness and survival through expediency."

Perhaps Miller wrote Monroe into the role of Roslyn because he knew that she only came alive as an actor when her real life flickered in her fictions. Perhaps he also understood that, for the American movie audience, films come supremely alive as fictions when they wink at their actors' offscreen actuality. This convention of American movies speaks to the weird boundlessness of American dreams. Americans dream without limits; a practical people, we make dreams into plans, and so we attempt to fuse our imaginations with our obligations, to displace our factual selves with our fantasy selves. We love movies so much because they embody this unreality of American reality, its illusion that we can become so large in life that other people will talk about what we appear to be in public as though they were talking about who we really are in private. We do not only fear the invasion of our privacy; we also hunger for it. That is why the the barrier between interior life and exterior life is crumbling in America.

Monroe's doctors ruled that Monroe had a splintered personality, and could barely distinguish between the inside of her head and the world around her. In her very soul, in other words, she was an actor. When she acted, she always played herself; and so she became the perfect picture of the unreality of American reality. In The Seven Year Itch, Tom Ewell wonders aloud if the seductive Monroe character is really Marilyn Monroe. The remark is not what it seems. It does not refer inward, to movies; it refers outward, to life. No film actor has ever torn down the barrier between the inner and the outer as devastatingly, and as delightfully, as Monroe. For this reason, she was also a pioneer in allowing the (respectable) silver screen to acknowledge the fact of sex.

Monroe's artificiality always shows itself; that's how she establishes her authenticism. Out of her greatness as an illusion, the abused woman made herself into a great disabuser by repeatedly puncturing her own illusion. And so Monroe's face, that white, blank, fluid face, sparkling with wounds, still speaks to us - not as the face of an icon, but as the face of a particular American woman who endured, and worked with, an unprecedented degree of unreality, and wants to say something about it. Her face wants to say that it is a worthless job of work to stay with unreality for too long. It wants to say, Desire me but do not follow me. It wants to say, Go back to life.

• Read more about this book

Try four weeks of the New Republic Digital absolutely free For nearly 90 years, the New Republic has provided its readers with an intelligent and rigorous examination of American politics, foreign policy, and culture. Today, we're proud to offer a faster, easier, and more economical way to enjoy the magazine — TNR Digital. Subscribe today and we'll give you 4 weeks absolutely free. That's less than 36 cents/week for every word of content available in the print version, a downloadable replica of the print magazine, and an array of special online-only features! Click here to sign up.