26:4 Spring 1975

JOYCE CAROL OATES

The Hallucination

Joyce Carol Oates contributed “The Hallucination” to the Spring 1975 issue of Chicago Review.  Often noted for her prolific outpouring of short fiction and novels, she is a frequent contributor to little magazines; with her husband, Raymond Smith, she edits the Ontario Review and the Ontario Review Press.  She currently teaches at Princeton.  Of this story, Oates writes,

I can say about “The Hallucination” that is was directly inspired by an incident in my personal life, probably in 1974; in Windsor, Ontario, Canada where my husband and I were living in a house not identical with the house described in the story but in circumstances roughly analogous.  A hallucinating young man came to our door, banged and kicked at the door wanting entry in the middle of the night; eventually, he went away.  The incident acquired for me a symbolic significance in the context of the much-publicized drug culture of the era.

I’d sent “The Hallucination” to Chicago Review because I admired the journal; it’s even possible, for this sometimes happens, that an editor invited me to submit a story.  It was subsequently reprinted in The Pushcart Prize 1976: The Best of the Small Presses but was never included in any story collection of my own.  So thank you for resuscitating this story from out of the rapidly receding past, very like a hallucination itself.

[DN, 1996]

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