One More Joyce Carol Oates Post

 The New Yorker did another profile of JCO, Joyce Carol Oates’s Relentless, Prolific Search for a Self, combining a lot of biography and discussion of her work. 

What I found is perhaps an explanation of how she is so productive:

In the midst of writing a novel, Oates sometimes felt so powerful—as if singled out—that she was startled when she passed store windows and saw her small, ordinary reflection. She made use of any stretch of free time, plotting the end of a novel while she was getting a cavity filled, or writing in the car on the way to book events. If her writing was going well, she didn’t want to stop (“one image, pursued, exhausted, then begets another”), and if it was going badly she also didn’t want to stop, because she needed to “get through the blockade, or around it, over it under it, any direction!—any direction, in order to live.” (After a few hours away from her desk, revising felt “as if one is coming home.”) Her friend Emily Mann told me, “I’ve seen her, in the middle of a party, check out, and I think, She’s just written a chapter.” To waste time made her feel “slithering, centerless,” she wrote in her journal, “a 500-pound jellyfish unable to get to this desk.” Oates was friends with Susan Sontag, who had a busy social life, and after the two spent time together in New York City Oates told her, “In some respects, I am appalled by the way you seem to be squandering your energy.” She reminded Sontag that “the pages you perfect, day after day,” will be the “means by which you define your deeper and more permanent self.”

It is nice to know she has been on the Nobel List, that she does not take it as seriously as some, I find charming.

By 1979, Oates was on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize, according to the Washington Post, and since then she has been rumored to be on the shortlist several more times. One year, she was told that she was the runner-up; another year, the book-review editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, acting on incorrect information, informed her that she had won. “I’m sorry that Daddy was disappointed—again!—by the Nobel Prize,” Oates wrote her parents in 1993. “I think, over all, it might be better not to be concerned about it; at least, we don’t have to discuss it.”

Finally, a discussion of her approach to American violence:

Her fiction often dramatizes grisly news headlines, involving kidnappings, serial killings, disappearances, and rapes, prompting so many questions about her preoccupation with violence that she felt compelled to publish an essay in the Times criticizing this line of inquiry. “The question is always insulting,” she wrote. “The question is always ignorant. The question is always sexist.” Her fiction, she explained, was simply reflecting the cruelty in our world. “We seem to have inherited, along with its two or three blessings, the manifold curse of psychoanalysis: the assumption that the grounds of discontent, anger, rage, despair—‘unhappiness’ in general—reside within the sufferer rather than outside of him.”

I think if the subject disturbs others, it is in how Oates does not romanticize violence. She serves it up directly and coldly. She has put me on edge when I read The Falls. This reaction is not one I had with any of Cormac McCarthy's novels. I hope that I can emulate her approach. I have known violence, I have been in the midst of violence, and I do not think romanticizing it is morally proper.

sch 11/26

Updated 2/5/2024: all of my Joyce Carol Oates posts.