The Paris Review unleashed its Joyce Carol Oates, The Art of Fiction No. 72 (1978) today. If you have not been following me, you can find my other posts on Joyce Carol Oates here. My notes follow.
One issues that has dogged her reputation all these years:
INTERVIEWER
We may as well get this one over with first: You're frequently charged with producing too much.
JOYCE CAROL OATES
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones—just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one. Each book as it is written, however, is a completely absorbing experience, and feels always as if it were the work I was born to write. Afterward, of course, as the years pass, it's possible to become more detached, more critical.
I really don't know what to say. I note and can to some extent sympathize with the objurgatory tone of certain critics, who feel that I write too much because, quite wrongly, they believe they ought to have read most of my books before attempting to criticize a recently published one. (At least I think that's why they react a bit irritably.) Yet each book is a world unto itself and must stand alone, and it should not matter whether a book is a writer's first, or tenth, or fiftieth.
In the following, the rising out of parochialism and the iamgery of the collapsing bridge are food for thought; particularly the former in these days of Trump.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find emotional stability is necessary in order to write? Or can you get to work whatever your state of mind? Is your mood reflected in what you write? How do you describe that perfect state in which you can write from early morning into the afternoon?
OATES
One must be pitiless about this matter of “mood.” In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function—a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind—then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally I've found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes . . . and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so. Joyce said of the underlying structure of Ulysses—the Odyssean parallel and parody—that he really didn't care whether it was plausible so long as it served as a bridge to get his “soldiers” across. Once they were across, what does it matter if the bridge collapses? One might say the same thing about the use of one's self as a means for the writing to get written. Once the soldiers are across the stream . . .
This makes take pause about my own working habits - as I backfill the missing parts of "Love Stinks". More time is being spent now on organizing than on converting paper to bytes!
OATES
When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer. Sometimes I work on two novels simultaneously, though one usually forces the other into the background. The rhythm of writing, revising, writing, revising, et cetera, seems to suit me. I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all. My next novel, Unholy Loves, was written around the time of Childwold, for instance, and revised after the completion of that novel, and again revised this past spring and summer. My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.
Her view of English writers and American novels is one I would like to see expanded. What I wished I had time to write is the social novel more than the psychological. No, I would just like to produce something that another would read without being disgusted at what I have cost them.
INTERVIEWER
You wrote Do with Me What You Will during your year living in London. While there you met many writers such as Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble, Colin Wilson, Iris Murdoch—writers you respect, as your reviews of their work indicate. Would you make any observations on the role of the writer in society in England versus that which you experience here?
OATES
The English novelist is almost without exception an observer of society. (I suppose I mean “society” in its most immediate, limited sense.) Apart from writers like Lawrence (who doesn't seem altogether English, in fact) there hasn't been an intense interest in subjectivity, in the psychology of living, breathing human beings. Of course, there have been marvelous novels. And there is Doris Lessing, who writes books that can no longer be categorized: fictional parable, autobiography, allegory . . . ? And John Fowles. And Iris Murdoch.
But there is a feel to the American novel that is radically different. We are willing to risk being called “formless” by people whose ideas of form are rigidly limited, and we are wilder, more exploratory, more ambitious, perhaps less easily shamed, less easily discouraged. The intellectual life, as such, we tend to keep out of our novels, fearing the sort of highly readable but ultimately disappointing cerebral quality of Huxley's work . . . or, on a somewhat lower level, C. P. Snow's.
All writing being an experiment reassures me of my own crazy ways, but it is her discussion of emotions. Stephanie R commented on my stories as not having enough depth, which I interpreted as emotional depth. Reading the following resurrected my worries that I am skimping - paying more attention to the forest of technique than the trees of emotion.
... I suppose it is an experimental work, but I shy away from thinking of my work in those terms: It seems to me there is a certain self-consciousness about anyone who sets himself up as an “experimental” writer. All writing is experimental.
But experimentation for its own sake doesn't much interest me; it seems to belong to the early sixties, when Dadaism was being rediscovered. In a sense we are all post-Wake writers and it's Joyce, and only Joyce, who casts a long terrifying shadow . . . The problem is that virtuoso writing appeals to the intellect and tends to leave one's emotions untouched. When I read aloud to my students the last few pages of Finnegans Wake, and come to that glorious, and heartbreaking, final section (“But you're changing, acoolsha, you're changing from me, I can feel”), I think I'm able to communicate the almost overwhelmingly beautiful emotion behind it, and the experience certainly leaves me shaken, but it would be foolish to think that the average reader, even the average intelligent reader, would be willing to labor at the Wake, through those hundreds of dense pages, in order to attain an emotional and spiritual sense of the work's wholeness, as well as its genius. Joyce's Ulysses appeals to me more: That graceful synthesis of the “naturalistic” and the “symbolic” suits my temperament . . . I try to write books that can be read in one way by a literal-minded reader, and in quite another way by a reader alert to symbolic abbreviation and parodistic elements. And yet, it's the same book—or nearly. A trompe l'oeil, a work of “as if.”
I wonder if this remains true for female writers, but for all of us something here to think about - how empathetic are we towards the characters we write (how sympathetic are we to our fellow human beings? Is there a connection there?)
INTERVIEWER
What are the advantages of being a woman writer?
OATES
Advantages! Too many to enumerate, probably. Since, being a woman, I can't be taken altogether seriously by the sort of male critics who rank writers 1, 2, 3 in the public press, I am free, I suppose, to do as I like. I haven't much sense of, or interest in, competition; I can't even grasp what Hemingway and the epigonic Mailer mean by battling it out with the other talent in the ring. A work of art has never, to my knowledge, displaced another work of art. The living are no more in competition with the dead than they are with the living . . . Being a woman allows me a certain invisibility. Like Ellison's Invisible Man. (My long journal, which must be several hundred pages by now, has the title Invisible Woman. Because a woman, being so mechanically judged by her appearance, has the advantage of hiding within it—of being absolutely whatever she knows herself to be, in contrast with what others imagine her to be. I feel no connection at all with my physical appearance and have often wondered whether this was a freedom any man—writer or not—might enjoy.)
INTERVIEWER
Do you find it difficult to write from the point of view of the male?
OATES
Absolutely not. I am as sympathetic with any of my male characters as I am with any of my female characters. In many respects I am closest in temperament to certain of my male characters—Nathan Vickery of Son of the Morning, for instance—and feel an absolute kinship with them. The Kingdom of God is within.
INTERVIEWER
Can you tell the sex of a writer from the prose?
OATES
Never.
Much to think about and which I hope will inspire others. I will end here, hoping that my admiration is understandable.
sch 1/21
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment