Edited and arranged by Robert Friedman
Telling stories, I discovered as a young child, is a way of being told stories. My first audience was myself, enthralled by Crayola crayons, filling coloring books and then lined tablets with drawings of my own, most of them of cats (upright on their hind legs) and chickens. At the bottom of the tablet pages were earnest zigzag lines, unintelligible scribbling that was my approximation of adult handwriting because I could not (yet) write. The drawings were not skillful enough to be described as cartoon drawings though I was surely influenced by the comic strips in our daily newspaper, the Buffalo Evening News.
So many tablets! So many cats and chickens! As if anticipating that the tablets filled with childish drawings and scribblings might someday merit curious interest my mother kept them in a drawer in our old farmhouse. Years later as an adult I was to look with amazement through the tablets. Vaguely I could remember drawing cats and chickens but I had no memory of the epic tales they seemed to embody. What on earth was I thinking? What are these stories about? As if the child-Tolstoy had undertaken War and Peace before knowing how to write, an epic of feverishly active animal figures whose meaning was known to him alone.
(How I loved my Crayolas! My favorite color was burnt sienna—the very word was mysterious, magical: burnt sienna. One of the great treasures of my life, as prized in their time as the typewriters that came later in my life, with the added appeal of having a particular Crayola smell, unmistakable if indefinable.)
O CRAYOLA! for John Updike Shall we tell them thanks but why reward us who, as children, filled in time by filling in coloring books? Or shall we lie? O Crayola!—even the taste was good. (from Tenderness: Poems, 1996)
It was an early lesson: one picture yields another; one set of words, another set of words. Samuel Beckett said, “It all came together between the hand and the pen”—the magical fluidity of language that seems to spring from a subterranean source that is both ourselves and something beyond ourselves.
Like our dreams, the stories we tell are also the stories we are told. If I say that I write with the enormous hope of altering the world—and why write without that hope?—I should first say that I write to discover what it is I will have written. A love of reading stimulates the wish to write—so that one can read, as a reader, the words one has written. Storytellers may be finite in number but stories appear to be inexhaustible.
ONE of the stories I tell myself has to do with the dream of a ''sacred text.'' Possibly it is a dream, an actual dream: to set down words with such talismanic precision, such painstaking love, that they cannot be altered—that they constitute a reality of their own, and are not merely referential. It is one of the enigmas of our craft (so my writer friends agree) that, with the passage of time, how becomes an obsession, rather than what: It becomes increasingly more difficult to say the simplest things. Content yields to form, theme to ''voice.'' But we don't know what voice is.
The story of the elusive sacred text has something to do with a childlike notion of omnipotent thoughts, a wish for immortality through language, a command that time stand still. What is curious is that writing, the act of writing, often satisfies these demands. We throw ourselves into it with such absorption, writing eight or 10 hours at a time, writing in our daydreams, composing in our sleep; we enter that fictional world so deeply that time seems to warp or to fold back in upon itself. Where do you find the time, people ask, to write so much? But the time I inhabit is protracted; my interior clock moves with frustrating slowness.
The melancholy secret at the heart of all creative activity (we are not talking here of quality, that ambiguous term) has something to do with our desire to complete a work and to perfect it—this very desire bringing with it our exclusion from that phase of our lives. Though a novel must be begun, often with extraordinary effort, it eventually acquires its own rhythm, its own voice, and begins to write itself; and when it is completed, the writer is expelled—the door closes slowly upon him or her, but it does close. A work of prose may be many things to many people, but to the author it is a monument to a certain chunk of time: so many pulse beats, so much effort.
We were devising appropriate tombstone epitaphs for ourselves the other day, here in Princeton, where everyone is a writer or a poet. ''Out of Print,'' we said, or ''Gone into a New Edition,'' or ''Remaindered.'' Perhaps ''Shredded.'' Emily Dickinson had the best epitaph: “Called Back.”
STORIES about Last Things always shade into uneasy laughter, a mask for terror, self-pity, nostalgia. So I should concentrate on First Things.
For years after I learned to write—(sculpted-looking letters in script in accordance to the Palmer method taught in my one-room school)—my child-novels contained both drawings and prose, inspired by the first great book of my life, the handsome 1946 edition of Grosset & Dunlap's ''Alice in Wonderland'' and ''Through the Looking Glass,'' with the Tenniel illustrations. I might have wished to be Alice, that prototypical heroine of our race, but I knew myself too shy, too wary of both the unknown and the known (Alice, never succumbing to terror, is hardly a real child), and too mischievous. Alice is a character in a story and must embody, throughout, a modicum of good manners and common sense. Though a child like me, she wasn't telling her own story: That privilege resided with someone named, in gilt letters on the book's spine, ''Lewis Carroll.'' Being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice, so I became Lewis Carroll. One part of Joyce Carol Oates lodges there—but to what degree, to what depth, I am unable to say.
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As a sophomore in high school I discovered Ernest Hemingway's first book, enigmatically titled in our time, and was immediately excited to see how chapters in an ongoing narrative might be self-contained units in the service of the larger structure and detachable from it. With my usual zeal I apprenticed myself to this elusive new form, eventually writing several “novels” in imitation of Hemingway, on my first typewriter, given to me by my grandmother when I was fourteen.
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As an undergraduate at Syracuse University I was always experimenting with forms of fiction, “voices.” One early miniature story was never finished:
Precisely when I began to think of myself as posthumous, as a species of finely meshed, ceaselessly operating, unfailingly tuned clockwork mechanism composed of organic parts (infinitesimally tiny gears and pulleys, cogs and wheels the size of cells, wires the width of hairs), I should be able to say, with the intellectual's grim elation at always knowing: but a strange oblivion washes over me and I remember too much, which is a way of remembering nothing. It might have been that devastating afternoon in the fall of 1956 when, as a freshman at Syracuse University, I was knocked to the floor of a basketball court by a player even more aggressive than I, and suffered, without knowing what it might be, without guessing what it might portend, the first, and very violent, tachycardiac seizure of my life: a breathless spasmodic fugue that allowed me to understand the proposition 'All men are mortal' in a way I hadn't fully grasped in Logic 1A. On that day I lost my innocence, which I've never regained. On that day I comprehended a new concept of time. (Not a gently undulating stream bearing us all along, in the companionable drowse of our race, to whatever fitting destination—Posterity, The Void, Heaven/Purgatory/Hell—but a heartless, because entirely inhuman, current against which we must struggle, as if, at every second, swimming backward. Only in strenuous opposition to Time do we define ourselves: only in ceaseless—if futile—opposition to the biological current some call History do we transcend that current, and leave whatever it is our privilege to leave behind, to 'outlive' us. Giving up basketball forever—giving up, in fact, the combative physical life for more than a decade—I took on a more complex, more challenging game. I would not only continue to write as I had always done, discarding most of what I wrote (all this apprentice-work, thousands of pages of hopeful prose, more or less analogous to the musician's constant practice at his instrument): I would transmute that process into an actual condition, a noun: I would become a writer. But I never regained my innocence…
The story broke off at that point.
A''WOMAN WRITER'' is an anomalous thing, lacking a counterpart, a grammatical equivalent, a mate. For there are no ''men writers.'' Persons of either sex who write define themselves as writers, but roughly half of us are defined (by others) as women writers. Problems of a metaphysical as well as a practical nature arise.
When I began publishing stories and critical essays in the late 1950’s it seemed natural for me to use the neutral name ''J.C. Oates”—not that I did not feel comfortable as “Joyce Carol Oates” but rather that “J.C. Oates” took up less space. After I was married to Raymond Smith, a fellow graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, I used the name “J. Oates-Smith” —not exactly a pseudonym since it was my own married. No one spoke of “gender” in those days—there was no consciousness of women who wrote as women writers.
Obviously I had absorbed the implicit bias of the era, that maleness was the norm, femaleness a kind of embarrassing anomaly of which the less was said, the better. Even Henry David Thoreau, whose Walden I’d read as a young adolescent with much admiration, even Thoreau who understood that slavery is obscene because “all men are equal,” tells us matter-of-factly in the chapter in Walden titled “Reading” that there is a ''memorable interval'' between spoken and written languages: the first is transitory, a dialect merely, almost brutish, ''and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers.'' The second is the mature language, the written language—''our father tongue, a reserved and select expression.''
One wonders: If brutes achieve a written language, are they no longer brutes? Or is their writing merely defined (by others) as brutish?
THE above is a feminist story that does not raise its voice. A kind of plea, a smiling admonition.
For decades I was frequently attacked as a (woman) writer who dared to write about subjects other than the domestic and near-at-hand; to emulate Stendhal whose The Red and the Black I’d taught at the University of Detroit, for whom the novel is a “mirror moving along a roadway”—reflecting what is, not what should be. In time, by the end of the 20th century, literary criticism had caught up with the more “masculine” women writers—that is, women who dared to write about subjects formerly reserved for men: politics, violence, tragedy.
A DRUNKEN peasant in czarist Russia is beating his overburdened, dying horse, a mare, and the child Raskolnikov and his father happen upon the scene. Raskolnikov wants to save the horse, but his father pulls him away, saying, as fathers have too often felt obliged to say to their children—" It's none of our business.”
When I first read Crime and Punishment as a high school student, and came upon this scene, it struck me as neither melodramatic nor lurid; nor was it, in its subtle configuration (child-witness, helpless ''civilized'' father, brutal ''natural'' peasant, female horse), anything other than a paradigmatic image, for me, of how the larger world—the world outside the home, the schoolroom, the library—is constituted. A melancholy vision, a ''tragic'' vision, but realistic. Uplifting endings and resolutely cheery world views are appropriate to television commercials but insulting elsewhere. It is not only wicked to pretend otherwise, it is futile. If all a serious writer can hope to do is bear witness to such suffering, and to the experience of those lacking the means or the ability to express themselves, then she must bear witness, and not apologize for failing to entertain, or for ''making nothing happen''—in Auden's derisory phrase.
SCANDAL accrues to the many instances of madness and suicide in the profession of literature, but statistics tell us that other professions (among them dentistry, that least romantic of crafts) are more lethal. Scandal too arises over the notorious vanity and egotism of writers; yet I find my writer and poet friends the most unfailingly generous of people. The craft is certainly solitary, but the prevailing sense of life in literary America in our time is one of community. Male colleagues sometimes express envy of what they sense is a strong female (that is, feminist) community within that community, and they are justified in that envy. But while the craft is lonely the life assuredly is not.
GLIMPSED FROM A CAR, QUICKLY PASSING Clothes on that line, headless in the chill May wind but such antics! Such a mad happy dance of legs, arms! Torsos male—muscled in wind! and tulip—bright colors, streaked checked solid plaid! Let’s set our clocks to zero and begin the universe again! In the chill May wind. (from Tenderness: Poems, 1996)
Thanks for this colorful, story-telling writing, rich in detail and satisfying.
Reading this, I'm reminded how shallow and formulaic today's literature has become. Oates reveals the deep meanings reality expresses that are often overlooked, glossed over, "spun" or misunderstood. Thank you for a memorable post.