Self-Interview: Joyce Carol Oates Vs. Joyce Carol Oates (Part 2)
In which I take on my toughest and most unrelenting interrogator.
Edited and arranged by Robert Friedman
Q. Shall we continue? On a more lively note? Our vast audience, fickle curiosity whetted by ubiquitous social media, wants avidly to know, Miss Oates: What is the most embarrassing thing that has happened to you?
A. Do you mean as a “writer”—or just more generally?
Q. Don’t be circumspect! Interest in you, at least minimal interest, derives in this instance from your being a “writer.” Even as the “writerly” aspect of your identity is overshadowed by the “personal”—“biographical”—“embarrassing” aspect of your being a writer.
A. Well, I don’t think of myself as a “writer”—really. I’ve always been a person who—
Q. “—who writes.” Yes, you are a verb, not a noun. I’ve heard that. Our question is: what happened to you recently that is excruciatingly embarrassing?
A. It wasn’t excruciating, only just embarrassing…
Q. Yes?
A. I was in the Pennington Market the other day, in the dairy section, which always feels particularly cold on warm days, when the air conditioning is high, when a woman who’d been staring at me quizzically finally asked, “Excuse me! Are you some kind of writer?”
Q. And then?
A. Vaguely I shook my head no, as if I might not have heard the question. In a kind of cowardly crab-scuttle I turned aside, and eased away, without looking back…
Q. And then?
A. …and then someone who knows me, not well but at least knows who I am, breezed by saying in a loud cheery voice, “Hel-lo, Joyce!”—and the woman must have overheard…
Q. That is embarrassing! Denying your own writer-self, in a bald-faced lie. Even as the cock began to crow, along comes someone and outs you.
A. I could not explain to the woman—“I am not ‘Joyce Carol Oates’ right now, but a shopper in a grocery store. And the dairy section is freezing.”
Q. What’s the dairy section have to do with it? If police had arrived and demanded your I.D., you’d have had to confess—what?
A. My driver’s license, passport, social security—are all in the name “Joyce Carol Smith.”
Q. Why not “Oates”?
A. Because my legal self, my property-owner self, is “Joyce Carol Smith.”
Q. Who’s “Smith”?
A. The surname of my first husband, Raymond, to whom I was married in 1961, and who passed away in February 2008. (Pause) We all have numerous identities, that shift with circumstances. The writing self is likely to be a highly private, conjured sort of being—you would not find in a grocery store.
Q. Is there something frankly embarrassing or shameful about being a “writer”?
A. The public identification does seem just a bit self-conscious, at times. Like identifying oneself as a “poet”—“artist”—“seer”—“visionary.” (Pause) When Oscar Wilde entered the United States to embark upon one of his extravagantly successful lecture tours, he said, famously: “I have nothing to declare but my genius.” But Oscar Wilde is sui generis.
Q. What’s this—“sooey generous”? Explain, please.
A. “One of a kind”—“unique.”
Q. Yet you are, are you not, a “writer”? After all these years?
A. If I’m required to identify myself on a form, I write “teacher.” I’ve been a teacher almost as long as I’ve been writing. (Pause) I think of myself less as a writer than as a person who “writes”—or tries to. Each morning is a kind of obstacle course in which the obstacles seem to have all the advantage.
Q. A curious and unconvincing sort of modesty! Your name is on your book covers, after all.
A. But my name is not me.
Q. Our readers think that you owe that woman in the grocery store an apology. (Malicious smugness) I will post this on Substack and see how many viewers excoriate you for your behavior.
A. Excuse me, but—
Q. Excuse me. I’m the one asking the questions. What are you trying to say in your ineffectual, stammering way? That you are—or are not—the “writer”?
A. I’d have liked to quote to the woman in the grocery store Henry James’s beautifully succinct remark about the public and private lives of writers—“A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.”
Q. His? Him?
A. Well—Henry James was a man of his era. Most things, if not all, were in the province of the “male”—the “female” was ancillary.
Q. You’re just apologizing for the rampant sexism of that bygone era. If you admire a writer, you make excuses for them—that’s “enabling.” You start innocently with a classic—Henry James—and before you know it, you’re “enabling” Harvey Weinstein and his even-worse buddy Jeffrey Epstein.
A. (protesting) Henry James is a paragon of the artist—a “writer’s writer”…
Q. Sounds deadly: “writer’s writer.” That has been said about James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as well. Kiss of death. Are you, or are you not, the “writer”?
A. The point of Henry James’s remark is that the “writer” is embodied in writing. The place to look for Henry James is in his books—of which James has written many including the brilliant gothic tale, The Turn of the Screw.
A. Our perceived “reality” is through the senses, by way of the brain—outside the human brain, we don’t really know what “reality” is.
Q. Are you claiming that there’s no there there? But of course, there must be, since we didn’t invent ourselves.
A. But we can’t know what is “real”—only what we perceive as real.
Q. In the world, you are generally perceived as a “writer.” Yet, to yourself, you are—?
A. As I said, if I have to identify myself, I usually say “teacher”—“professor.” That sounds less vain, somehow. Since teaching is a respectable profession aligned with an institution, involving others.
Q. Your “writing-self” isn’t involved in your teaching? Really?
A. If you mean, do I “teach” my own writing, or even discuss it, no. My writing workshops focus on the work of students, and works of fiction by classic and contemporary writers which we read and discuss at length.
Q. You don’t teach literature as “Joyce Carol Oates”? How is this possible?
A. I don’t teach literature from my personal perspective—I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I’m teaching a story by Hemingway, my intention is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
Q. When you appear in public as “Joyce Carol Oates”—who is that?
A. A representative of the writing, perhaps—not the writing itself.
Q. As Andy Warhol purportedly sent out simulacra of “Andy Warhol”—wearing wigs to resemble his. Something like that?
A. It used to be that an advantage of the printed word is that one did not have to appear in public, as an actor, a dancer, a musician must appear in public. Now, it’s often demanded of writers that they appear in person—in bookstores, on social media, TV.
Q. Living writers, that is. Dead writers are allowed privacy.
A. Some writers are not very adequate representations of their work—Emily Dickinson, for instance, famously reclusive, pressed into a public appearance, would have been shy, awkward, miserable; while Walt Whitman, exuberant, outgoing, wonderfully vain, “extroverted,” would have been charismatic. Samuel Clemens loved the public eye—impersonating “Mark Twain” was much easier than writing, and audiences adored him; Charles Dickens was enormously popular as a reader of melodramatic scenes from his novels, in both the U.K. and the U.S., and exhausted himself in a succession of public appearances.
Edith Wharton may well have been assured and articulate in a public forum—Flannery O’Connor, cringing with shyness, and miserable. Hemingway was certainly a distinctive public presence, like the most popular American poet of the mid-20th century Robert Frost—while William Faulkner would have loathed and disdained the public eye. It’s said that Faulkner mumbled his Nobel Prize acceptance speech so badly that few in the audience heard it, and only later, when it was published, were Faulkner’s words recognized as brilliant and visionary, or at least eminently quotable.
Q. Are you “at home in public”?
A. Since I’ve been teaching more or less continuously at Princeton University since 1978, more recently at N.Y.U., Berkeley, and Rutgers, it seems plausible to say that I am “at home in public.” (Or, I give that impression.) In fact, being “in public” is far less stressful than remaining “at home in private” trying to write, as Samuel Clemens knew.
Q. Writing is “stressful?”
A. Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort—these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.
Q. All right, then—if the situation is so “stressful”—why do you write?
A. We write to create the books that we would like to read, that haven’t yet been written—possibly.
Q. This is a somewhat mystical answer, isn’t it?
A. The writer is a “somewhat mystical”—or do I mean “mythical”—person.
Q. Recalling that, some years ago, Roland Barthes wrote a little book provocatively titled. The Death of the Writer, my question is, Miss Oates: does the writer exist?
A. Individuals struggling to “write” definitely exist. And writings exist, in some form or other. Books outlive their authors. The “writer” is an individual who writes, but does many other things as well, most of them doomed to transience, soon forgotten…
Q. Was Barthes correct? Is the writer “dead?”
A. Barthes may have meant that the writer is “dead”—excluded from her work—once the work is completed, and published; her intentions for it and her interpretation of it are no more valid than anyone else’s.
Q. Was Barthes a typical French theorist? A contrarian?
A. In the public “Barthes”—yes. In the private Barthes, in the posthumously published fragments titled Mourning Diary, written after his mother’s death, Barthes was heartrendingly, achingly himself—no mask, no authorial subterfuge.
Q. Is it fair to judge a writer by his posthumous work? Is it even valid, to speak of posthumous work? The Mourning Diary was assembled by someone not the author, after all.
A. Posthumously published writing is writing. We can assume that it bears a rawer relationship to its author than more crafted work, but it’s also likely to be more sincere.
Q. What is the most enjoyable aspect of being a “writer”—assuming you have acknowledged that you are a “writer”?
A. The “most enjoyable thing”? There are so many… (Not very convincingly)
Q. Are writers by nature masochists? Taking pleasure, of a kind, in pain?
A. “Pleasure” may be an exaggeration…
Q. We can assume that the pleasure isn’t in the creation of first drafts—that’s serious, uphill work, about which all writers complain in the most self-pitying ways so we’d be led to believe that the writer is slaving away like a child-laborer in China. We can assume it isn’t the blind lunging early notes-for-a-novel, executed in a white-hot fever but subsequently, when reread, like notes derived from dreams, barely legible or literate. It isn’t, as you have so graphically described, like “pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.” So, what is it?
A. (grasping for something plausible to say) Research. As John Updike said, “Research is the innocent part.”
Q. What sort of research do you mean? Historical?
A. All fiction is “historical”—to a degree. There’s a particular pleasure in transcribing reality carefully and precisely, as in James Joyce’s brilliant evocation of Dublin, Ireland on a single day, June 16, 1904, in Ulysses. My writing tends to have a firm foundation in reality, upon which other, less conventional features may be imposed. The surreal springs out of the real, as dreams spring out of sleep.
Q. What advice, if any, do you have for writers of historical fiction?
A. (easing into the topic, as if she has uttered these words in the past) A subject can be over-researched, as a book can be over-written. In research as in art, less is often more. If you accumulate too much information, you are likely to become paralyzed by the sheer bulk of material. It’s better to imagine than to attempt to replicate. “Dumping one’s notes” is a horrific figure of speech! (Pause)
In those novels for which I did significant research, which include Blonde as well as The Accursed and its predecessors Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance, Mysteries of Winterthurn, and My Heart Laid Bare, there is a strata of historical/ political/ geographical reality, upon which imagined—that is, “fictitious”—stories are played. I am not drawn to sheer fantasy, as I am not drawn to most science-fiction; the real world is fantastic enough.
End of Part 2
Hi! I'm a Spanish reader. I enjoy your books and now I'm happy to read you here too. Your self-interview made me remind of Elena Ferrante. Right now I'm trying to publish my first novel; I'm a shy person and sometimes I've thought about using a pseudonym so that I could hide and avoid public appearances (but I won't). Thank you for your words and your advice, I'm the kind of researcher who would definitely over-research and get blocked. You're a really inspiring person, I hope to become as disciplined as you someday. Wish you all the best.
Ah, Gore Vidal put it this way: "I said recently to a passing interviewer, 'You know, I used to be a famous novelist.' And the interviewer said, 'Oh, well, you're still very well known. People read your books.' And so I said, 'I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about the category. 'Famous novelist'? The adjective is inappropriate to the noun. It's like being — 'I'm a famous ceramicist.' Well, you can be a good ceramicist. You can be a rich ceramicist. You can be much admired by other ceramicists. But you aren't famous. That's gone."