Literary Structure: An Essay in Tweets

By Joyce Carol Oates

Assembling a story collection is very like structuring a novel: stories are “chapters” in a (subterranean? atmospheric? oblique) narrative.

As the first sentence or paragraph in a novel is a (hidden) signal of all that is to come, so the first story in a collection is crucial.

As the final scene, even the final words, in a novel are crucial to its meaning, so the final story in a collection is crucial.

Structuring a story collection you know that there is a “ideal” opening–but it is not easy to find it.  (All true for poetry books, too.)

Generally, a movement from “relatively simple/ clear” to increasing complexity & length; from “realism” to something like “surrealism”…

(The obsession of the writer with “structure” is ironic since many readers don’t read books in a linear fashion, even mysteries(!).)

John Updike once remarked that the writer’s effort to get words down in precisely the right way is ironic in that, for many readers, read-

ing is a losing proposition with sleep as in, for instance, reading in bed until the book slips from the reader’s hands.  Not flattering.

(Yes, there are “avid readers of mysteries” who will admit to reading the final chapter first.)

(Yes, I confess that often I have read story collections & poetry books in a haphazard fashion thus undercutting my own convictions.)

All works of art are assemblages of bits & pieces–memories & invention–”inspiration”–but their final structure is highly deliberated.

Books carefully constructed can’t be read but only reread–any more than one can see a Shakespearean tragedy just once & “experience” it….

…but apart from students, other writers, & isolated obsessives, few people reread books, & especially not line-by-line.

Tweeted by @JoyceCarolOates, May 24, 2013

Joyce Carol Oates: By the Book

What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?

Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking-Glass,” which my grandmother gave me when I was 9 years old and very impressionable. These were surely the books that inspired me to write, and Alice is the protagonist with whom I’ve most identified over the years. Her motto is, like my own, “Curiouser and curiouser!”

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

Our great American tragic-epic, Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” This truly contains multitudes of meanings: the Pequod is the ship of state, the radiantly mad Captain Ahab a dangerous “leader,” the ethnically diverse crew our American citizenry. And to balance this all-male adventure, “The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.”

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I was trained to consider “disappointment” of this sort a character flaw of my own, a failure to comprehend, to appreciate what others have clearly appreciated. My first attempt at reading, for instance, D.H. Lawrence was a disappointment — I wasn’t old enough, or mature enough, quite yet; now, Lawrence is one of my favorite writers, whom I’ve taught in my university courses many times. Another initial disappointment was Walt Whitman, whom I’d also read too young (I know, it’s unbelievable, how could anyone admit to have been “disappointed” in Walt Whitman? Please don’t send contemptuous e-mails).

Read the full interview in the New York Times Book Review.

Joyce Carol Oates Wins Mailer Prize

Joyce Carol Oates has won the 2012 Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement.

The Mailer Prize, given by the Norman Mailer Center, is awarded to writers whose work over the years has challenged readers’ perspectives on the world around them. The Mailer Prize recognizes those who embrace the values that drove Norman Mailer’s work: namely, writers who fully exercise their freedom of creativity; who apply themselves to the craft of writing with the rigor of an athlete; who wish to reach a broad audience through their work; and who thrive on dialogue and debate.

The Mailer Prize honors those who share the Center’s vision of writers as people of action, those who embody the Center’s mission to preserve the role of the engaged writer as not only a legitimate, but an indispensable voice in contemporary discourse.

Dickens’s Night Walks

My favorite prose on the subject [of walking] is Charles Dickens’s “Night Walks,” which he wrote some years after having suffered extreme insomnia that propelled him out into the London streets at night. Written with Dickens’s usual brilliance, this haunting essay seems to hint at more than its words reveal. He associates his terrible night restlessness with what he calls “houselessness”: under a compulsion to walk and walk and walk in the darkness and pattering rain. (No one has captured the romance of desolation, the ecstasy of near-madness, more forcibly than Dickens, so wrongly interpreted as a dispenser of popular, softhearted tales.)

From Joyce Carol Oates’s essay on running.

The Crosswicks Horror: At Last

Admirers of Joyce Carol Oates’s brilliant Gothic novels ( Bellefleur; A Bloodsmoor Romance; Mysteries of Winterthurn; My Heart Laid Bare ) will be pleased to hear that the final book of this thematic series, known for years as “The Crosswicks Horror,” is currently being “revised / recast / rewritten.” The new title is “The Accursed.”

View early manuscript images of The Crosswicks Horror and other works here.

Update: 1/23/12: “Since I am immersing myself in the literature of 1905-6, & decades preceding, I will want to reread Edith Wharton, particularly The House Of Mirth; & Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; work by Willa Cather, Henry James, Jack London, & Upton Sinclair (The Jungle); plus romances & verse of the era, as well as looking at Walt Whitman & Emily Dickinson with a “new”–(that is, a 1905-vision)–perspective.  (I am working on a gothic-historical novel set in Princeton, NJ.)”

From: Writers tell us what they plan to read in 2012.

 

Remarks on Joyce Carol Oates Visit to USF

When Joyce Carol Oates introduced Stephen King to a Princeton audience in 1997, she noted that it’s commonly said that certain people need no introductions. But that, on the contrary, it’s precisely those whom we imagine we know, in broad stereotypical terms, who require introductions.  And that, I think, is the case here.

Joyce Carol Oates is prolific: she has published more than 150 books. That  is the broad, stereotypical way that many people know her. Every book review of one of her books begins with some variation of that statistic.

But here are some different statistics that might put the “150″ in a different light. Every year in December the New York Times puts out a list of their notable books of the year. From 1963 to the present, forty of Joyce Carol Oates’s books have been on those lists. Now, the notable books list is not exactly an award, but in the case of Joyce Carol Oates it does seem to be an indicator of the consistently high quality of her work. Also reflecting this are the award anthologies such as the Best American Short Stories or the O Henry Prize Stories series.  Twenty-nine of Joyce Carol Oates’s stories have appeared in the O Henry anthologies. That’s more than any writer in the nearly 100 years that the O Henry’s have been around. The next most frequently appearing writers are Alice Adams, John Updike, and William Faulkner. In the Best American Short Stories series, which has also been around for almost a century, Joyce is not the most frequently appearing author. That distinction goes to the great Canadian short story writer Alice Munro with 18 stories. Joyce currently has 17. (Although I’m told that Joyce’s 18th story will appear in the 2011 edition).

These are remarkable numbers–plus the fact that her works have also been included in The Best American Essays, The Best American Mystery Stories, The Best American Poetry, The Best American Short Plays, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and the Pushcart Prize.

Now, what do the scholars and critics think about those 150 books?

Here’s what four of them have said.

Henry Louis Gates Jr, the Harvard critic and scholar:
Joyce Carol Oates has become one of the elemental forces of American fiction. And yet to the museum keepers of national culture, her skill at resisting critical containment must be unnerving. She picks up and discards generic forms at will. She refuses to restrict herself to one subject, to one stratum of society, one personality type. Indeed, her very productivity stands as a reproach. What’s curious is that Oates writes as if each novel is her first, last and only one, a singular testament to her existence. A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America.

John Updike, who knew a thing or two about being a prolific writer, had this to say:
Joyce Carol Oates was perhaps born a hundred years too late; she needs a lustier audience, a race of victorian word-eaters, to be worthy of her astounding productivity … she has, I fear, rather overwhelmed the puny, parsimonious critical establishment of this country. … Single-mindedness and efficiency rather than haste underlie her prolificacy. If the phrase “woman of letters” existed, she would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it.

A UK scholar, Gavin Cologne-Brookes, who published a recent monograph on Joyce Carol Oates’s novels says:
Oates’s achievements are indisputable for anyone who has read her work extensively. Her body of novels, let alone her work in other genres, is among the most wide-ranging in contemporary writing.… she is the nearest America could currently have to a national novelist.

Last,  the late great critic John Leonard said:
It’s as if this prodigious novelist can’t help registering all the voices the culture tries to repress. She hears screams and writes books. I am reminded of Joan of Arc, who heard bells and then immediately had visions. After the rapture of carillons, see Catherine, or Margaret, or Michael … Oates, too, consorts with warrior-angels.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to USF our National Novelist: Joyce Carol Oates.

Photos by Shawn Calhoun.

The Poisoned Kiss Revealed

The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese—Joyce Carol Oates’s numinous and unusual short story collection from 1975—has been considered an anomaly among her books, and something of a mystery. The stories had been published individually under the name “Fernandes” with a note that they were translated “from the Portuguese” by Joyce Carol Oates. The collection’s author was listed as “Fernandes / Joyce Carol Oates.”

Adding to the mystery is JCO’s afterword to the book, where she explains:

In November of 1970, while I was occupied as usual with my own writing, I began to dream about and to sense, while awake, some other life, or vision, or personality ….

The Fernandes stories came out of nowhere: not out of an interest in Portugal (which I have never visited), or a desire to write parables to pierce through the density of existential life that I dramatize in my own writing. …

If I did not concentrate deliberately on my own work, or if I allowed myself to daydream or become overly exhausted, my mind would move—it would seem to swerve or leap—into “Portugal.” There seemed to be a great pressure, a series of visions, that demanded a formal, aesthetic form; I was besieged by Fernandes—story after story, some no more than sketches or paragraphs that tended to crowd out my own writing. …

The only way I could accept these stories was to think of them as a literary adventure, or a cerebral/Gothic commentary on my own writing, or as the expression of a part of my personality that had been stifled. …

Since this experience, I have been reading voluminously in parapsychology, mysticism, the occult and related subjects, but so far I have not been able to comprehend, to my own satisfaction, what really happened. … My fairly skeptical and existential attitude toward life was not broad enough to deal with the phenomenon I myself experienced, and yet, at the present time, I find it difficult to accept alternative “explanations.” …

Repeatedly, one is brought back to the paradox that one can experience the world only through the self—through the mind—but one cannot know, really, what the “self” is. …

Fernandes retreated when his story seemed to be complete. A kind of harmony or resolution must have been established, and the manuscript came to an end. Years later, writing this afterword, I am almost tempted to return to my earliest and most conventional diagnosis of the experience and claim it to be only “metaphorical”—the stories, the book they gradually evolved into, the afterword itself. But in truth none of it was metaphorical, any more than you and I are metaphorical.

This fascinating afterword may well explain the origin of the “Fernandes” stories, but it may also leave a wrong impression that the stories were somehow transcribed dreams rather than “written” stories—that they’re somehow less rational, constructed, writerly than JCO’s “regular” stories. JCO even seems to try to dispel this impression in a 1986 Writer’s Digest interview:

I should stress, though, that the voice of these tales was firmly joined to a fairly naturalistic setting by way of subsequent research and conversations with friends who knew Portugal well. And the tales were rigorously written and rewritten.

The afterword addressed the mystical/personality issues that were clearly of primary interest to JCO at the time, leaving out a sense of the more mundane mechanics of research, writing, and revision; and possibly leading the potential literary critic to look elsewhere for less impenetrably personal material to analyze.

However, a few critics have been undaunted. Some have briefly noted the influence of Borges on the one hand, and Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, on the other. James R. Giles takes the first serious look at the book—story by story—and finds a commentary on “the contrast between ‘minimal art’ and ‘sanctifying art,’” as well as thematic links to JCO’s other work. Eileen Bender also sees that “Oates/Fernandes offers a parable about the essence of fabulation …. This meta-fiction is an exposure of the deathliness of meta-fiction itself, the ultimate art of annihilation.” And Jacqueline Olson Padgett is concerned about  literary colonialism:  ”Oates’s possessed authorship of a little bit of literature for Portugal forces us to face the danger of such work rendering Portugal’s literature anonymous, of inscribing it only in and by the look of an American other.”

But the most compelling and sustained analysis of The Poisoned Kiss is published this month. Susana Araújo, an appointed researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon, and JCO critic extraordinaire, manages to synthesize and greatly expand upon earlier critical insights, as well as correct some previous misjudgments in her article “Joyce Carol Oates’s transatlantic personae: Fernando Pessoa and Jorge Luis Borges in the USA“ for the March 2010 issue of Atlantic Studies. (contact your library for access to the full article).

The abstract:

This article explores Joyce Carol Oates’s allusions to the work of the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa in her collection of stories, The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975). In these stories, Oates maps out an unacknowledged transatlantic genealogy: she re-reads the work of Fernando Pessoa in order to unveil the influence of the Portuguese modernist writer in the works of Jorge Luis Borges—a figure who was, in turn, a major influence for the metafictional writing produced in the US from the 1960s onwards. In order to understand the influence of Borges for the American Fabulators, Oates explores prevailing notions of subjectivity and writing which can be traced back to Pessoa. By travelling back and forwards between Portugal and the US, these stories allow us a better understanding of the US literary landscape during the 1960s and the 1970s in the light of decisive Atlantic lineage.

Araújo manages to set the context of these stories in JCO’s argument with American metafiction of the time, her ambivalent relation to Borges, and her intense engagement in this collection with Pessoa.

What is revealed is a much more intellectually complex and unified work than its haunted reputation would suggest—a lesson that could well be applied to all of JCO’s work.

Joyce Carol Oates in Paris

Guest post by Tanya Tromble

Joyce Carol Oates made an appearance in Paris on Saturday, July 4, for an interview and book signing session at the Virgin Megastore on the Champs Elysées.  The appearance was to promote the release of the French translation of her Journal.  She responded to questions from an interviewer and then from the audience for about an hour and then signed books.  This is the first time I had met her in person, and she was just as gracious and natural as I had imagined her.

She spoke about the difference between fiction writing and journal writing and encouraged everyone in the audience to begin keeping a journal if they were not already doing so.  She said that though there are a few things in the journal she wishes she hadn’t written, overall she feels that looking back at it allowed her to realize the past difficulties she had confronted and gotten through.  Responding to the seemingly mandatory question about violence in her work, she pointed out that an artist is not his/her subject matter, rather the subject is just the material used by the artist.  She thinks that criticism of violence in her work stems from a miscomprehension of what an artist is and stressed that an artist lives in his/her imagination, whereas her own life is a peaceful one.  She quoted Flaubert who said “live like the bourgeoisie so you can be violent in your writing.”

When asked about the relationship between her work and detective fiction, she responded “I don’t write thrillers, exactly” and went on to list many different genres and subgenres of detective fiction.  “I’ve never written a thriller and I’m not drawn to the genre,” she said before going on to explain what she views as the action structure of the thriller.  “The genre I like is psychological mystery/suspense which I think is very true to life.”  For her, this genre is written from the point of view of one person, sometimes a detective, and represents the position we are often in when confronted with something mysterious.  She spoke about family secrets at the periphery of her experience when growing up and expressed the idea that a writer is always pursuing mysterious threads toward illumination and knowledge.  She distinguished between genre fiction and literary fiction saying that in genre fiction the mystery is always explained because of the contract between reader and writer, whereas literary fiction operates in a different dimension where each literary work is supposed to be unique, so things don’t need to necessarily be explained/resolved.  Oates offered Black Girl, White Girl as an example of one of her works with the form of a mystery/suspense novel. Told from the perspective of the white girl, you know immediately that the black girl is dead. The novel looks back over fifteen years, dealing with white guilt, class-generated guilt, and the (sometimes wrongly) perceived cliché qualities in the Other.

Before concluding, she went on to answer questions about The Gravedigger’s Daughter, her play I Stand Before You Naked, her writing process and her favorite French authors including Flaubert (especially Madame Bovary), Camus, Sartre, Duras and Colette.  She apologized for not being familiar with the work of contemporary French authors, explaining that as far as she knew, there were few, if any, English translations available, publishers being wary of venturing into this domain.

It was a surprise and a joy to have Oates finally visit France!

Flannery O’Connor

Joyce Carol Oates adds to her many writings on Flannery O’Connor in the April 9 New York Review of Books with The Parables of Flannery O’Connor, a review-essay around Brad Gooch’s biography of O’Connor. JCO, a great admirer of O’Connor’s work, speaks of  her “cartoon art” (but this term is desrciptive, not derogatory):

Is the art of caricature a lesser or secondary art, set beside what we might call the art of complexity or subtlety? Is “cartoon” art invariably inferior to “realist” art? The caricaturist has the advantage of being cruel, crude, reductive, and often very funny; as the “realist” struggles to establish the trompe l’oeil of verisimilitude, without which the art of realism has little power to persuade, the caricaturist wields a hammer, or an ax, or sprays the target with machine-gun fire, transmuting what might be rage—the savage indignation of Jonathan Swift, for instance—into devastating humor. Satire is the weapon of rectitude, a way of meting out punishment. Satire regrets nothing, and revels in unfairness in its depiction of what Flannery O’Connor called “large and startling figures.”

JCO has previously written on:

O’Connor’s story “The Artificial Nigger”: “This graceful, parable-like short story, with its precise, weighted language and its comically sympathetic rural Georgians Mr. Head and his ten-year-old grandson Nelson, is virtually unique in Flannery O’Connor’s oeuvre, ending not in violent death, nor even in devastating irony, but with tenderness.”

O’Connors letters: “The experience of reading these collected letters (which are, in fact, rigorously selected letters) is a disturbing one: but tonic, provocative, intriguing. For while it cannot be said of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction that she revealed herself anywhere within it—her strategy was to submerge herself, to “correct” emotion by means of art—it must be said of the letters that they give life to a wonderfully warm, witty, generous, and complex personality, surely one of the most gifted of contemporary writers.”

O’Connors essays: “Reading and rereading this book is a moving experience: not only is Mystery and Manners (Occasional Prose of Flannery O’Connor, selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald) a valuable and exciting collection of essays in itself, it is a testament to the deep humanity of Miss O’Connor, to the modesty and wisdom and gentle humor that lay behind her vivid, sometimes repulsive fictional accomplishments. Her death at the age of thirty-nine is one of our bitterest losses.”

And in JCO’s most extensive essay, on O’Connor’s fiction: “It is this complexity that makes the fiction of Flannery O’Connor so rich and at the same time so perplexing and alienating. She seems unique in her celebration of the necessity of succumbing to the divine through violence that is immediate and irreparable. There is no mysticism in her work that is only spiritual; it is physical as well. She has been accused of being un-Christian or anti-Christian in her insistence upon the limitations of the human will. For, as she says in an introductory note to her first novel, Wise Blood, ” … free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery …. ” Her refusal to account for the mystery leads to the bizarre atmosphere of her world.”

Art For My Sake

The Guardian asks Joyce Carol Oates and others whether writing for a living is a joy or a chore; JCO suggests don’t trust anybody’s answer:

Recall that DH Lawrence warned us to trust the tale, not the teller – the teller of fictions is likely to be a liar. Darwinian evolutionary psychology suggests that none of us really knows what has made us what we are, still less why we behave so eccentrically as we do; when we are pressed to explain ourselves, we invent. In the Renaissance, poets claimed repeatedly that they wrote for posterity – to be “immortal.” In religious communities, the creation of any art was for the glory of God. In a capitalist society, one is likely to claim that one writes for the same purpose that everyone else produces a product – for money.