The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Lonely still for Son of the Morning. For my immersion in Nathan’s consciousness, his intense relationship with God. How passionately I miss the writing of that novel…in the early morning, especially; and in the evening (at the moment it’s 9:30 P.M., a Thursday). Short stories don’t seem to absorb me as they once did. There’s such a paucity of consciousness in a story, I mean such a paucity of my own involvement in it; one no sooner creates a living, breathing (sic) human being than one has finished with him. The divine form is the novel, which includes the entire world…which can bring about an alteration of consciousness in the author if all goes as it should….

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  The terrible challenge of James Joyce. After Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, what remains? Experimentation for its own sake seems sterile & pointless. Especially since one cannot hope or wish to out Joyce Joyce. What Joyce doesn’t do is enormous, of course, yet one’s attention is drawn to what he has done…and made impossible for others to do.

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  Will be teaching Brave New World tomorrow in my large class; must talk about satire briefly. Then off to the Michigan Inn for luncheon with my friends, if the weather isn’t too formidable…. Am haunted by a sense of laziness or unworthiness. Obscure sense of inadequacy. A story of mine in the current Viva with a fairly handsome illustration but I couldn’t force myself to buy the magazine, it’s so vulgar, so…so vulgar.* What am I doing in it, what is my name doing on its cover…! And last month in Playboy. I don’t know how these things happen & feel too numb to contemplate them, as if my fate were out of my hands: simultaneously shameful and utterly insignificant…. My life too is a jigsaw puzzle, an odd baroque game.

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  January 29, 1977. […] The sense of the divine, the sacred. A genuine stirring some years ago: 1971. And for years afterward. Then a kind of waning, a gradual loss…the loss as ineffable as the reality. How to explain this, how to find the proper language…. Impossible. Nathan’s loss was much greater than my own because the Divine, in him, was much more powerful. I am by no means bereft & broken as he was…nor would I wish to be as God-intoxicated as he was in his prime. “The motions of grace, the hardness of heart, external circumstances.” Grace, surely: the correct word: fortuitous & utterly unpredictable. Beyond human control. The Divine can swallow one up, can buoy one aloft, and then recede: simply disappear.

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  February 6, 1977. […] To what extent, I wonder, are all individuals the spectators of their own lives. Does everyone glance back over his shoulder to reassess the person he’s been, does everyone have moments (as I do) when he feels quite blissfully detached from the actor who is acting out his lines as if they were terribly serious…. Personality: persona. Mask. The real self is elsewhere. Deeper. Inaccessible to consciousness. To have faith in God means, possibly, to have faith in this deeper & wiser & in a way impersonal, unknown self. To have faith in faith. To love. To be loyal to. To continue to search for. To continue the search.

  Someone said, my friend John Gardner in fact, that at certain moments we know that all we have is each other…that we’re here together & must make a world of it. But I don’t agree. I think he’s wrong. His psychology is shallow, his sense of mystery is programmatic & contrived. He writes as if he were a critic writing—actively writing. “Like this. I’ll show you,” says the music teacher, taking his student’s place at the piano. And plays for his student’s edification. So John “plays” at his writing—spinning out plots to illustrate his essentially didactic imagination. Yet he doesn’t quite believe in what he’s doing. So he has said, and so his behavior seems to suggest. His worry is that he’s a slick showman & a kind of confidence-man & that he will actually fool people into thinking he’s the real thing…& that, consequently, he will never grow into the “real thing.” (But he could, he certainly could. If only he would set aside his plodding moralism, moralizing, his over-academic notion of what a novel should be in order to make it a candidate for New Critical attention.)…No word from John since he and Joan have separated. Awkward, to continue a relationship when it’s always been with a couple, not an individual; and now the couple is extinct. Rumors abound that John is living in a small town in New York State, not far from Bennington, with a former Bennington student who is twenty years younger than he. The sort of thing he always contemptuously opposed in others: men leaving their wives & children for younger women. Berating me, in fact, for not having given his children (he was drunk at the time) good, healthy models of family life in my writing. As if one wrote for children…who are not apt to be fooled by propaganda anyway. A generous man, intelligent & talented & inventive, yet capable of unsettling gestures of cruelty. So hopelessly drunk at our last meeting that he couldn’t rise from the table with the rest of us…. Does he like me, or dislike me. I suppose his feelings are ambivalent. But then he doesn’t know me, really.

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  February 12, 1977. […] Flaubert’s remark that the content of a novel is nothing, perhaps might be nothing; style everything. In the writing of a novel this is certainly true. Finding the voice, the point of view, the quirky lens-angle that is the angle—that is everything. Only afterward does it seem that the characters might possibly spring to life quite apart from the language: might be taken over, let’s say, by someone else & pursued further. It sounds like occultism…but is it only common sense? Or is it (like much that is “common” sense) simply bunk. A novel is a skein of words. It is words. Or is it? It appears to be words, then. As a photograph in a newspaper, seen close up, appears to be made of dots. Or a painting is a series of brushstrokes. But the “reality” isn’t in the minute but in the organization, in the glimmering background, backdrop, whatever…the world evoked by the words. Thus the novelist could lose his or her novel characters, “invented” characters, to someone else…mistaking the minute (the words) for the governing cohesive reality.

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  …Contemporary tragedy. The small writ large; the large writ small. The impossibility of connection between the individual & his—or any—community. A critic named Pickering chided me for having written stories about rootless unconnected suburban people;* but what is one to do, given the condition of our era? Nostalgia doesn’t appeal to me. Looking back over my shoulder with a tear in my eye doesn’t appeal to me. Writers are blamed for writing of what exists, as if they had caused certain dislocations of the time…. The banality of most of the criticism that has attached itself to my work. Hastily-written, incoherent, uncomprehending. What value? Very little. It isn’t infrequent that reviewers get the plots wrong. Am I naïve to have expected more consideration, am I naïve to be disappointed…? Even “positive” criticism so often seems uninformed, ignorant. What to do? Keep on writing, I suppose; try to write better than in the past; remain stoic. At the very least it can be said that I’ve made a great deal of money—enough to be financially independent for life—if that’s any consolation.

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  February 20, 1977.…Finished the essay on Lawrence: Lawrence’s Götterdämmerung.† Very satisfying, very enjoyable indeed; especially this morning’s work, rereading and revising and doing footnotes. There is nothing quite like analyzing and speculating in this way…dealing with a great work of art, bringing various threads together, developing ideas that arise over a period of time…in this case, over a period of about ten years. Whatever the essay’s ultimate fate it has certainly been a pleasure to write.

  I feel the urge, now, to write more essays…to write a book-length study, even, of someone whose work I admire…. The strange, surprising, undeniable satisfaction of critical writing: “critical” a poor term for it, really.

  The work of art, for all its gorgeous beauty and perfection, or near-perfection, even for all its marvelous voice, its music, is curiously mute: shy and coy and unspoken-of: until another person comes along to snatch it up in his or her arms and bear it aloft, crying out for all to hear This is a masterpiece! I will tell you why; and in so doing I will, of course, put fo
rth certain ideas of my own….

  Literature as a dialogue, never-ceasing. In order to say anything about another person I must do more than simply present him, more even than simply interpret him; I must put forth my own view; and in so doing I create a kind of sub-literature or para-literature that complements the original work. Viewing literature as a critic I can see that my own work is there, in a sense, to be commented on. The writer wants his work to be experienced, and possibly (though not always) to be praised; he doesn’t really want it to be the occasion for other people to exercise their genius…feeling, quite justifiably, that the critic is in a subtle contest with him and can’t help winning; can’t help feeling the satisfaction, however unreasonable, of “winning.” But as I am a critic at least part of the time, and thrill to the not-inconsiderable pleasures of criticism, I will have to be more tolerant of others’ comments on my writing. I will have to see critics as friendly rivals, as people very much like myself, drawn to certain works possibly because they wish to quarrel with them; but drawn irresistibly, which is all that a writer can ask.

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  The cunning of art, which no non-artist can comprehend: that the mere expression of an idea is in itself infinitely pleasing. The idea can be literally any idea at all—“optimistic,” “pessimistic,” serious or playful. Behind the writing there is, no doubt, an essential seriousness. For no one would build a house and not live in it…no one would build a house, at least, without the intention of living in it. Yes, we’re all serious, we’re deadly serious. And yet…. And yet we are strangely free even of our seriousness. The artist is free, I see that so plainly at times, so very plainly…. Lawrence, in expressing certain of his worst fears in Women in Love, nevertheless felt pleasure in expressing them; in the act of arranging and organizing and writing. By bringing something totally new into the world we participate in the mystery (one might as well call it that: what other word is adequate) of creation, which is always a pleasure. Afterward, like Lawrence, we may be vaguely alarmed by the nature of what we’ve done. He expressed surprise that Women in Love was so “apocalyptic” when he read it through. This reaction is entirely probable, and doesn’t refute the artist’s sincerity. The artist expresses himself by the work as well as through it. But no non-artist could understand this any more than the artist himself, apart from his art for a period of time, can remember why it’s so inescapably true….

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  February 24, 1977. […] Delight in renewal, and dread of change. The death of the species and the survival—so one might fantasize!—of the individual. “The seeds of knowledge are within us like fire in flint; philosophers deduce them by reason, poets strike them forth by imagination, and they shine more clearly.” But it isn’t knowledge, is it. At any rate it isn’t sanity. What could Descartes have known beyond his wishful constructions, his mocked-up clockwork universe guaranteed by the Church…. The self-sealing universe of the old philosophers. Descartes, Plato, Spinoza. The open universe of Nietzsche. Systolic, one moves between them unable to decide, unable to know. Looking at an Egyptian exhibit in the museum last night, gazing at a mummy in a sadly-battered and once-ornate coffin, Ray said, “It seems pointless, doesn’t it?—so much history,” and I said, “What do you mean by pointless? What does have a point? What value is there in it?” but I didn’t know quite what I meant, and there wasn’t anything Ray could reply. Such speculations, the Buddha shrewdly noted, lead one nowhere. And are not even especially stimulating…. Yes, in our “real” lives material is everything: the flux of life, the richness and complexity and occasional triviality of the detail; meaning counts for very little. But in art meaning is very important. Structure is always important. The anti-structuralists profit from the traditional sort of art, and would be lost without it as a reference point. I want to be chained so that I might break free in triumph. But if I am already free, if nothing constrains me, if no one cares about the consequences of my freedom—what point is there in my art? (The pointlessness too of the all-for-giving God. A kind of syrup, soupyness, adhesive jellyfish God…. )

  Freedom. Bondage. Again the systolic rhythm. Man moves between ennui and anxiety, Schopenhauer said, or so I half-remember him saying. Perhaps he only meant to be droll, like Oscar Wilde? He’s wrong, or at any rate not correct, not entirely. But at certain times of the day fearfully convincing.

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  March 4, 1977.…Deeply enjoiced. Enjuiced.* Reading also Simone Weil. And of her. What to think, indeed…? What others see or claim to see as sainthood I see as a tragic delusion not much different from Nathan Vickery’s. He too approached death and wished to die, but did not: his fictional odyssey I take to be more laudable than her real one…. The saint as Hunger Artist. Kafka’s superb perception. But if one refuses to eat it isn’t always because there isn’t adequate or tempting food…it may be simply that one wishes to display one’s will; one wishes to dramatize one’s own victory over the instincts of the flesh. Of course Simone Weil committed suicide. She successfully killed her body. Which she would have interpreted as “triumphing” over it and achieving union with “God.”

  Having felt such temptations…having been visited by them…I understand what they are from the inside. And they are terrible. Terrible.

  My story of the woman who is threatened by a deranged man: must write it soon. Back in January the incident occurred, nothing since has transpired, the original story was to have been comic in tone and resolution…but I’ve shifted my interest and now want to deal with the situation frankly and seriously, even tragically…. Marian Kern. Marian the “Mary,” the maternal: Kern the (archaic) footsoldier. The woman who is both womanly and soldierly.*

  Her denied and forgotten sexuality. Her desire to live in the will, in the intellect, in active involvement with others…. (Whom, nevertheless, she flinches from as people, never wishing to be touched.)

  The novel brings us back again and again to the earth. To the simplest of emotions. To clear-cut fates. Hence its essential wisdom and health. The gravitational weight of Joyce’s Ulysses: how it conquers Stephen D.! “Virtuosity,” says Frank Budgen. “Why not?”…A Simone Weil is absolutely banished from such a tumultuous world.

  In what was she deluded…? Not initially in religion, but in philosophy. In Absolutes. There are none, of course, except in texts and (temporarily, for conversational purposes) in people’s minds. But she behaved as if there were. As if there must be, should be. One dies on earth in terms of an Absolute elsewhere, like an actor whose suffering is being witnessed and recorded…and if it turns out there is no Absolute, no elsewhere, one never learns; one is simply dead. What is the ethical difference between a person who dies in terms of an Absolute, as Simone Weil did, or one who dies out of spite, stubbornness, a simple wish to die and have the complexities and disappointments of life finished…? People who believe in the divinity of words would have the former a saint, the latter a suicide. But it doesn’t seem to me so clear-cut.

  How intellectuals deceive themselves!—with what timid gusto they elevate one of their own to sainthood! It would be hilarious if it were not so dismaying.

  March 5, 1977. […]…To Detroit Institute of Arts this afternoon. Dreary blankly-gray sky. Bombed-out city. Broken glass, acres of rubble, half-constructed buildings that look abandoned. A kind oasis in Topinka’s and in the museum. Woodcut exhibit. Two Munches, a number of Dürer: sadistical-hysterical “death-on-a-rocking-horse” sort of thing, tiresome after so many centuries. What is the human impulse to imagine others’ suffering…. A true Teutonic streak. But Munch is different; Munch is lovely. Some by Leonard Baskin, not among his most forceful…. The American wing as bad as, or worse, than I recall. Truly wretched stuff. Magazine illustrations; fifth-rate imitations of Impressionists. A man named Metcalf quite pleasing to the eye…. The London Arts Gallery in the Fisher Center: a Campbell’s soup can proudly displayed as though the year were 1960 and not 1977. At the poor little Willis Gallery a display of sculpture…wooden chairs painted in
part. Does anyone bother to step inside to investigate such art? Throwaway art. Tired cynicism. Bankruptcy of spirit. And the Fisher Center itself nearly empty. Store after store closed. Will never reopen. Long echoing corridors. Policeman w/closed-circuit television. Ray and I on the marble stairs, climbing hopefully to the art galleries only to find them empty of patrons and empty too of art.

  The betrayal of language. The betrayal of the spirit by language as spoken. The betrayal of the Self by one’s extroverted consciousness & by others in their hurried detachment. Our fate; our cross. The broodingness of Ulysses. Communion is short-lived, isolation permanent. Joyce’s people inhabit their skins. Rarely touch. Bloom “makes love” to the image of Gerty MacDowell, a knowing unknowingness. Does not wish to know. One requires a stage setting…illusion…falsification. Otherwise the erotic persuasion is missing.

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  March 10, 1977. […] Joyce’s magnificent words. The Ithaca chapter especially. How brilliant, how staggeringly great…. I must write something on Ulysses, another essay, merely because I feel at times as if I would burst with the news (news?) of Joyce’s genius. He has done what he has done, and so superbly. Yet I would wish Ulysses cut, in all honesty. The Oxen of the Sun is rather too precious, and certainly too long; as is the Cabman’s shelter episode (as deathly dull and depressing as Joyce had intended it to be, and then some), and Stephen-on-the-beach, the Proteus episode, is too compact, condensed with pointlessly obscure and precious allusions, not adequately imagined in the flesh. The other chapters, however, are uniformly—not quite uniformly—well—the other chapters are successful on their own terms, and their terms of course are very high. Ithaca remains my favorite, not perversely. And Penelope of course. Cyclops a very close third. And Gerty MacDowell. Ah, I forgot Nighttown: Nighttown of course. And the first chapter as well…. I can well believe that Joyce was exhausted after having written these chapters and felt a “blank apathy”…one almost feels that way after having read them.