Interviews
Ten Questions with Joyce Carol Oates
Jessica McCort: Some of your most memorable protagonists, at least for me, are young girls; (my interest is in girlhood and representations of girlhood): Karen (17) in With Shuddering Fall, Connie (15) in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” and particularly the child Norma Jeane in Blonde. I was wondering what place “the American girl” holds in your imagination, particularly as a figure “trapped in history”?
Joyce Carol Oates: I’m very drawn to adolescent visions, whether they are boys or girls actually. Obviously my predilection might be a little more for girls, since I was a girl. Adolescence is a frame of mind and a consciousness with which I feel somewhat familiar. But I’m also often writing about boys too, who see the world, I think, somewhat differently, and I find the differences very interesting. I’m not sure that one sex is more trapped than another in the gender because of the role-playing that gender seems to bring to us … can be defining, and it also can be very entrapping and suffocating. And, I see the adolescent consciousness as probing and skeptical and wondering and inventing, often in a way that I think adult consciousness no longer is, so I’m kind of drawn to that. But in terms of the girls that you mention, the Marilyn Monroe role that Norma Jean takes on is just so conspicuously grand and historic compared to the others that it is difficult for me to talk about her with the others. The novel is meant to be a posthumous novel where she is thinking back; she is no longer alive. She goes back to her beginnings as a very small child and then moves to Marilyn, and then Marilyn becomes this iconic carapace that sort of suffocates her. So I see her girlhood not really so much in terms of my other fictitious characters, but more as part of this mural, a kind of historic phenomenon. You know, to wake up one day and find that you are an iconic personality in history, you would want to say, “But no, I’m myself,” but people cannot see you as yourself any longer. So in that case, the girl is really swallowed up.
Grace Waitman: My question is I was very interested in your essay “Running and Writing”—
JCO: Oh yes? Are you a runner?
GW: I am a runner, and I like to be in movement.
JCO: Just like me.
GW: So I was really struck by your experience, when you that you were in London, but you were dreaming of Detroit, even though all the while you were actually running in Hyde Park (in London, England). I was interested in how a person can envision one geographic location, even while they’re in another one. And, so, my question is—for example, if you might be running—do you find yourself more aware of the surroundings you’re envisioning, or [of] those that are actually around you? And, how might that function in your creative process?
JCO: Well, it’s kind of a complex question because the act of running is a really a manifold. Sometimes you’re working on a problem that’s formal, and you’re looking for language, or you’re looking for a way into a text that hasn’t been written yet. Sometimes when you’re running, you’re looking for a way to edit the text that’s all finished. And so, these are kind of formal preoccupations. I find the act of running very meditative and almost trancelike. I don’t like the treadmill nearly as much as running, but I can do the treadmill if it’s really cold out. I almost go into a kind of trance, and it’s very good for figuring things out spatially—the way the text itself is like a paragraph set that maybe could be reshuffled or eliminated, and that somehow is a very different sort of activity from running and envisioning a different land—or cityscape. And, I think, probably, I don’t do that much of envisioning another landscape. I tend to be very interested in what I’m looking at and what I’m seeing, and I find landscape to have a spiritual, or psychological, or emotional value in the text, and that becomes like a character. So, my apprehension of, say, the city of Detroit, would probably not be somebody else’s. You know, I’m looking at it as a landscape or a cityscape of heightened drama in which something’s about to happen—as some of the backdrop. But we know that a landscape or a cityscape is basically an entity that has no animation in itself. You know, we’re bringing to it, or we’re projecting onto it. It’s a very interesting question. I often feel that the solution to a formal problem will be found on a run, or at the end of a run, or coming back from a run, whereas if I stayed home at my desk, then I wouldn’t get it. And sometimes when I travel—I’m getting off an airplane in a different city and walking very quickly along in an airport—I sort of feel that I’m coming to something, and sometimes I have these strange little revelations that help me with a knotty problem. And so I think, though I’m not a mystical person at all—I’m actually quite skeptical—so I think that if I had stayed home and hadn’t come to St. Louis, you know, would I have figured out about how to end the story? Because I figured something out about an hour ago, and I felt as though it was kind of waiting for me here in St. Louis. But if I’d stayed home, then maybe I wouldn’t have gotten it, maybe ever, or not so quickly.
GW: It’s like that sense of destiny of place, or the importance of place, or something along those lines.
JCO: Yeah, the place is so alive. I get very excited when I read a text that evokes a place, because to me, it has, as I say, this kind of shimmering spiritual value. It’s not just inert and dead, but it’s kind of alive. I feel that it’s very magical.
JRM: In your writing you often make use of allusions to or revisions of classic fairy tales. In Blonde, for example, you use the fairy-tale model of the Fair Princess and the Dark Prince to examine the American mythos of Marilyn Monroe. I was wondering, can you speak more about the importance of the fairy tale—its worlds, images, plots—to your own work?
JCO: I've written an essay on fairy tales and it's such a complex subject, you know, one could talk five hours about it. So, I don't know how I might narrow that down. Very often I work in terms of an emblematic or archetypal male-female role that works itself out in fairy tales. Traditional fairytales are very conservative politically. One would think that they might represent the folk or working-class sensibility. That’s really not the case. They tend to be hierarchical, and there is always at the top a sense of nobility—a king, a queen, a princess, or a prince—and then we go down. Cinderella is a scullery maid in the cinders, but if you examine her, she’s actually a princess. She’s been demoted, but she’s of royal blood. So, when she is given the glass slipper, when she is brought along by the prince, she is going back to her rightful place. It would not have been a fairy-tale vision to see a child of the proletariat, you know, raised to that level. So far as that is concerned, I don’t really identify with fairy tales because I don’t feel that the conservative vision is one that … I don't think it's natural. We live in a world of evolution, of Darwinian evolution. I don’t believe in the fixed forms of society or the conservative vision. Fairy tales are sort of projections of collective thinking, sometimes wishful thinking, like “They lived happily after.” But many of the Grimm fairy tales are very grim. They’re actually awful; they’re like nightmares. People are disfigured and defaced and mutilated and killed, and they come to terrible ends. The fairy tale would seem to be a kind of shorthand way of talking about the complexity of life reduced to some essence or some archetype.
JRM: I like that sense of it being shorthand.
JCO: Shorthand, yes. Norma Jeane saw herself as the beggar maid who has been mistaken for the princess. But she's being made to play the role of the princess, and she was destroyed. In Hollywood, there always has been a kind of hierarchy, especially in the past. At the top, you would have someone like Elizabeth Taylor or Claudette Colbert. They were the A-list women. And then, going down, you have the B-list, and then girls like Norma Jean who came in at the very bottom—they were basically almost like prostitutes or like call-girls. They had to be at the beck-and-call of the producers, whereas the A-list young women—Elizabeth Taylor is the best example—were very beautiful, but very assured because they came from good families and they started at the top. And Norma Jean, or Marilyn Monroe, was never allowed to be on that level. She was always considered a slut; she was considered dirty. The producers, though they made money from her, they looked down upon her as being lower class.
GW: My next question also has to do with the writing process. You mention in the same essay [“Running and Writing”] that writers are famous for liking to be in motion, and I sort of saw the act of dreaming as a way of being in motion through the mind. So, I wondered how does being in motion through running, dreaming, or some other means, function in your work, either as a theme in your work, or in your writing process?
JCO: Well, this is a very informal thought, and maybe it’s debatable, but I think that when we’re stationary, we have a somewhat thickened sense of the ego or the “I,” and we’re just sort of self-conscious and aware of ourselves. But when we’re in motion, or when we’re in a dream, the “I” entity starts to dissolve. Some people, including myself, and possibly you, are capable of having dreams in which your own personality is really almost dissolved. You know, way, way down in the depths of the ocean there are creatures that are transparent. They’re like jellyfish, a lot of very transparent creatures. And I was thinking it’s almost analogous to the human experience of sleep, where when you’re really, really deep into sleep, your own physical self is often not even there. It’s like you’re transparent. And, it may be a process that we just will never understand, descending somehow deep into the primitive brain—like the brain almost at the brain stem—and away from the consciousness. And, somehow running replicates that, I think. I would think that if you were running very fast, if you were in an instinctive situation where you were terrified—say you were being pursued, and your life was in danger—you would be flooded with adrenaline. I would think probably the “I” or ego was almost gone, that you’re just running like a physical entity, the way a soldier might just start [running], or a boxer, or someone like that. But when you’re writing, there’s … as I say, we have this more thickened or more solid sense of the self, because it’s usually in some stationary situation with social definitions. When we’re out running—I hope you’re like this—you like being alone rather than running and talking to someone. Nothing is so mysterious as when you’re in a beautiful day, and you’re thinking your own thoughts, and then two or three runners come along, and they’re chattering. That seems so unnatural to me. They’re ruining it.
JRM: Your writing often addresses girls’ and women’s traumatic experiences—I noticed that in your work—concentrating particularly on themes of victimization and pain. I wonder how your realistic rendering of trauma has been critical to your representation of the female experience or of the American experience in general?
JCO: I am a feminist, and I’m very interested in women’s issues, but when I’m a writer, I don’t inevitably just write about women, you know. I’m very interested in what I might call the dramatic realization of inchoate forces; sometimes it does involve women, sometimes women and men, or girls. But I am very sympathetic with the female predicament because that is my predicament. It's just that when I think of my own background, I think that I was to some extent victimized not necessarily because I was female, but because I was small and relatively weak. Small boys and weak boys were also sort of bullied. So my earliest memories of being victimized by older children, if you want to call them that, sort of louts and punks, you know, wasn’t that much because I was a girl, but because I was just small. And then, where I come from, which is a very rough background (I’m not really from the middle-class; though I live in Princeton I’m not from that kind of community), if you didn’t have an older brother to protect you, you were at risk, whether you were a boy or a girl. Could you follow up? I didn't answer all of that.
JRM: Sure, I guess one of the things I'm drawn to in your work is this notion of trauma to your characters—they often go through very traumatic experiences—and so male and female, how do you see that being a central component in you work, or do you?
JCO: Well, I think because things happened in my own background, particularly my family background, more than in my own life…. My grandmother and my mother experienced what would be called traumas of a kind, and I am kind of fascinated with how people deal with that. You probably have not read my most recent novel, The Gravedigger’s Daughter. That's about my grandmother. When she was fourteen, her father, who was a gravedigger, a Jewish immigrant, was going to kill the whole family. He had a shotgun. He didn’t kill my grandmother, who was fourteen, but he injured his wife and then he killed himself with the shotgun. But my grandmother, who was Jewish, actually never acknowledged that she was Jewish. She moved away from that world and became almost like an anonymous person. So The Gravedigger’s Daughter is about that person who becomes an American, generic female trying to fit in and conform. She changes her hairstyle, she changes her way of walking, and she becomes sort of a movie-actress type of pleasant woman. Not glamorous or very beautiful, but a pleasant, a pleasing woman. So I always thought I never knew my grandmother, because she never talked about any of that. It was a secret. And I thought it must have been the case for my grandmother that every day of her life, every hour, she would remember that she was almost meant to have died when she was fourteen, but she didn’t. He didn’t kill her. So it seems to me that there would be a feeling in your life when you look back that it could have gone that way—and I would be gone—but it actually went this way. And so there is a feeling of immense gratitude and wonder, but it is tied in with the trauma. If you had not had the trauma, you wouldn’t have the wonder and that sense of preciousness. So, I often write about that sort of thing. I don’t often write about violence per se in the novels, but usually the aftermath or the consequence of the violence for girls and women—and sometimes for men and for boys—because it’s a testing ground. In my own life, relatively, I have been spared. I've been spared. I haven’t had the experiences that people in my family have had. So I’m like a witness or a chronicler. We can assume that Shakespeare didn’t have the experiences of Macbeth or Othello; he was a kind of witness seeing how things played out. I’m just very interested in the drama of a situation, in situations that have some dramatic potential and how they work out.
GW: My question kind of goes along those lines. In an essay about Romanticism and its connection to Sylvia Plath’s poetry, you suggest—and I have a quote here—that “the artist both creates and is created by his art, and that the self—especially the ‘I’ of lyric poetry—is a personality who achieves a kind of autonomy free not only of the personal life of the artist but free, as well, of the part-by-part progression of individual poems; that the autobiographical personality is presented by the artist as a testing of reality” (“The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath”). So, my question is, are there ways in which you consider a writer’s more autobiographical work—I’m thinking here of the personal essay—is more of a test of reality than fiction, or vice versa?
JCO: I’m not sure that there’s much of a distinction, really. I think we assume, and perhaps too readily assume, that when there’s a pronoun “I” in a poem, or an essay, or even a memoir, we assume that that’s the literal person. But I would think it’s probably a textual, fictitious person. It’s very clear in Emily Dickinson, because sometimes she seems to be a little boy, or a man, or she’s just old, or she’s dead. You know, she says all these different things. We sort of feel that there’s an essence of Emily Dickinson, but it’s very distilled. And [we feel] that there was another Emily Dickinson who had a very funny and a wonderful sense of humor, and was somebody who made black bread, and pudding, and took care of her father, and had several flirtatious relationships with her sister-in-law, and did things that wouldn’t really go into the poetry then. The poetry is rather stark, and archetypal, and almost skeletal, and elegant, very elegant. But the actual Emily Dickinson…. Could we know her, we might sit around like girls, kind of giggling together. That wouldn’t work in the poetry, even though that’s part of her personality. I have many, many writer friends, and some artist friends, and so little of their personalities go into the writing. There’s a whole sprawling sense of “Otherness.” It’s very true that someone like Hemingway presented a certain very distilled and calibrated, calculated image of himself. But he was many, many other things. There’s a physicality that’s always left out of literature.
JRM: You mentioned at the outset of our interview that you had just returned to The Bell Jar, that you hadn’t read it in a while and then picked it back up. Has your opinion of the novel changed over time? Do you read it differently now than you had read it before? How has your experience of that novel changed?
JCO: There are many interesting things that we could say about The Bell Jar; it’s just a fascinating text. It's almost difficult to narrow it down. First of all, I was kind of bemused that it had been rejected at a number of publishers, including Knopf, and that the rejection letter said that Sylvia Plath, she can’t write! Some reader read The Bell Jar and wrote this little report: “We don’t want this.” If they had all said that, it wouldn’t exist. What are these people thinking? Then when you read it, from that point of view, what were they thinking? The same publishing house rejected Nabokov’s Lolita, which nobody could doubt is very well-written. Are they afraid? Is there some taboo being violated that they reacted in this way? So, I would be interested in looking at why it had been rejected at that time and what this suggests about Plath’s poetry being very revolutionary. The poetry is on a much higher level of execution than the prose; the prose is just not on the level of the poetry. The poetry seems to us brilliant and very much, in some ways, like Emily Dickinson—just very distinctive. When she was writing it she was a poetry student of Robert Lowell. She was in with Anne Sexton and, I think, Maxine Kumin, who was their contemporary. It would not have seemed that Sylvia Plath was distinctive among those people. Robert Lowell was the great poet; John Berryman was very, very strong. The women poets, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, maybe some others, they didn’t seem at that point in history as if any one of them was special. But now, looking back after decades, it seems that Sylvia Plath has emerged as a classic in ways that the other people haven’t. I find that very interesting, because I lived through those decades myself. In the beginning, it just didn’t seem that she was that distinctive from Anne Sexton, who actually is quite a good poet. So that’s something that I would find very interesting, too. Then, the emphasis on the Rosenbergs, the execution of the Rosenbergs and the tie-in with electroshock treatment—which I guess Sylvia had, didn’t she? That I think is very interesting too. As far as I can say, the novel is naturally readable and fluid; it's maybe a little bit like The Catcher in the Rye. I just picked it up and started re-reading it—I haven’t gotten very far. It almost reads with the fluidity of “chick-lit”: there were twelve of us in the hotel, Doreen has this dress on, they go up to a bar, and she’s ordering vodka and eating caviar or something. There’s a level at which it is not what you’d call great literature, but it is very readable.
JRM: I was thinking of your review of Jack Linrose's book on her and this sort of iconic Sylvia Plath that has emerged over time. Do you think that that's linked with some kind of American consciousness—like the way that our nation has sort of developed over time—its view of public figures—that she's emerged as a specific poet rather than…
JCO: As we move away in time from any person or event, it loses its specific details and starts to assume—again, to use this word—an iconic outline. So that there are many, many things that we could say about Sylvia Plath had we known her; and her writing has a certain… she’s funny, she writes letters, she had babies. You know, there’s a whole side of her that was quite appropriately published in the Ladies Home Journal, but now as time goes on she becomes a tragic poet, and everything that doesn’t fit into that is kind of ignored. I particularly disliked Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters for presenting her as this continually flawed, passionate, disheveled, and disorganized person whom he always had to take care of. Of course he loved her; he loved his animal wife, like she’s the animal and he’s the rational person. He’s doing the same thing to her. Obviously she was just as smart as he was, if not smarter. She was typing his poems. She was critiquing his poems. None of that really gets into his view of her because he’s creating a text; he’s creating, actually, a stereotype of her. He’s making her into this figure in his cosmology. That just happens to everyone. If you don’t fit into that, I think you actually fade away and don’t exist anymore. I think if you can’t be perceived as having an essence, like Marilyn Monroe.... If you see a poster of Marilyn Monroe, it’s always her as she was when she was 26 in Gentleman Prefer Blondes, where she’s dressed in a gown and has severe platinum hair. She played many roles in movies, and most of them are better than that role, but they are all forgotten; there’s just the iconic image, as for the young Elvis Presley and Muhammad Ali. Einstein has become this sort of comical person with his hair. Einstein, whom some people I know actually knew, was a very complex person, not a sweet old man at all, but a very manipulative and very driven person who wasn’t a bumbling, old sweet guy that you’d come up and kiss, you know. But America, or maybe it’s the human species, has to perceive people as brand names or logos, and just all the complexity and the things that make us special get lost. I see that sometimes when I see things written about myself, especially if it is a very short paragraph, it will always say the same clichés because it can’t accommodate anything else.
GW: In your book The Faith of a Writer, you mention that “On days when I can’t run, I don’t feel ‘myself’ and whoever the ‘self’ is I do feel, I don’t like nearly so much as the other.” What are the different kinds of “selves” that you perceive yourself as having when you’re writing, or you’re running, or whatever?
JCO: Well, we all have many selves. William James says that we have as many selves as there are people who know us—social selves, etc. My most difficult self that I—well, I wouldn’t say I don’t like because that sounds kind of exaggerated—but, is the person who does the writing. I have to mediate voices in a text, and I’m very particular, and I’m very driven to get the paragraphs just right in the sentences, to the point where I think there’s a loss of efficiency, and I’m taking much longer to do something than I think I should be taking. It takes a really, really long time to do certain things that I don’t feel should be taking that long. In contrast to that, I really love to teach, and I love my students. I’ve always been teaching, and I find I’m very relaxed. The teaching situation is very pleasant. I wouldn’t say I like myself better. I actually sort of forget about myself. You know, when you’re at home writing you’re just completely obsessed with getting this right, and it’s so exhausting. But with teaching, I just don’t even think about myself at all. And, I think of each class as being just fraught with all sorts of different points that we’re going to make, and revelations, and some jokes, and I allow my writing students to sometimes do a little reading so that they can kind of perform. And other people can say, “Oh, he’s really good,” or, “She’s great.” So, I’m giving an arena to students to excel and display themselves which might not exist if I didn’t do it. And I find that completely easy. Then, I have a social self where I’m with friends and that sort of thing, and I have a family self, and all these different selves. But when I’m all alone—say, I’m running—I feel I’m really there with the thoughts. And the thoughts are not about myself at all, but some sort of problem in a text, and I get very caught up in that. And I feel I get really excellent ideas when I have to keep going, like when I’m running a mile or something, you know, to get that revelation. And I drive myself, and I feel sometimes I’m punishing myself, but it’s worth it if I can get some sort of a revelation. If I could get a small revelation every day, I feel that being exhausted, or having a headache, or whatever, that would be worth it.
JRM: This is sort of on a different path than my other questions, but in your review of Sylvia Plath’s Unabridged Journals you question or consider the ethics of editing such documents and question putting them in the public eye un-edited. I am also thinking here about the recent debate regarding Elizabeth Bishop’s unpublished work as released in Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box. So I wondered if you're concerned about such ethics with regard to your own journals or unpublished work (drafts, juvenilia, etc.)? How do you see these materials contributing to literary criticism?
JCO: There’s an analogous debate about whether Ray Carver’s earlier manuscripts should be published before his editor blue-penciled and edited them so severely. Well, I think these are debatable issues, and I would not come down firmly on one side or the other. When I was writing that review for the New York Times, I was taking the position, which I was quite confident I could do, that Sylvia Plath would be greatly embarrassed, squirming to see some of the stuff in print. If she had wanted it in print she would have published it. Because it’s so banal. She is presented as so juvenile and kind of mean. It isn’t even that well-written. It’s like going into your drawers and finding something that you wrote in seventh grade and taking it out and publishing it in the front page of some newspaper. Oh, no, no—no, I didn’t want them to see that!
It’s a little different with Bishop. Now Bishop's poetry, I read that book. I was in a program with Alice Quinn, and we each chose five poems to talk about. I found beautiful poems and parts of poems which the poet herself had been fussing over for too long. She couldn’t make them perfect, but they were better than perfect. They were actually vivid and alive and very engaging and very interesting. One is called “The Fire.” And if that had been lost, that would be a pity.
So it’s a debatable issue. Sylvia Plath’s journals could be edited very carefully and the best things put in and all the other stuff left out. My journals are like 5,000 pages long, and they’ve been way cut back. A lot of things are left out which I think properly should be left out. All of Thoreau’s journals have been published, thousands of pages, but there are edited versions that are just beautiful works. If you are an editor and a publisher, you have to put together a book that is a product and is finite, and [it] has to have a certain number of pages; what you leave out is just as important as what is put in. In Plath’s case, there was so much that was put in that would diminish or degrade her, so I was kind of identifying with her.
JRM: Can I ask which poems in the Edgar Allan Poe that you found just totally interesting?
JCO: Elizabeth Bishop—did you know you said Edgar Allan Poe?
JRM: Oh, in the Edgar Allan Poe volume! I'm sorry, I should have clarified.
JCO: "The Drunkard”… I'd have to really think, it's been a couple years since I've really done that panel [inaudible]… Those are really excellent poems, but a poem like "The Drunkard" is probably not a poem that Elizabeth Bishop would have been comfortable publishing, but it’s so good.
GW: To return to the question of place and how it might be mystical, I think you mentioned that some of your writing is a way of assuaging homesickness. Could you speak further about that idea?
JCO: I think that one of the motives for writing novels and a certain kind of lyric poetry definitely has to do with homesickness. Some of the greatest poems in our language—much of Irish poetry—is nostalgic, looking back, maybe in time and place, and evoking a lost world. Thomas Hardy’s poems about his deceased wife, whom he didn’t especially like when she was alive—you know, that sort of thing happens, where the poets are always looking back. Novelists are very thrilled sometimes—I know I am—to be evoking a landscape that they have a lot of emotion about, and, so a lot of my writing is going back to places that I have lived in, or have been. And then the writing is just creating this vibrant dream into which you can kind of step. But I’m particularly interested in place and landscape, and I encourage my writing students to explore that, too—the relationship between characters and the landscape, and make the landscape be like a character in the fiction.