Faithless: Tales of Transgression

  Next week, the official start of summer. I’m optimistic. I refuse to despair. Chop-Chop may return. I’m still young, I think.

  Dark Work

  An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates

  From her study in Princeton, the author spoke by phone with Sean Abbott, a senior editor at HarperCollins, on January 23, 2001.

  SA: Let’s talk first about the title of this collection, Faithless - taken from the story of the same name. One has the sense, reading Faithless, that the title could as easily have been Physical, after another story in the collection. Because your descriptions of people are vivid, tactile, and, in fact, pungent. Of Grandpa Wolpert in “What Then, My Life?”: “…his fingers that smelled of manure poking my ribs and catching in my hair and his laughing breath exploding in my face like rotted apples.” The characters’ physicality extends even to their possessions, notably their cars and their guns. So, one might surmise that you begin with the physical being and take the story from that point. Is that in fact true?

  JCO: Well, it’s an interesting observation. But my writing tends to be the consequence of thinking and dreaming about a subject before I begin to write. Now, when I say dreaming, I don’t mean unconscious dreaming. I mean conscious dreaming. I envision a story in my imagination as if I were seeing a film. I see the story. I see the people and I see what’s happening through their eyes. I guess I would compare it to a dream. But I’m not unconscious. Often this happens while I’m running. I run all the time. I love to run.

  SA: So this is kind of a waking dream.

  JCO: A kind of waking dream that I will. It’s something I can turn on and turn off. I try to work through the whole story in this way more than once. A couple of times I work on it. And if it’s a novel, it takes a really long time to get through it.

  SA: And then the writing begins?

  JCO: When I sit down to actually write, it’s … the aftermath.

  SA: But is there a kind of pre-writing phase - taking notes, say?

  JCO: Yes, I take lots of notes. I take notes in longhand. Then, when I type it, I start to make more formal arrangements - writing for me at that point is mainly about structure and style. The characters come to me already fairly well formed. The whole story is there before I start writing.

  SA: That’s a gift.

  JCO: For me, the challenge is to find the right language, to see how it should be structured. Do I present this in a style that is somewhat ornate, with lots of commas and long sentences? Do I present it in a style that’s quite declarative and simple? What is the pacing? How fast should it go? How slow? I have to make all these decisions before I begin writing. And it makes all the difference in the world. I can’t stress how important it is and yet most people who read never think about it.

  I was looking at a novel of mine from 1969 that’s been reissued by The Modern Library [them]. I have to give a reading from it so I’ve been studying it. And what strikes me about the difference between then and now is that I wrote much longer paragraphs in the past. And the narrative went a little slower. And there was a lot, a lot of dialogue. Long pages - pages and pages of dialogue. Which I don’t think I do now. So I’ve obviously evolved in some direction.

  SA: Your mentioning of your typewriter brings up something I wanted to talk about, because when you said “type” a moment ago, you did mean that, right?

  JCO: That’s right. I don’t use a word processor.

  SA: It’s almost an iconic thing with you, the typewriter, if I may say. I once edited a book [The Writer’s Desk by Jill Krementz] that had a picture of you in it, at your desk, which was essentially bare except for what appear to be elaborate handwritten notes and this very modest electric typewriter. Also, your biographer, Greg Johnson, reports of you: “After receiving the gift of a typewriter at age fourteen, she began consciously training herself, ‘writing novel after novel’ throughout high school and college.” And to this day you’ve managed to avoid the word processor. Is that right?

  JCO: I had a word processor for about two years.

  SA: Aha. What happened?

  JCO: Well, I became too addicted to it. I would work till midnight.

  SA: You know, that is the perception of many people, anyway - given your output.

  JCO: Well, it’s not accurate. I like to read in the evening, but the computer was cutting into my life in terms of the reading I might do. And I’m sitting here in my study in Princeton. I have glass all around me. It’s a beautiful day and the sky is blue and the sun is shining on the snow. The deer are walking around; there are birds. I was not seeing any of that. I was only seeing the computer screen. I became quite obsessed, staring at that little screen with the pulsating green letters - it became something I was doing many, many hours of the day. And I felt that this was probably not good. That it was an addiction.

  SA: Beyond the addiction, did you feel that the computer was affecting your writing, the final product?

  JCO: I don’t know about that, but it’s true that the whole process was taking longer. On the computer, you’re not going to delete what you’ve revised so you keep pushing it forward. So what I was revising was getting longer and longer. I’d have several pages of… something. I’d be working on a paragraph and then I kept doing it over and over again, revising in a way that seemed no longer productive: inserting a sentence here, a sentence there, then taking them all out again. I wrote one novel, American Appetites [1989], with the word processor. And I think it was actually harder to do than it would have been just with a typewriter. I became kind of demented. If James Joyce had had a word processor, he would probably still be working on Finnegans Wake.

  SA: [Laughs] I don’t doubt it! … I’m interested in where our conversation has turned because, as you know, we’re primarily doing this interview for the e-book edition of Faithless. Now, obviously, you’re willing to be part of our great experiment here, but what’s your opinion of e-books, in that they put you back in front of a screen?

  JCO: Well, I don’t think the medium matters that much in terms of reading. I’ve used an e-book. I’ve read parts of Thoreau’s Walden on an e-book.

  SA: Interesting choice.

  JCO: I know - what an irony… The technology is obviously going to improve. I found it a little bulky.

  SA: You’re talking about a handheld device.

  JCO: Yes.

  SA: So were you out in nature, at least?

  JCO: I was actually just reading it in the car.

  SA: Okay. [Chuckles]

  JCO: I would have preferred a traditional book, to be able to underline with a pen and do all the old fashioned things. But I think there will be a time when reading an e-book is pleasant.

  SA: We’re working on it even now… Back to Faithless. Let’s talk about the title story, which happens to be set in the 1920s, although, unfortunately, its theme of spousal abuse could just as easily have made this a contemporary story. And “We Were Worried About You” is set in the 1950s, which feels absolutely right, but how did you decide that? Is the period of the story something that comes in a waking dream, or is it more of a conscious choice, like the style?

  JCO: I like to write stories that start in the past and move up rapidly to the present - that is, someone is looking back at the past and discovering something. A shift in perspective, which the passage of time allows, makes a discovery possible. Such is the case in “Faithless.” As for “We Were Worried About You,” here I could draw upon my own memory. When I go into the past, I see things pretty vividly, and I could see the old cars and the way a road looked before it was paved and I populated the story with people from my own background.

  SA: I think you answered my “waking dream” question when you said “I go into the past,” but this is not at all a nostalgia trip, is it?

  JCO: True. I probably tend to remember more of the bad things.

  SA: Does that require a kind of discipline?

  JCO: Oh, I don’t even think about.

  SA: Another question regarding
the conception of a story: Reading this collection, I’m struck again by how easily you move between male and female narratives. Is this something you’re conscious of at the time you’re writing? More to the point, is it easy? Or does it take more effort to render the male viewpoint?

  JCO: Basically, I just choose a protagonist who seems to best embody the idea of the story. I have never really felt much of a barrier. I’ve always written about men. I think some of my earliest stories were about boys, when I was in high school.

  SA: Since then you’ve written on some profoundly male topics.

  JCO: That’s true. I’ve written about boxers [On Boxing, 1987]. The drama of being a man is something that interests me. It’s different from the drama of being a woman. A boy - or a man - might be told, “Act like a man.” It’s quite a serious injunction. Girls are never told that: “Act like a woman.” Maybe a scold would say, “You’re not being very ladylike.” But nobody really wants to be a lady. That’s kind of dull. But, “Act like a man!”; “Take it like a man!”; “Stand up like a man!” Those are strong imperatives, and I respond to them as a writer.

  SA: Which isn’t to say, in this and other of your books, that the women aren’t highly dramatic. They certainly are.

  JCO: But in a different way.

  SA: That’s true, but there are, in this collection, parallel stories of stalking, for instance - of sexual fury and revenge, enacted most dramatically by a woman in “Lover” and by a man in “The Vigil.” These stories are related in many ways, but it’s especially interesting how in both stories the car becomes an aspect of the fury - a second self, a disguise, a weapon. Speaking of weapons, there are many guns in these stories, too. Many. Suggesting a certain authorial intimacy. So I just have to ask it outright: Have you ever handled or fired a gun?

  JCO: Well, yes. I’m from a gun culture.

  SA: That would be upstate New York.

  JCO: Yes, a rural culture where guns were very common. We lived on a small farm but my father actually worked seven miles away in the city. And that made a big difference. My father was not a hunter, but my uncles were. In November, half the boys would be out of school because they were hunting deer with their fathers and their older brothers. So, yes, in their company I handled and shot rifles.

  SA: By the way, what’s your opinion of gun control? Because, while guns abound in Faithless, there’s not a political agenda in sight.

  JCO: I tend to feel that there should be gun control. But if you’re from this culture you have a different perspective. However, I’m not writing about working class, lower middle class people in “Gunlove.” Most of the people in the story are pretty solid middle to upper middle class, and they have a lot of money. So here I learned to focus on a different kind of gun fascination in America.

  SA: Did this require research?

  JCO: For “Gunlove” I looked up the guns and made sure that they were real.

  SA: How much research do you have to do, generally?

  JCO: It varies widely depending on the work. When I wrote Blonde [2000], my novel that’s based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, I watched her movies and I did much, much more background reading than I ordinarily would have done for a work of fiction. I also went to where Norma Jean Baker lived, Santa Monica and Venice Beach. And I just walked around there, taking it all in. So that’s kind of the extreme - physically being in the place where my character would have been.

  SA: What kind of research was required for, say, My Heart Laid Bare [1998], your novel about confidence men that spans that interesting time in America from the 1880s to the 1930s?

  JCO: I did research into confidence games and what today we would call “white collar criminals.” I think Bill Clinton would have liked some of these people.

  SA: I think he would have been one of these people.

  JCO: [Laughs] Well, that’s a really good point! Bill Clinton is in that great American tradition of the congenial, smiling, charismatic con man. And I say this with some admiration, because he’s so good at it. Certainly I don’t approve of everything he’s done. But Americans love these rogues, whether they’re evangelical preachers or politicians. It’s something about America. We all say, “Here we are! Deceive us! We want to be deceived!”

  SA: Which is, of course, totally in opposition to any good writer’s project. Do you ever feel a sense of mission - that it’s you and a few other writers against these natural tendencies to deceive and be deceived?

  JCO: I think more widespread is hypocrisy, which we see in our leaders and in some people who are supposed to be moral paragons. And, yes, we writers have to examine that. Then there are other kinds of people who are criminals, and they’re deceitful in ways that are very explicit. Here we might observe an absence of hypocrisy, actually. I’m interested in that. I often write about people who are victims of their own violence, and of their own lack of hypocrisy, you could say.

  SA: That brings us to “Deathwatch,” collected in Faithless. Now, I thought I had a pretty well-worked-out understanding of my own views of the death penalty. But “Deathwatch” totally exploded that. I wouldn’t say that I had formed a fixed opinion as to whether there should be a death penalty or not, but I thought I basically understood all of the mechanics involved. And, somehow, they seemed to be less important than abstractions like ethics and justice.

  Then I read these lines in “Deathwatch”: “The ritual of execution proceeded like clockwork, and swiftly. That’s the horror: Once it begins it won’t stop. A living man enters a room from which he will be carried a corpse.” In all my musings on state execution I had never thought about a simple thing like that: Oh, that’s right - they have to remove the body! And suddenly I realized that I hadn’t been thinking through this problem at all. If I had missed that, well, what else was I missing?

  Along these lines, I had an identical experience reading Black Water [1992, based on the 1969 drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne in a car driven by Senator Edward M. Kennedy]. I understood that a young woman had died in an overturned car in the water. But that dumb fact had somehow obscured the essential elements of the case - that is, the mechanics of drowning, in the dark, in an overturned car: mechanics that you examine relentlessly in that book.

  So, to come to the point: are you consciously working to achieve this effect - of raising consciousness, to put it in simplest terms? Or is this something that just happens naturally in the course of writing the work?

  JCO: Well, I tend to write about characters who are having some sort of consciousness-raising experience themselves. They may begin the story with one point of view and then a shift occurs. So I guess their realizing some epiphany or having some moment of insight perhaps does the same for the reader. I’m not consciously thinking of affecting the reader so much as I’m taking a character on a journey that is soul-engaging and dramatic. I find that I discover things that I didn’t know myself. If you’re writing a short story that’s fifteen pages long, when you begin you have a certain mindset and by the end you may have a slightly shifted mindset. As for the reader’s part in this process, I would say that I don’t think about readers at all.

  SA: [Laughs] Oh, dear.

  JCO: I can’t because it’s so abstract, thinking about readers.

  SA: So, then - acknowledging what I said earlier about there being no political agenda in Faithless with regard to guns - would you or would you not consider yourself a political writer? I mean, to the extent that a political writer, if he wants to be successful, has to be laser-focused on the needs, the wishes, the will, of his readers. It sounds like the answer is no.

  JCO: No, I think all writing is political and all writers are political writers to some degree.

  SA: Fair enough, and we’ve heard it said time and again that not writing about politics is a political choice.

  JCO: But, if you write directly about politics, often what you’ve written becomes very dated. It’s no longer as interesting as it might have been if you’d written more elliptically, and really
gotten it down to the facts that matter the most.

  SA: Okay, let me just acknowledge as futile any exercise that tries to place Joyce Carol Oates within a given school of writing. The same holds true for any good writer who also happens to be prolific. But a few years ago [1991], your short story, “Why Don’t You Come Live With Me It’s Time” [1990], was collected in a volume called The New Gothic, edited by Bradford Morrow and Patrick McGrath. And please indulge me as I relate something I read in Borges. In a lecture [“The Thousand and One Nights,” 1977] Borges mentions a Baron von Hammer-Purgstall, an Orientalist who influenced Lane and Burton, translators of The Thousand and One Nights: “[The Baron] speaks of certain men he calls confabulatores nocturni, men of the night who tell stories, men whose profession it is to tell stories during the night.” And I thought, Well - that’s Joyce Carol Oates in a nutshell! You lead us often into a subterranean world. Your tendency is to the dark side, to obsession, to the most extreme feelings a person can have. And these are frightening places.

  JCO: We do inhabit day and night worlds, and during the day we are certain people and at night, in dreams, we can be other people. And the two worlds spill over into each other. If you don’t want to live in a state of denial you have to acknowledge this simple fact. But I wouldn’t say that necessarily or inevitably I’m focusing on the dark side. I do have an artist friend who tells me her main task when she gets up in the morning is to try to recapitulate where she’s just been, in the drama and the potency of the dream life.