When joyce carol oates, the 77-year-old author of more than 100 books, told the New Yorker last year that she considered herself “transparent,” before adding “I’m not sure I have a personality,” the admission felt shocking. We live in a time when the concept of the person has been enshrined, in the monetizing jargon of late capitalism, as “my personal brand”. Postulating its non-existence is a kind of taboo. Especially if you are someone often described as “the America’s foremost woman of letters.”
oates, a five-time pulitzer finalist, might be “very intensely interested in a portrait of america,” but she clearly has nothing to do with the ego-swaggering, personality-driven paradigm of the contemporary celebrity . she seems to belong more to another bygone era, with a pronounced gothic streak coloring much of her fiction, which tends to be populated by powerful men and introverted women who frequently experience sexual embarrassment. in the afterword to his 1994 collection Enchanted: Tales of the Grotesque, he seems to find a human truth within horror: “we should immediately feel, in the presence of the grotesque, that it is both ‘real’ and ‘unreal’, since mental states are real enough (emotions, moods, shifting obsessions, beliefs) though immeasurable. the subjectivity that is the essence of what is human is also the mystery that irrevocably separates us from one another.”
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at her home in rural new jersey, she pours cups of herbal tea and when her bengal cat, cleopatra, sits on my leg, oates says, “I see you’ve got quite a conquest there. she assumes you’re here to meet her.”
I’m here, of course, to talk to oates about her and her work, but “I’m not that interested in myself…” she says. “i remember someone said that elizabeth taylor and richard burton loved to go bar hopping in new york, and the last thing they wanted to talk about was themselves: they were more interested in these bar characters. that’s how I think a lot of writers are. I feel that way. and it is often said of shakespeare that she was transparent and highlights that she had this negative capacity to take an interest in other things.”
Specifically, I am here to tell you about his new novel, The Man Without a Shadow, number 44 under his own name, to accompany his many collections of short stories, essays and plays, his memoirs, and his novels written under pseudonyms. . It is about the relationship between an amnesiac, Elihu Hoopes, and a neuroscientist, Margot Sharpe, for whom Hoopes is both an enduring scientific subject and a lifelong love object. she is a woman who “cannot bear herself but as a vessel of labor.” she is also a person who wonders, “what if I don’t have a ‘persona’? what will I do then?”
oates is clear about the personal parallels. “I identify a lot with Margot.” and not just because of his workaholic tendencies and his doubts about his personality. “I think,” he ventures, “we are continually making up narratives and filling in the blanks and misremembering in ways that reinforce our interpretation of something. so I wanted to write about this relationship between two people involved in different memories.”
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since his memory does not extend beyond 70 seconds, elihu experiences each encounter with margot as if it were his first. Consequently, the novel is written entirely in the present tense, the state in which Eliú lives. in a sense then, her love is literally baseless: how can you form a meaningful connection in little more than a minute? however, there is also something pure in their relationship: each meeting has the wonder of the eternally new.
“The relationship between them is always somewhat unreal,” he says, “but I wonder if many relationships that are based on love and romance aren’t heavily laden with unreality. when you actually live with someone for a period of time, you get to know the person in a very complex and detailed way. but the romantic ideal is very loaded with the possibilities of conditioning people. presenting your best self. say things to the other that will elicit a certain response.”
oates was married for 47 years to raymond j smith, a professor and editor of ontario magazine, which he and oates co-founded in 1974. after he died in 2008 of complications from pneumonia, oates detailed her grief in a acclaimed memoir, a widow’s story. Shortly after, she met and married Charlie Gross, a neuroscientist. Gross has been a particularly enthusiastic reader of the latest novel, which has come about, she says, directly as a consequence of writing a widow’s story and having to deal so rigorously with her own memory. Oates often works on several projects at once, but it was only after finishing the memoir that she was able to return to writing novels and stories. “Writing fiction is hard when real life seems so much more important,” she explains.
however: “I don’t have any anxiety about writing. not really. it’s a pleasure, and our lives are relatively easy compared to people who are really in the world working hard and suffering. art comes much later in civilization, when you’ve dealt with other things like poverty and conflict. People think I write fast, but actually I’m not. I remember saying to myself, ‘Am I still working on this novel?’ It’s such a slow evolution. the point of anxiety is lost in all of that. you can’t be anxious every minute of every day for eight months.”
oates’ extraordinary work ethic (he writes eight hours a day) is such that we now have a virtual sub-genre of literature we might call “where to start with joyce carol oates”. It is a phenomenon ironically mocked in Joyce Carol Oates’ diary, 1973-1982: “The list of my books… is overwhelming. so many books! so many!”
The first was By the North Gate, a collection of short stories published in 1963, but it was her fifth book, Them, a 1969 novel, which earned her a National Book Award and confirmed Oates as an important writer. Blonde, her 2000 fiction about the inner life of Marilyn Monroe, is often considered her best novel (it was nominated for both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award), although many readers first encounter it through the repeated anthology “where are you going, where have you gone? been”, a nuanced story of the rape of a young woman, in which each sentence is tense with something lethal.
And then there’s his review: long, dispassionate, and exhaustive articles for the new york book review in which he reads each author exhaustively. she recalls, for example, “sitting in the dallas airport with all these cormac mccarthy books, literal books, i wasn’t reading on a kindle, and i thought i was dragging all these books, and they’re so depressing! but he’s such a good writer…” This is where I confess that, in this case, I didn’t follow my usual rule of reading a writer’s entire list before an interview. “Well, you can’t…” she murmurs to herself. “maybe that was asking too much of yourself, just in general.”
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the completist jco in this world must be few. “There is a man named Greg Johnson who has written a biography of me,” he says. “and then maybe some other people.”
I wonder if jm coetzee’s job description of a writer like “secretary to the unseen” resonates with her. (Coincidentally, Johnson’s 1999 biography is titled Invisible Writer.) “Obviously I’m creating,” she replies. “coetzee is kind of shy… a secretary is someone who takes notes, but a novelist is strong willed and is creating narrative situations, bringing people together, telling a story. it’s a very stubborn thing, and coetzee is a very stubborn person as an artist. there is will; he should be invisible. no one should really know.”
then I approached the subject of another form of writing. Oates, who has nearly 140,000 followers on Twitter, has become notorious for missives that are mocked or “huh?” collective. when he asked, “everything we hear about isis is puritanical & punitive; is there no celebration & jubilant? Or is the query naive? made actress molly ringwald reply, “okay, who got grandma on drugs?”
Most appalling was a tweet that seemed to confuse violence against women with Islam. “where 99.3% of women report being sexually harassed & rape is an epidemic – egypt – natural to ask: what is the predominant religion? I venture that this was Islamophobic. “Well, some of the reactions are sympathetic…it’s all kinds of politics. but my fundamental focus is the rights of women and girls, and patriarchal religion, no matter what it is, I don’t sympathize with it. I have often confessed on twitter, that I don’t believe in patriarchal religion; It’s wishful thinking to me, so if that’s Islamophobic, I guess it could be true. it’s more like religion phobia, or patriarchal religion phobia. what he had to say was actually much, much longer than could be said in a tweet. but no one forces anyone to tweet, so the backlash you get is…basically, you kind of deserve it. I’ve tweeted other things that I’ve honestly wanted to say, but sometimes people misunderstand.”
adds wearily: “I really don’t care that much. I write something good about the motherland, but a lot of people write back to say ‘oh, we hate the motherland, it’s Islamophobic’. I literally don’t care. I don’t even read them. they’re attacking a tweet, then it’s gone. the fickle memory of Americans is something to be relied on. the literary world is very different, and I am much more serious about the literary world. I write these reviews, which are quite long and nuanced for the New York book review; that’s really like my real life.”
When I thanked him and we both stood up, there was a moment of mutual uncertainty. oates probably wants to go back to work, but the car i still have to call will probably take 20 minutes to arrive. I gesture to a small floral couch by the front door and suggest I wait there. upstairs, I can hear the sound of oates’ satisfied humming receding as she moves over to her desk.
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