The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

concern for the traditional appearance or “feel” of the work, no matter that (even in With Shuddering Fall , * the most clearly thematic) its propositions are ultimately non-naturalistic, non-realist, perhaps even anti-realist in the Howells sense of that term. † I wanted the tone of naturalism, believing that the improbable, introduced into such a world, would itself be believable and hence not improbable. Hume disclaims miraclesfor if the miraculous should happen—it won’t be miraculous any longer. * This method is fine, I love the feel of naturalism, the clarity of details…infatuation with the physical, sensuous world…I am impatient with people like Beckett who don’t even bother to begin with that world…as James Joyce did, and Proust…writers who are loving, lovers…faithful to the primary world. (And Lawrence also, of course; and Faulkner.) For this I had to accept being classified as a “naturalistic” writer in the tradition of Dreiser (whom I have, alas, never read…and must someday read, before it is too late; I must read Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy ) though it was only the material of “naturalism” that interested me, not the treatment of it. “Gritty realism” and that sort of thing. “Uncompromising.” “Lifts the lid off.” Etc. One does want that—but more, far more. The eternal and the temporal are one. The naturalistic novel and the parable are one…though with some technical difficulty. All is style: all human endeavor is stylistic. “God” is not an entity but a process or an experience or an unfolding, a “God-evolution,” always a movement, a fluidity, a way of perception, a kind of style. Content is nothing, except as it is perceived, conceived, expressed through style. Our subject matter is always style itself. This is obvious, and yet so many artists go berserk when they discover it…and can create only parodistic art after experiencing their revelation. They mock, they defile, they go against content. But one is always “against” content in the sense of knowing himself superior to it (in a way). A pious little short story exclaiming the bliss of conventional married love is as much a creation of words, a process of words, as are Borges’ more abstract inventions, or Joyce’s…. There is nothing inherently better about writing against instead of for (Gass vs. Bellow, for instance), and it is even more sophisticated to be for since that is difficult and will not seem, to shallow people, sophisticated at all. Which is why I want to be “traditional” as long as possible, for if I become abstract, I will have a very difficult time going back again. The challenge is to wed the naturalistic and the symbolic, the realistic and the abstract, the utterly convincing story and the parable…that is, to bring together the psychological and the mythic in one character at all moments…and to wed time and eternity in a seamless whole. So it is rather like walking a tightrope. One does want surface realism, but one wants just as much an allegorical or mythic universality, relating not to surfaces but to the inner experience, the life of the soul itself. Those who do not believe in the “soul” will hate this kind of writing, not knowing what it attempts; those who do not believe in the “world” (because they are very religious, or politically conservative, or neurotic) will detest the naturalism, the feel of “gritty reality” even when it isn’t gritty but is rather attractive. Only those readers who are, somehow, in the center…as I am…who share my vision, however unclear it is…necessarily unclear…will be able to respond to my work without distorting or misreading or rejecting it. This is a risk I take gladly. Though perhaps I have no choice.
     
    Now writing a novel is a process. It is an experience that evolves. The novel is its own experience and its subject is always the evolving of consciousness…that of the reader, the author, the