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

characters…the world itself. Art that is less than this is no longer interesting to me. In Wonderland I was dictated to by an organizational clarity that forbade expansion…wanting the work to be “perfect” in its form…to possess a structure I had worked out in advance. Its curve is tragic. It was a deliberate tragedy, worked out in detail, structurally meticulous. Much more, but that formal rigor was the mistake; I must have been listening to or reading old-fashioned critics…really can’t remember the genesis of the formal aspect of that novel…though it might have been simply that I saw, in those mid-and late 60’s, that certain American pathways were tragic and those who took them lived out a tragic curve, a tragic destiny. I don’t disagree with that judgment even now. It is quite right. What I might have considered was the ahistorical transcendence of the historical-local…in which (as an artist) I of course believed and lived anyway. I did not, therefore, allow my characters the vision I myself had and used all the time, like a fish in its element, largely unconscious. But the next novel, and all the writing that follows, assumes a vantage point of total transcendence, the liberation from blindness, freedom from snarls, restraints, ignorance, sin, whatever it might be called (mortality?) and begins at that point, with everything accomplished. The blundering of time is over; there is a timeless or ahistorical vision; and the main characters sense but do not know this. This is analogous to our own lives; we sense salvation from blindnessbut do not, and cannot, know it. We are in time and in eternity, at once. We know the one and sense the other. We believe in the one because it is obvious (or is it?) but we must have faith in the other because, apart from a few visionary dreams or odd experiences, there is nothing religious about this certainty; it is a fact of our human psychic life. It is an attribute of the soul. It is our humanity…. So the novel is a dreaming-back and dreaming-forward. Time is broken, fluid, miraculous. The first syllable assumes the last. It is not poetry, not lyric, because it is historical also and deals with human beings in society, as well as in their own heads. There is beauty in creating it though I might know beforehand that critics will be hostile on other grounds or positive on other grounds…seeing as “formless” what is necessarily free, fluid, and determined only by the evolution of the characters’ souls. Death is not a defeat. Not in my world. Death is an event, one event of many. Destinies are worked out, certain limited visions are necessarily jettisoned (as Plath and Berryman and my own suicidal characters and Eugene O’Neill and Hemingway and Faulkner, etc., etc. gave up on their evolutions, having gone too far in the wrong direction), but this is not a defeat: it is a recognition. How clear it is from Anne Sexton’s last poems that she recognized and welcomed her impending death…. An elegant beauty in that gesture, no matter what people say, misreading style for content….
     
    So the end is in the beginning. Time is honored, but not allowed to smother us. We live in time and breathe eternity. Which is why I can read only those who love both time and eternity, not disparaging time (as Eliot did) or eternity (as so many of the “hard-headed cynics” do). Art is a celebration and a furthering of one’s psychic development. It is never totally personal and never impersonal. It is, finally, only itself: a supreme experience.
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    January 20, 1975. A friend teaching James Joyce…commenting on his ambivalence regarding not Joyce but the idea of Joyce…coinciding with my own doubts about a too-finely-constructed novel. At what point does the craftsmanship or genius simply become fussing…? Had one sixteen or even seven years to work on a book, at what pointwould the passion, the book’s initial energy, fade, and a newer, more cold and cunning