The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (25 page)

[…]

The cunning of art, which no non-artist can comprehend: that the mere expression of an idea is in itself infinitely pleasing. The idea can be literally any idea at all—“optimistic,” “pessimistic,” serious or playful. Behind
the writing there is, no doubt, an essential
seriousness
. For no one would build a house and not live in it…no one would build a house, at least, without the intention of living in it. Yes, we’re all serious, we’re deadly serious. And yet…. And yet we are strangely free even of our seriousness. The artist is free, I see that so plainly at times, so very plainly…. Lawrence, in expressing certain of his worst fears in
Women in Love
, nevertheless felt pleasure in expressing them; in the act of arranging and organizing and writing. By bringing something totally new into the world we participate in the mystery (one might as well call it that: what other word is adequate) of creation, which is always a pleasure. Afterward, like Lawrence, we may be vaguely alarmed by the nature of what we’ve done. He expressed surprise that
Women in Love
was so “apocalyptic” when he read it through. This reaction is entirely probable, and doesn’t refute the artist’s sincerity. The artist expresses himself by the work as well as through it. But no non-artist could understand this any more than the artist himself, apart from his art for a period of time, can remember why it’s so inescapably true….

[…]

February 24, 1977.
[…] Delight in renewal, and dread of change. The death of the species and the survival—so one might fantasize!—of the individual. “The seeds of knowledge are within us like fire in flint; philosophers deduce them by reason, poets strike them forth by imagination, and they shine more clearly.” But it isn’t knowledge, is it. At any rate it isn’t sanity. What could Descartes have known beyond his wishful constructions, his mocked-up clockwork universe guaranteed by the Church…. The self-sealing universe of the old philosophers. Descartes, Plato, Spinoza. The open universe of Nietzsche. Systolic, one moves between them unable to decide, unable to know. Looking at an Egyptian exhibit in the museum last night, gazing at a mummy in a sadly-battered and once-ornate coffin, Ray said, “It seems pointless, doesn’t it?—so much history,” and I said, “What do you mean by pointless? What does have a point? What value is there in it?” but I didn’t know quite what I meant, and there wasn’t anything Ray could reply. Such speculations, the Buddha shrewdly noted, lead one nowhere. And are not even especially stimulating…. Yes, in our “real” lives material is everything: the flux of
life, the richness and complexity and occasional triviality of the detail; meaning counts for very little. But in art meaning is very important. Structure is always important. The anti-structuralists profit from the traditional sort of art, and would be lost without it as a reference point. I want to be chained so that I might break free in triumph. But if I am already free, if nothing constrains me, if no one cares about the consequences of my freedom—what point is there in my art? (The pointlessness too of the all-for-giving God. A kind of syrup, soupyness, adhesive jellyfish God…. )

Freedom. Bondage. Again the systolic rhythm. Man moves between ennui and anxiety, Schopenhauer said, or so I half-remember him saying. Perhaps he only meant to be droll, like Oscar Wilde? He’s wrong, or at any rate not correct, not entirely. But at certain times of the day fearfully convincing.

[…]

March 4, 1977.
…Deeply enjoiced. Enjuiced.
*
Reading also Simone Weil. And of her. What to think, indeed…? What others see or claim to see as sainthood I see as a tragic delusion not much different from Nathan Vickery’s. He too approached death and wished to die, but did not: his fictional odyssey I take to be more laudable than her real one…. The saint as Hunger Artist. Kafka’s superb perception. But if one refuses to eat it isn’t always because there isn’t adequate or tempting food…it may be simply that one wishes to display one’s will; one wishes to dramatize one’s own victory over the instincts of the flesh. Of course Simone Weil committed suicide. She successfully killed her body. Which she would have interpreted as “triumphing” over it and achieving union with “God.”

Having felt such temptations…having been visited by them…I understand what they are from the inside. And they are terrible. Terrible.

My story of the woman who is threatened by a deranged man: must write it soon. Back in January the incident occurred, nothing since has
transpired, the original story was to have been comic in tone and resolution…but I’ve shifted my interest and now want to deal with the situation frankly and seriously, even tragically…. Marian Kern. Marian the “Mary,” the maternal: Kern the (archaic) footsoldier. The woman who is both womanly and soldierly.
*

Her denied and forgotten sexuality. Her desire to live in the will, in the intellect, in active involvement with others…. (Whom, nevertheless, she flinches from as people, never wishing to be touched.)

The novel brings us back again and again to the earth. To the simplest of emotions. To clear-cut fates. Hence its essential wisdom and health. The gravitational
weight
of Joyce’
s Ulysses
: how it conquers Stephen D.! “Virtuosity,” says Frank Budgen. “Why not?”…A Simone Weil is absolutely banished from such a tumultuous world.

In what was she deluded…? Not initially in religion, but in philosophy. In Absolutes. There are none, of course, except in texts and (temporarily, for conversational purposes) in people’s minds. But she behaved as if there were. As if there must be, should be. One dies on earth in terms of an Absolute elsewhere, like an actor whose suffering is being witnessed and recorded…and if it turns out there is no Absolute, no elsewhere, one never learns; one is simply dead. What is the ethical difference between a person who dies in terms of an Absolute, as Simone Weil did, or one who dies out of spite, stubbornness, a simple wish to die and have the complexities and disappointments of life finished…? People who believe in the divinity of words would have the former a saint, the latter a suicide. But it doesn’t seem to me so clear-cut.

How intellectuals deceive themselves!—with what timid gusto they elevate one of their own to sainthood! It would be hilarious if it were not so dismaying.

March 5, 1977.
[…]…To Detroit Institute of Arts this afternoon. Dreary blankly-gray sky. Bombed-out city. Broken glass, acres of rubble, half-constructed buildings that look abandoned. A kind oasis in Topinka’s and in the museum. Woodcut exhibit. Two Munches, a number of Dürer: sadistical-hysterical “death-on-a-rocking-horse” sort of thing, tiresome after so many centuries. What is the human impulse to imagine others’ suffering…. A true Teutonic streak. But Munch is different; Munch is lovely. Some by Leonard Baskin, not among his most forceful…. The American wing as bad as, or worse, than I recall. Truly wretched stuff. Magazine illustrations; fifth-rate imitations of Impressionists. A man named Metcalf quite pleasing to the eye…. The London Arts Gallery in the Fisher Center: a Campbell’s soup can proudly displayed as though the year were 1960 and not 1977. At the poor little Willis Gallery a display of sculpture…wooden chairs painted in part. Does anyone bother to step inside to investigate such art? Throwaway art. Tired cynicism. Bankruptcy of spirit. And the Fisher Center itself nearly empty. Store after store closed. Will never reopen. Long echoing corridors. Policeman w/closed-circuit television. Ray and I on the marble stairs, climbing hopefully to the art galleries only to find them empty of patrons and empty too of art.

The betrayal of language. The betrayal of the spirit by language as spoken. The betrayal of the Self by one’s extroverted consciousness & by others in their hurried detachment. Our fate; our cross. The broodingness of
Ulysses
. Communion is short-lived, isolation permanent. Joyce’s people inhabit their skins. Rarely touch. Bloom “makes love” to the image of Gerty MacDowell, a knowing unknowingness. Does not
wish
to know. One requires a stage setting…illusion…falsification. Otherwise the erotic persuasion is missing.

[…]

March 10, 1977.
[…] Joyce’s magnificent words. The Ithaca chapter especially. How brilliant, how staggeringly great…. I must write something on
Ulysses
, another essay, merely because I feel at times as if I would burst with the news (news?) of Joyce’s genius. He has done what
he has done, and so superbly. Yet I would wish
Ulysses
cut, in all honesty. The Oxen of the Sun is rather too precious, and certainly too long; as is the Cabman’s shelter episode (as deathly dull and depressing as Joyce had intended it to be, and then some), and Stephen-on-the-beach, the Proteus episode, is too compact, condensed with pointlessly obscure and precious allusions, not adequately imagined in the flesh. The other chapters, however, are uniformly—not
quite
uniformly—well—the other chapters are successful on their own terms, and their terms of course are very high. Ithaca remains my favorite, not perversely. And Penelope of course. Cyclops a very close third. And Gerty MacDowell. Ah, I forgot Nighttown: Nighttown of course. And the first chapter as well…. I can well believe that Joyce was exhausted after having written these chapters and felt a “blank apathy”…one almost feels that way after having read them.

Joyce: my own predilection for the wedding of the “classic” impulses and the “romantic.” Difficult terms but they indicate simply that one imposes the rigors of the “naturalistic” world on one’s imagination, and one’s imagination upon the world. The documentary-as-vision, the vision-as-history. And of course he’s right about all mythical structures and all techniques—they are simply ways of
getting his story told
. Bridges for his troops. And afterward—what does it matter if the bridges are destroyed?

March 13, 1977.
[…] Very happy these days. Why? The absence of the divine that is almost a kind of presence. Even the god “within” can disappear from experience…. Greatly concerned with the world. Caught up in it, carried from hour to hour and day to day, enjoying it immensely, though not much deceived. It is not I who do these things but another, another fulfilling her responsibility, and why not with as much enthusiasm as possible? The burden of teaching so many students in an uncongenial atmosphere simply evaporated a few weeks into the semester and we are all having a good time: all of us, that is, who are passing the course. On the periphery are those who should not be in college, those who have been exploited along the way, given falsely inflated grades; the intellectual life will not have much appeal for
these…. The dailiness of teaching. The day-liness of it. Round and round. Fascinating. The spinning of a wheel. Blurred motion. Hypnotic—unless one has been there before and recognizes the symptoms. All this will pass, I think contentedly, all this is passing, has passed. Which does not in the slightest alter the fundamental worth and pleasure of the experience.

March 15, 1977.
[…] A fairly good day yesterday at the University. Writing workshop lasted longer than usual; we have so much to talk about, not only their writing but other books…Joan Didion, John Cheever, John Gardner, Philip Roth, Simone Weil. This will be the group […] whom I will probably miss the most. Teaching
The Luck of Ginger Coffey
in my first-year class with a fair amount of success:
*
not exhilarating classes, not disappointing. Brief troubling incident with a “writer” from Detroit who has published a book with a vanity press. He had telephoned me for advice a few weeks ago, I talked with him, he wrote a letter and I replied, and yesterday he turned up just before my seminar wanting to talk to me…and I told him I hadn’t time. He was smiling, very courteous, and abruptly changed: became quite angry. Stalked away. He went to the chairman’s office and complained, saying that he and I were equals, really, and that I should have talked with him. When John Sullivan pointed out that I could not accommodate strangers who simply appear in the hall, he said that in a short while he would have to put up with that too—he’d be famous too. Evidently John did not satisfy him (did he want me fired?) because he left his office saying he would go to the Dean.

One more crank in the area, seething with hatred for me. It was amazing how his smile vanished and a look of murderous rage appeared. Is my life to dwindle into a bad television melodrama…? The English Department must be tiring of these people who show up and harass, if not me, the secretaries and Dr. Sullivan.
Meager, too, the literary material one can get from such experiences….

March 20, 1977.
…More snow. Great heaps and banks of it. The rose garden I worked in the other day, gingerly clearing away debris from jonquils’ and tulips’ shoots, is now completely covered. Snowfall all night. Electricity out for a while. Wind. The river slate-colored and choppy and directionless. Immense still immobile eternal winter. Stasis. No time at all passes in this silence.

Working on
Jigsaw
.

Reading
One Hundred Years of Solitude
. And rereading Nathanael West for my undergraduate course.

Query: Does writing in a journal stimulate thoughts of a minute, precise nature that are already in the mind…or does it artificially create those thoughts…. All journal-keepers become sensitive to their own experiences; and it may even be the case that they set down feelings they don’t really have, or would not have apart from the necessity of keeping the journal. Hence the “narcissism” certain diarists are accused of, for instance Anaïs Nin. Yet if the journal is about oneself one must necessarily and inevitably write about that self…though aspects of private life, especially the routines of that life, are not very interesting. Do I care that I am, in fact, working on a new novel…. In all honesty I don’t care. I work, I work in frustration and bewilderment and occasionally with pleasure, but I don’t truly care about the frustration and the bewilderment and the pleasure, all I ultimately care about is the writing itself, the finished product. A writer’s diary, therefore, is a record of a process, a way of getting to an end, and since it is the end that the writer really values, the entire process is a kind of invention…that is, one’s concern for it is an invention. (Yet it interests me to look back to the days when I was writing
The Assassins
, if only to discover that things were as frustrating then, or worse. That does give me a kind of hope. A fraudulent hope?)