The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates Read online

  Dreadful “experimental” work at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The now-obligatory all-white canvases; squares of paper, rather. Nine of them in a row. One painting that covered three walls and was called “Green Focus”: two immense white canvases, one immense white canvas with a small green rectangle at the center. Yet if one objects to such boring, derivative work, he or she is automatically called “reactionary.” I very much dislike [R’s] attempt to push aside my objections to minimal art by saying that there is always a resistance to new work; consider Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh, etc., etc. Certainly that’s true. But this isn’t new work any longer. Duchamp began the playful anti-art business decades ago; the all-white canvases are routine in 1976, as are all-black, all-red, and all-green canvases. Yet the curator at the Institute called the exhibit “A New Decade.”

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  Now that I write everything by hand first, the experience of typing it is almost like a new creation—a new invention. The handwritten versions are sketches, light enough to be only suggestive, not binding. Once something is typed out, however, it acquires a certain annoying permanence.

  Inconceivable to type poems out directly—to write poems on the typewriter. For some reason poems demand handwritten homage.

  The novels of the past, written by hand, must have had a distinctly different flavor in their creators’ imaginations…. There’s something about handwritten work that tends toward the romantic, the lush, the prodigious, the flamboyant; whereas print has a more classical texture, its spirit is economic, spare. The pleasure of writing, these days, for me at least, is the process of transcribing the handwritten work…transforming it into printed, “permanent” work. Though I’m very dependent upon the sketchy notes, a single page of these notes expands to a twenty-page story; and the first draft of All the Good People…was only about four pages, while the second and final draft ran to over 100. Of course there’s much rewriting, revising, erasing, re-imagining involved…. But I don’t think I can write any other way now. At one time, when I first began writing, I wrote out a complete first draft—then went back with a pen and made corrections—and then typed the work out, without changing very much. Now, that would be impossible; I’m incapable of typing the same sentence twice. Everything yearns to be expanded or contracted or switched around or erased. I could no more dutifully type out a ms. without changing every line than I could give a lecture from notes or a prepared speech. Whether this is good or not, whether it’s crippling, or in fact quite provocative, I don’t know. But I feel the urge to revise almost constantly. […]

  August 13, 1976. […] In glancing through earlier pages of this journal, back in 1973, I am troubled by the “inner” quality of the entries. All seems to be swallowed up in subjectivity. In fact, however, my days were so taken up with teaching that I took for granted my intense involvement in the world—one hardly wishes to record the clever remarks of one’s students, in retrospect. So the journal is often misleading. Not misleading exactly—since a journal is meant to be intensely self-analytical, unlike a log—but it doesn’t express my life in its fullness and complexity. But the experience of keeping a journal is paradoxical. Hours of excellent conversation—such as we enjoyed today at lunch—are lost forever, as are stimulating and rewarding classroom sessions. Small observations, however, which one finds for some reason tantalizing and provocative, are worried over and expanded into paragraphs, or into pages—thereby squeezing out references to the extroverted world. Having lived a full, busy day, one doesn’t really wish to repeat it by recording it; one turns with relief to the subjective mode…. So a journal by its very nature is not representative of its author’s life. It represents its author’s thoughts—the process of thinking itself.

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  August 17, 1976.…Planning Son of the Morning. Studying St. Matthew; am rather discouraged by the fundamental silliness of the Christ story: Christ’s intolerance (threatening people with hell who merely don’t listen to his disciples), his predilection for flattery (it’s because Peter says “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” that Peter is given the keys to the kingdom of heaven), his ruthless sense of his own righteousness (“He that is not with me is against me”), his childlike insistence upon the identity of wish and action (“Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart”—etc.—a psychologically invalid theory, to say the least), his general obnoxious zeal, his intemperance re. giving advice (“Take therefore no thought for the morrow…”) that will only cause trouble for others. Again and again whole cities are threatened with destruction, with being “brought down to hell.” The tenderness, the faith-hope-charity, etc., forgiveness of enemies, are really quite subordinate to this dictatorial person, who says at one point that he comes not to destroy but to fulfill, and then says, at another, that he brings not peace but a sword; “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother….” Such is Christ’s unchristliness that one is forced to interpret everything as symbolic, as pointing toward meanings other than the literal. But it seems clear that he really wished his “enemies” (those who don’t care to follow him) in hell, where they would suffer terribly; he lusted after complete dominion over men’s minds.

  I had intended to trace the means by which Nathan becomes the Devil…it hadn’t been my intention to show that Christ isn’t very different from any inspired hypermaniacal bully with a few good ideas that others must drop everything and listen to….

  However….

  And so out of the New Testament, a hodgepodge of unlikely miracle stories not very different in quality from those circulated about hucksters like A. A. Allen and Oral Roberts and The Perfect Master, there grew, slowly and then violently, the great Christian religion: trillions and trillions of people who, encountering Christs in their own lifetime, recognize them as busybodies whose capacity for exciting mobs makes them dangerous…whose possession of an incontestable good idea or two makes them attractive.

  It isn’t that revival preachers are perverting Christ’s message, or Christ: the fact is that they are Christ. With the difference that they would not wish to be crucified. (Though if they were convinced they would rise on the third day, no doubt they would eagerly arrange for their crucifixion.)

  All this is distasteful, and disappointing. It wasn’t my intention—it never has been—to ridicule beliefs that others take seriously. So long as anyone believes anything, that belief should be respected.

  Or should it?

  Jesus of Nazareth suffered what Jung might call an “invasion” from the Unconscious: from that archetype that involves a sense of one’s limitless capacity for being right, for telling others what to do, for saving the world. The Savior complex, in short. Nothing is so dreadful as an invasion from the Unconscious when the ego is poorly formed, or somehow incomplete. Christ’s “crucifixion,” then, may have been a psychosis—a destruction of the integrated personality.

  August 19, 1976.…Yesterday an idyllic day: Ray and I drove to Grosse Pointe for lunch, then walked along the lake and through the residential neighborhoods. If I can persuade myself that I walk so much and observe so much, tirelessly, because I am storing up visual memories for my writing, I feel a little less guilty; but it often seems that the walking is an end in itself, unrelated to anything that might follow. Houses, streets, lawns, buildings, the Grosse Pointe War Memorial (inside a photograph of a man with shrewd, curly eyes and a subtly depraved face—the Grosse Pointe Women’s Republican Club is bringing a former CIA chief to speak on “the importance of security”), gardens in the forms of mandalas, a Catholic church with kitchen linoleum tile and a general air of diminished splendor. Today I went to 10 Mile & Southfield for lunch with Liz and Kay, and beforehand walked through Huntington Woods for an hour, along handsome shady streets. I am rehearsing the opening chapters of Son of the Morning and trying to shake off a sense of defeat, or distaste, or a curious impersonal sorrow evoked by my reading of the
Bible and of certain preachers (midway in the chapter on Oral Roberts I lay the book down, not wanting to continue: I don’t want to learn about such nonsense); in today’s mail came an unfortunate book published by Atheneum, of all places, by Jess Stern, A Matter of Immortality. Such nonsense…. To do this book I shouldn’t have to wade through mud and muck, but at the same time I shouldn’t feel that any area of experience is alien to me; I’ve got to shake my sense of disapproval.

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  August 30, 1976. […] Still reading the Bible. Thinking. Thinking.

  The Bible is clearly a work of beauty marred at times by unspeakable ugliness. Or is it a work of madness illuminated at times by flashes of beauty & insight. It is a human work—one must keep remembering that. But is it? And what sort of humanity? Beauty ugliness madness insight. I am certain about one thing, however—the Bible is mesmerizing.

  Jesus’s personality interests, not because it is “good” but because it is emphatic. His teachings are attractive enough—at least the more famous are—but it’s his obsessive nature, his militant behavior, that interests. In one sense he is the very personification of tragic mystery; he must cause the people around him to become murderers. In another sense he is perfectly simple and explicable. He is a nuisance: nuisances must be eliminated.

  A surprisingly cool day. Quiet. Sunny. Reread “Lamb of Abyssalia” & will send it to Blanche tomorrow, in Maine. Now there is nothing to think of—nothing. Only Son of the Morning which patiently awaits life.

  The other day, a near-attack of tachycardia. And tremendous relief that it didn’t happen.

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  Pathetic & pointless, basic Feminist concerns. The weakness of Weldon’s novels—men imagined as brainless enemies, as Males.* A certain dreadful resentment in feminist literature as well: their hatred of women who have succeeded. Perhaps that is the most frightening thing about the feminists. A wish to reduce everyone to femaleness; a wish for “leaderlessness.” What folly!

  The atmosphere of the Women’s Liberation workshop at MLA some years ago: spite, hatred, jealousy, impatience, silliness. Two angry young women were blaming what they chose to call “capitalist society” for the exploitation of women, and when I remarked that non-capitalist tribal societies were often very cruel to women, and severely limited women’s privileges, they had absolutely nothing to say—nothing at all. (I felt, however, that they disliked me intensely.) I sensed that nearly everyone in the crowded, smoky room was personally unhappy—disappointed—somehow unfortunate. And it’s inevitable that the Establishment should be blamed; perhaps quite logical. The Establishment happens to be Male and so Maleness is blamed. Who would dare to point out the delusions of such thinking? It’s a pity that so many women should be unhappy, that they should feel excluded. What can be done. As soon as one becomes relatively successful, her “sisters” turn against her. The ideal is leaderlessness—which is impossible.

  As men turn against weak men, as if embarrassed and angered by their existence, so do women turn against strong or successful women. But why? Is it inevitable? I don’t want to think so.

  Memories of Syracuse, my first year. Homesick. Waking so very early—the alarm going off at 6:45—everything dark & freezing. The cafeteria a block away in a dormitory. Plodding through the snow, groggy from lack of sleep, always rather insecure re. schoolwork despite my grades. French class at 8 A.M. Hall of Languages, aged & musty & forlorn. My sense of the importance of every class, every hour, every day. A kind of sanctity that high school didn’t have. Ritual. Ceremony. Reading & rereading texts. Extra assignments. Books on reserve. A curious insatiable love of learning…. Working part-time at the library until I had a kind of breakdown, December of my sophomore year. Romance there too: the old, antiquated library, the smell of the books, the loneliness back in the stacks, the absurdly ill-paid, tiring work. The heart condition put an end to part-time work and, for a while, to my sense of myself as an athletic young woman. I’ve never fully regained it. What have I lost?

  September 2, 1976. […] Have begun to think of the academic year imminent. A certain reluctance, as usual; summer was so idyllic. But already the weather seems to have changed. At once. September 1 and it was cool, windy, autumnal. Today is the same. I sit here staring at a blue, blue sky, and wonder where the summer went, shivering, regretting I didn’t do more yet what more could I have done…. The constant moving-on, onward, perpetual motion, a sense at times that the days pass slowly, agreeably slowly, a sense at other times that the film is speeded up and something must be amiss. To be thirty-eight years old seems no different, really, from being eighteen or twenty-eight, and, I suspect, forty-eight. A kind of flickering of self, soul, that remains constant. Which is not to say, of course, that the emotions surrounding the self are constant; they are not.

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  Thinking idly of Son of the Morning. Thinking, brooding, dreaming about Nathan. Haunted by. Fascinated. A little worried.

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  September 14, 1976.…Lovely day. Wrote eighteen pages of Son of the Morning, the first chapter, am fairly satisfied though of course I’ll rewrite much of it. Got up early yesterday and before leaving for school (the first day of classes) wrote the first page, Nathan’s elegiac voice, am pleased with it, it’s the voice of the novel I have been waiting for all these months…. Revision of Ashton Vickery’s chapter should be a pleasure: it’s Ashton rendered by way of Nathan, many years later. An odd novel, not “my” voice at all.

  Wrote from 9:30 until 2:45, my first break, had breakfast then and afterward began preparing Laing—Sanity, Madness and the Family—and Lawrence’s poetry. In between read more of the Bible; am becoming quite mesmerized. Lovely lonely voices like that of Romans. And Isaiah, in part. Finished St. Augustine whom I realize now I truly don’t like; don’t plan to reread. That business with his mother is simply too much—the ridiculous prig! Worrying that he’d been too emotional, having shed a tear or two for the dead woman. What idiocy. And what an obscene influence “Saint” Augustine must have had upon otherwise normal people. To consistently downgrade the human, to attribute every grace and talent and inclination toward goodness only to God…. A sickly attitude, indeed. If Augustine’s mother is a good woman he’s quick to say that of course she wasn’t good in herself but only by way of God, God’s blessing. So everything is offered up to the transcendental and inhuman God, and all that remains human is sinful, “material.” I hate such perverts. I can see why Nietzsche became so unreasonable on the subject.

  Though we may be living in the decline of the West, in the last days of the American Empire, I can’t truthfully say that any other era was superior. Not at all. This is the most open, the most adventurous, the most exciting epoch; and the sanest as well, no matter what critics of our culture say. They’re romantics, they’re deluded. To have lived at any other time in history, particularly as a woman—the thought is atrocious.

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  September 16, 1976.…Woke at six and couldn’t get back to sleep. Dentist’s appointment at nine. Made another appointment to have two wisdom teeth extracted in October; should be an interesting experience. (Do I get a general anesthetic?—what a horror.) A chilly gray featureless wet day, prematurely November.

  Worked on Son of the Morning. Revised first chapter. Am thinking about the next chapter, Elsa’s “annunciation.” The voice of Nathanael is, anyway, a Godsend. The very rhythms and cadences needed to carry the lurid tale through….

  Read in the Bible. Gospels again. Very exciting & chilling. Who knows Christ?—very few people, I’m sure. Very few “religious” people.

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  Began teaching in the summer of 1962. Which makes me rather a veteran now. Nothing is more effortless, more enjoyable. An odd sparkling unpredictable synthesis of the intellectual appetite & the social. One is buoyed along by the students’ presences…by their response to the literature & to the questions I ask or the problems I pose. The only really unpleasant stretch of teaching I had was back at the Univ
ersity of Detroit that final semester, when I was assigned (deliberately, I suppose) classes on five days a week, and the schedule grew tiresome and tiring and I really couldn’t wait for it all to end. Yet there are fond memories of certain students at U.D. Some truly gifted young people.

  A pity, how we melt into one another as time passes. A pity too that the delights of the classroom are always lost, substanceless as smoke; unrecordable. There is no way to communicate to another person the sense of success and even of triumph that a “good” class brings, without sounding vain or foolish. And the days, the weeks, the months, the years are like vapor. Nothing is retained. So teaching is, in a way, the antithesis of art, which is permanent—or, at any rate, as permanent as one might wish. The one falls away, the other remains. Yet both seem, to me, necessary: I would not want one without the other.

  September 18, 1976. […] Looking through the hundred or so prints John C. gave me,* I came to the conclusion that I am awfully thin…though when I look at myself in the mirror it doesn’t seem so; I seem merely normal. How odd it is, to be staring at oneself, photo after photo, scanning them rapidly, looking for something halfway decent—not that, even, but something recognizable. Is this face my face, this body my body, why is it or was it inevitable, must I care about it, must I care for it? I don’t seem to identify much with my appearance. It’s an image, a droll eccentric thing. Some of the snapshots seem unusually good, some unusually bad; none are convincing. The introvert turns away from the extrovert’s highly-charged social world simply because its surfaces bore him, and because he senses that its surfaces are misleading. Aren’t we all here behind our facial masks, somewhere inside our brains, waiting to be discovered…?