Sitting with Joyce Carol Oates on a sunny day in Toronto, I am in awe. Like a pre-Raphaelite nymph, she is wide-eyed, dark-haired and fragile. When she speaks, this author of over 70 novels, short stories and essays is transformed. The critic can be Oedipus: we want to kill and make love to the author from whom we necessarily spring. Slavering, essay-producing hordes have a need to get at the truth of a work and to vanquish it. But Oates inspires only affection; she is a delight. Joyce Carol Oates has written of the violent loss of self that signals the start of artistic effort: an appropriation by destruction. At the same time she calls the act of writing an offering of love and gratitude to the world. Twin passions of destruction and commemoration surge through Joyce Carol Oates' oeuvre. Her latest novel (one of three published this year alone) is titled Beasts. It pulsates with an apocalyptic lust triangle in which art, primitivism, academia, and social change are explosively intertwined.
The Strand: Upon hearing that I was meeting you, everyone badgered me to ask how you can possibly be so prolific. How do you structure your day to get so much writing done?
Joyce Carol Oates: Well, I like to run. Walking is frankly boring; there's nothing like running. It's so surpassingly wonderful. I haven't yet hurt my knees; I hope it doesn't happen. Just this morning I was running on the treadmill. You run and you get so happy; infused with energy. So I start thinking about my work when I'm running and I get all kinds of ideas. I try to envision little movies like a little chapter in my head. I might start it five times and work on it. Basically I'm using the running time as meditation. So then when I get to my desk later in the day, it's like I'm remembering rather than making it up. So I probably seem to be prolific because I use this time which anybody could use. It's such a wonderful time to meditate.
S: Do you see actual pictures or more abstract concepts?
JCO: It's not that visual; it's more like I'm trying to envision. The word envision seems to suggest an intellectual act of vision, not a literal vision. It's not like a dream where you see something that's actually vivid. What I'm doing is more like daydreaming. But it's usually very focussed.
S: Is that the same process for fiction and non-fiction?
JCO: I guess it is. My essays are arguments; they are an attempt to persuade somebody about something. So when writing an essay, it's almost as if it's one long sentence. It has that form. Whereas a scene in a novel is like a little play or a scene in a movie. And it moves in different ways. You have two or three characters all moving in their own way, so there's not an imposing structure. It's more like something that's floating on water. The essay is so formal, and in the voice of the author. When I write fiction, I try to not be in myself; I don't want my own voice imposing.
S: Are you yourself removed when creating and running, or is your work grounded in the body?
JCO: When running, I don't feel the body at all. I feel very light and become very happy; it is a joyous sensation.
I also like to dance. It's just the nicest thing you can do. No ballroom dancing. Who wants a partner? Partners can drag you down. This other dancing is just so wonderful. Maybe in another lifetime we were whippets or young horses that liked to run. Whippets are so handsome.
S: You lived in Windsor for a while.
JCO: Yes, it was so lovely. We were there for ten years.
S: Did you find that you needed a physical break from America?
JCO: It was wonderful to have that separation. We loved living in Windsor, driving around in Ontario, around the lake. That stage of my life came to an end when I became a visiting professor at Princeton. I stayed on.
S: Was there a difference in attitudes and psyche, even though Windsor kisses the border?
JCO: At that time, the University of Windsor seemed much more cosmopolitan than Detroit and it may be still. I had students from all over the world. The faculty too was an international mix. Detroit was much more monolithic; it was a Jesuit university. It was the time of the Vietnam war, so it was very good to leave. In the U.S., our foreign policy is characteristically very aggressive and somewhat adversarial. Not all of the U.S. citizens feel that way.
S: It's difficult sometimes to see that from the outside.
JCO: During the Vietnam war it was a lot like that and now there's a lot of dissent about a possible war with Iraq. When we left the U.S. it was a good time to go. Canada seems so much more reasonable, and not so aggressive. I was saying last night that the attitude in America is one of adolescence, like the romance of guns, the romance of being a bully. And Canada doesn't have that romance. You have the exploration of the northern territories or some romance; every country does.
S: It's all so male. Difficult for others to deal with that American energy.
JCO: Exactly. It's completely macho. Living there is an unnerving experience. Gender becomes a prominent concept. Not so much in academia, but in politics there is an enormous resistance to women. We will never have a female president. I could see Canada having a woman prime minister.
S: We did for five minutes.
JCO: Never the U.S. It is a bit depressing. And then we have problems we might trace back through the residue of slavery. So we have the black population that has been stigmatized; they have to fight for their own identity and integrity. We did very well in the 1960s, but now there's so much poverty and ghettos. You wouldn't believe what a problem it is, but it's kept quiet. My first interview was with Mike Tyson in 1986. He was just a young athlete who wasn't yet a champion. It was his first as well. I remember the two of us just kind of looked at each other.
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