The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates (26 page)

The tragic & comic truth of life: that one shares so very little of the great concerns of the day. Political fervor, an awareness of the injustices of the world, hopes for improvement, fears, terror, dread, etc., etc…. evaporate before the ferocious heat of one’s concern for his daily routine life. My country must be important because it belongs to me, Stephen says. Very well: but
is
it important apart from belonging to Stephen? Apart from being transformed in Joyce’s mind? So far as I can judge people seem primarily concerned about their families, their salaries, their “recognition” in the world. If love goes wrong nothing goes right. Isn’t that so? If love goes right other things pop to the surface to irritate and frighten. Salary. Career. Respect. All very dimly narrow, yet very human. One might imagine that the saint or mystic transcends the personal…but perhaps he merely obliterates it, erases it. And then? Naturally the void is enchanting. While acknowledging the very real pleasures of mysticism for the mystic himself I seem to have lost faith, I seem to seriously doubt, the mystic’s connection with or superior awareness of the universe. The worker bitterly upset about his salary vis-à-vis our endlessly inflating economy seems to me no less legitimate, no less admirable, than the “saint” who has simply turned aside from such ostensibly trivial concerns. We
are
all equal. The universe, the human universe at least, is remorselessly democratic.

[…]

March 24, 1977.
…Working on
Jigsaw
. Absolutely enchanted with the development of the characters’ relationships. […] Life not fragmented but multi-faceted. Life in the round. In many dimensions. Living, we are forced to live out one role; give energy to one viewpoint. Which is why art is so seductive. The novelist fleshes out many viewpoints, and these viewpoints grow heads, arms and legs and bodies, take on life, take on life sometimes greedily and brutally…. The possibility of having lived my life without being a writer is one that leaves me nonplussed. Whatever would I have done…? How could I have endured a narrow tunnel-like self-preoccupied (or family-preoccupied) existence, all my intimate feelings channeled into and through what is merely personal…family or career….

[…]

March 29, 1977.
…Working on
Jigsaw
, pressing on to 100 pages. The method would appear to be easier than it really is. When I’m done I will be forced to redo it all. Or take on another novel, one truly organized around images and not around a plot.

Good news: “In the Region of Ice” won an Academy Award last night. People have been telephoning, and my parents sent a telegram. Since Ray and I didn’t bother to watch the broadcast (I assumed anyway I would not win, and the Academy Award ceremony doesn’t interest me) the first we learned of the award was this morning when Gene McN. called to congratulate me.

A lovely warm day though somewhat windy. We went for two walks, morning and afternoon.

Four more teaching days at the University. Tomorrow I begin
The Day of the Locust
, which should interest the students. In my seminar continuing with Joyce. (“Nighttown.” Have been reading about Dada.)

[…]

Dada: the short-lived nature of all that is reaction, all that is
anti
. Hence my own lack of enthusiasm for “the literature of exhaustion” and for most parody.

Doing galleys for “Daisy.”
*
Would like to write more on that subject—the enigmatic relationship between genius in father and madness in daughter. What is willed in one is unwilled in another and totally uncontrolled. The pity of it…. Joyce and Lucia. One’s daytime and nighttime self. What is the connection, after all? We know ourselves so slenderly: a mob inhabits our sleep, dimly remembered. Very little of it is
us
.

10
P.M
. Have been writing for most of the day. Must quit; must do a little reading. Writing is like dancing to my doomed heroine Rhoda: a drug, sweet and irresistible and exhausting.

[…]

April 5, 1977.
[…] Licking about the edge of my vision like gay golden crazy flames are the people of my next novel.
*
Giants, seen from a child’s point of view. The child Crystal is born and observes certain bizarre things…grows to be about six or seven years old…loses her extraordinary powers (a kind of playful clairvoyance, ability to foresee the future)…and the novel ends. It should be immensely enjoyable to write…! Last night I worked on it, sketching the elaborate plot, and decidedly preferred it to
Jigsaw
…which is too cool for my taste, too deliberate.

[…]

April 8, 1977.
[…] A very long day on Wednesday, the last teaching day of the year. The “Literature and Society” class went well, finishing
Day of the Locust
w/a Spenglerian flourish. Then a seminar from two to five on
Ulysses
. Quite exhausting, to put it mildly. I disconcerted some of the students by criticizing Joyce: which one must do, after all, eventually. Is it inevitable that
Ulysses
should have been so fanatically structured, so many things imposed upon the stream of experience that by rights belongs to the characters…? Molly, for instance, is a gorgeous creation and one honors the life in her. But Joyce interferes by introducing, for instance, the animals of the zodiac or the tarot into her soliloquy…cerebral bits that are foreign to her nature. And then one must acknowledge that a closed system in which
everything is accounted for
belongs to pathology more than to health. For the essence of sanity is an ability to tolerate openness, doubt, ambiguity….

[…]

April 11, 1977.
…Working steadily on
Jigsaw
. Enjoying it more than previously. Will have completed it by about. Which will make it my shortest novel: for me, something of an accomplishment.

Two days of extraordinary weather. Easter Sunday in the high seventies and today just as warm, though windy. Sighted several kinglets. Could not see the ruby crowns but assume they are kinglets since they don’t resemble
any warblers likely to come through here. Forsythia blooming everywhere. Daffodils out back. Tulips slower, not yet blossoming. Hyacinth very pale, sluggish, slow. A lovely, enchanting time of year…yet only three days ago it was so cold we could barely enjoy our walk.

[…]

Thinking of my next novel, taking notes.
Bellefleur
. A handsome family name which might function as a good title.
Bellefleur
. Radiating out around the baby Crystal Bellefleur who possesses “clairvoyant” powers that gradually (or abruptly?) wane. The novel can end when she’s about six or seven though the time-span of the novel can be more than seven years—can encompass a century if I go about it adroitly enough.

Bellefleur
: a child’s-eye vision of the universe. Giants as parents & relatives. Their activities gigantic, exaggerated, florid, dramatic. I want a tornado, a hurricane & flood…several violent love affairs…feuds, duels, deaths…resurrections…the motif of the airplane (my father’s flying & his taking me up)…which crashes at the very end of the novel into the ancestral home. And releases Crystal from her “powers” as she and her brother Brom and her sister drive away into adulthood…leaving the willful Leah behind…. I envision all sorts of garish things. But an essential buoyancy, so that a violent episode will be followed by a heartier one and death will come to seem not morbid but merely an event in a long complex story. What triggered this was strangely enough the idea of a garden
wall
and a child playing in the garden. But I think in the final version there won’t be a wall…though there might be…the main idea is that to a child the world is enchanted, a magical place. Parents and other adults are giants with remarkable powers. And the child himself is “powerful” in ways not understood…. A voluptuous novel crammed with people and events, quite antithetical to the rigorous structure of
Jigsaw
and its “cool” air. But
Jigsaw
too is likable. Is a pleasure to work with. I don’t want it overcome and swept aside by
Bellefleur
…which is already straining at the gates, wanting to flood my imagination with its oversized people and its improbable adventures…. Telling
stories
. Read part of the
Decameron
the other day and wonder why the telling of stories as such has never appealed to me. The penetra
tion of character is fascinating, of course, but storytelling too can be fascinating if I go about it lightly enough…refusing to get snarled in probabilities…maintaining freedom at all times. And who has written a long dense novel with a child at its center who does not age though everyone else ages…. To do justice to a child’s magical vision of the world: a challenge indeed.

April 12, 1977.
…Lovely warm day; like summer. Went for a long walk. Reread
Unholy Loves
. (By deliberately withholding a “dramatic” conclusion I weaken the narrative. It
could
end otherwise: both Brigit and Alexis are emotional, volatile people. Yet it seems to me the weak, tentative, hesitant conclusion is the most satisfactory one…. )

Hair cut—much too short. The woman asked me if I was still in school, which should have alerted me: she thought I was much younger than I am. Now I have an ideal haircut for a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old. Unfortunately I will be thirty-nine in two months.

More ideas for
Bellefleur
. Obviously this novel will write itself once it begins; and it will probably be far too long. I don’t care.
Jigsaw
is too restrained a performance for me, it omits far too much.

Reading magazines at the library—
Ms.
,
Redbook
,
Time
,
Newsweek
. Struck by the banality, the tedious pseudo-profundities; the unoriginal ideas stridently expressed. (Where once I was sympathetic with “feminism” I find it all very tiresome now […]. What has happened to the freshness of the Movement…. Two or three or four “ideas” expressed again and again in different form. That men “colonize” women, that men are imperialists, etc., etc., the dull dead-end of polemics, of insensitive people incapable of registering nuances of feeling and thought…. I had better keep my distance from [the ideologues]: they see only black and white.)

Pheasant in the backyard this morning. Curious sound it made. Many birds—unidentifiable warblers. A few days ago a blizzard, and now summer. Must be difficult for the body to adjust.

[…] Possibility of my going to Princeton for 1978–79. Awfully far in the future. It would be ideal, though: a lovely town, stimulating people, proximity to New York.

The back lawn flooded with sunlight & forsythia. River quite placid. Faint blue sky, summery winds, an air of unearned paradise.

Am I as lazy as I feel myself to be…. Wasted today, practically. Mind idling. Tomorrow the chaos of 120 exams, yet I let today slip by without doing much. Dissatisfied with the poems, really
*
…dissatisfied with everything…yet inert, indifferent…. That’s an exaggeration, I suppose. The cessation of conflict brings a kind of benign inertia. I wish I valued the emotions more, as I once did. However…. Bleak, economical, precise, pared-down: humanity only between the lines. That is
Jigsaw
and perhaps its rigors have discouraged me.

[…]

April 26, 1977.
[…] Unless Virginia Woolf weighed a certain amount, she said, she would see visions and hear voices. Which suggests the powerful link between “madness” and one’s chemical equilibrium; and perhaps the link between fasting and the visions of the saints.

Fasting and meditation certainly bring about an alteration of consciousness. No doubt Simone Weil experienced this and attributed it to divine intervention. At a certain point one feels not only euphoria but a curious, uncanny certainty…and a total suspension of what might be called the skeptical inclinations of more ordinary consciousness. When euphoric we are open to the very skies: we can believe almost anything, provided it is outrageous enough. By deliberately limiting her consumption of food Simone Weil followed a time-honored tradition and reaped the questionable benefits of visions, dreams, voices, religious certitude. (Which is not to say that the mystic’s beliefs are necessarily false. They are not
necessarily
anything.)

An image out of the unconscious is always valuable because it belongs to oneself. It may be very important indeed and may partake of a kind of divinity—but there’s no reason to assume that it comes, in fact, from an outside source and that it conveys an objective truth. As euphoria floods the mind speculative ideas crystallize rapidly into dogmatic “truths.” Wishes—for instance, that the universe is governed by love—metamorphose into irrefutable facts. Dreams are “visions” sent from God. Statements told the visionary by other people (parents, priests) metamorphose into the utterances of deities. So inspired, the visionary can talk or write for long periods of time, ecstatically, and his certainty is such that he can overwhelm others’ doubts—temporarily at least. A kind of madness infects everyone. Not necessarily a malevolent madness…but a chimera nonetheless.

One thing
is
certain: the mystic experiences a powerful integration of his own personality. The ego is strengthened, strangely enough, by its being negated or transcended; a kind of solar light shines through, from the Soul…from the powerful area beyond the conscious ego. What is petty and parochial and time-linked fades, what is “eternal” emerges. A neurological and psychological miracle that can be sweeter than anything the outside world has ever offered (with the possible exception of erotic love); and so it is no wonder that the mystic will cling to his vision despite others’ doubts. Thus with Simone Weil. She starved herself, recited the Our Father in Greek over and over and over, turned bitterly aside from the world which had disappointed her, turned aside even from her own physical life as a woman; and was rewarded with “revelations.” Her essay on meditation and beauty is a very fine one. Standard mysticism, if “standard” is a word appropriate in this context; but fine nevertheless. Ah, the art of being so completely and so brilliantly self-deceived!—is sainthood anything else?