Joyce Carol Oates Interview (page: 8 / 9) National Book Award	Print Interview

What are the books that have inspired you the most as an adult?

Joyce Carol Oates: As an adult, there's one book I keep coming back to very often. It's on a shelf right by my desk, and that's The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. Some of her poems are very short. Some are only four lines long, even two lines long. But she has written so many profound poems that I find I can just open the book and read and reread and be carried into another sensibility. I would almost rank Emily Dickinson with Shakespeare. Shakespeare does something very different, of course. His whole agenda is very different. But Emily Dickinson is the great poet of inwardness and spirituality. And I'd mention Shakespeare. Of course, I go back to Shakespeare quite frequently.

What about movies? You mentioned before that you felt some of them really came.

Joyce Carol Oates: The moviemaking art is fascinating. Many of my students are convinced they want to write and direct their own films. I don't discourage them. I think they have to go off to California and find their own destiny somehow, but, I think that making a movie would be very, very difficult and laborious.

I used to know Martin Scorsese, whose work I admire very much. He talked of spending six months editing, working twelve hours a day, in the dark, in a dark room, in a kind of basement situation. Very, very hardworking. No glamour. It's painstaking work to edit. And he creates a movie that people see in the theater, and they have visceral reactions. And they feel it's glamorous and exciting. And I think that's the quintessence of the artistic enterprise.
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We work on things painstakingly and fastidiously. We have all sorts of emotions like despair, frustration, dissatisfaction. Once in a while, we're satisfied for five minutes. Anyway, this product comes out, and then people react to it in ways we can't even anticipate. They think it's glamorous. There's something glamorous about movies? Well, excuse me! Or something glamorous about the theater? I'm involved in the theater, and the only glamour and romance in these fields is in the audience. The audience will feel that thrill of something glamorous.

But actors whom I know, directors, playwrights, those people are working. When an actor's out in public, the actor tends to be working, and is looking forward to going home and relaxing, maybe watching something on television. The glamour is the illusion.

I remember seeing a movie when I was quite young. It was Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront. That was probably the first meritorious film that I had seen. I was able to see that it was rather like a novel. And I was able to see that it had superior acting, though I was quite young. I had seen many movies, but most of them were just Hollywood concoctions.

On the Waterfront though, which has held up over many decades, was truly a work of art. Remarkably made, with a very sound screenplay by Budd Schulberg -- very literary, very intelligent. And Marlon Brando acted in it so brilliantly. That was the first film that truck me as being on a level with a literary work. Before that, I had only seen movies as entertaining.

Beside your very early attempts at writing and observation, what else in your youth prepared you for your career?

Joyce Carol Oates: My whole life. Much of what was absorbed unconsciously, in a kind of osmotic way, from the people around me, has led to the shaping of my writing.

I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking. Who were not self conscious and were not thinking about themselves very much. I observed their lives. Some of their lives were quite difficult. There was a certain measure of violence in my world. I'm not from a middle class world. I'm from another kind of world. And I absorbed things without being conscious of them.
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For instance,

I was taken to boxing matches by my father when I was quite young, probably around ten years old. And so I inhabited, as a spectator, a very masculine world in which there were not very many women. I watched men fight, and boys fight, in a way that must have seemed to me paradigmatic of the world, though I didn't have that vocabulary. I didn't have a feminist position, and I wasn't saying, "Well, this is brutal and this is ugly and this is cruel." I was just looking at it with open eyes and thinking, "This is the way the world is."
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This has all been internalized. I see the world in ways that might be considered somewhat harsh and Darwinistic. At the same time mediated, as in Darwin, by a real idealism and an excitement about the possibilities of the intellect and imagination to deal with this somewhat brutal world.

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