SA: I think it’s [Oates biographer] Greg Johnson who reports that you have or had over your desk a quote by Henry James: “We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
JCO: Exactly. “We work in the dark - we do what we can.” That’s absolutely right. But to return to your comment earlier about being classed as a writer, the story that appears in The New Gothic is indeed a gothic story. But I also write very realistic stories. I’ve been a realist for a long, long time - for years I was only writing realism. This was true especially of the novels. And then I started writing more short stories, and these tended to the surreal. For me, writing is a pendulum that goes back and forth between the real and the surreal.
SA: I imagine it helps to keep you intellectually trim, so to speak - varying the workout.
JCO: Yes. For example, a very realistic novel I wrote, What I Lived For [1994], which was some six hundred pages long, was followed by Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque [1994]. Interestingly, Zombie [1995, inspired by the Jeffrey Dahmer case] was kind of in between the two.
SA: And that pendulum swings here in Faithless, doesn’t it?
JCO: Yes, most of the stories are very realistic until you move toward the end of the novel - I mean, the collection. The last story is “In ∗COPLAND∗,” which is a little more surreal, more hallucinatory.
SA: But it’s also highly realistic, despite what you might think of the narrator’s stability or reliability.
JCO: You know something happened to him.
SA: Yes, and if a friend were telling me this story the first thing I’d react to is that he’s telling the story. Whatever happened is kind of secondary to the fact that I’ve got a friend in this extreme state who’s relating something to me that’s pretty profound. But I also want to talk about the larger rubric of Tales of Transgression. I noted your Freudian slip there, referring to Faithless as a novel, because I’ve been doing the same thing. And I have to say I really read it that way - as a novel. I read it through from beginning to end because I noticed it was divided into three parts. So I wasn’t going to skip around, and I found that it really worked - it is like a novel, in that there is, in fact, a central character, Obsession. And Obsession moves from story to story, hopping beds, like the characters in [Arthur Schnitzler’s] La Ronde (which was a play, but never mind).
JCO: Hmm, that’s an interesting idea.
SA: Now, the definitive statement on this technique comes - no surprise - from Joyce Carol Oates, writing in The New York Review of Books last June: “The short story is a minor art form that, in the hands of a very few practitioners, becomes major art. Its effect is rarely isolated or singular, but accumulative; a distinguished story collection is one that is greater than the mere sum of its disparate parts.” And I wager that’s what we have here with Faithless: Tales of Transgression.
JCO: All my books of short stories are basically unified works, and in each I spent a lot of time organizing them. The sequence of the stories is very important to me. In the beginning of a volume I tend to group stories that are much more explicit. Toward the end they tend to be more ambiguous - even surreal. I’ve always done that, in every collection I’ve ever made, from By the North Gate [1963] to Faithless. I have a lot of stories that I’ve never collected.
SA: Because they didn’t fit a rubric?
JCO: I cared about them, but they didn’t quite fit. There were stories that came out of Faithless - stories that were more upbeat or about more normal people. They had to come right out.
SA: It’s extraordinary that you have that kind of luxury - that there’s so much material, and if it doesn’t work it can be used elsewhere. But this actually relates to something you reported, concerning your short story, now a classic [in fact, collected by John Updike in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, 1999], “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” [1967]. This story was based on the case of the “Pied Piper of Tucson,” who seduced and murdered teenage girls in the early 1960s. You wrote that what brought you to that story was the extraordinary action or, rather, inaction of the teenagers involved in this case - they did not inform parents or police that they knew who this dreadful murderer was. But that turned out not to be an element of the story you wrote.
JCO: That’s right, not at all.
SA: But it does reappear almost twenty years later, in the mid 1980s, in the story “Testimony.” Can you tell us a little bit about that process? Did you always have this in the back of your mind - Somehow, I’ve got to use this material - or did it just happen organically?
JCO: No, I think I was overtaken by history because there had been other works of art and films that have dealt with this phenomenon. There’s a movie, River’s Edge [1987], for example.
SA: That’s right, and, actually, there was a movie based on “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” wasn’t there, with Laura Dern and Treat Williams.
JCO: Yes, Smooth Talk [1985], it was called.
SA: What’s your experience generally of seeing your work interpreted by other artists?
JCO: Well, I’ve written a number of plays. And each actor or actress brings something special and different. Directors have different ideas. Some directors are very literal. Some directors are very poetic. Some directors do very imaginative things with music and lighting. For the most part I find it very exciting. And, speaking of Black Water, on Sunday there was a concert at Lincoln Center where selections from the opera Black Water [1997, music by John Duffy] were performed. I wrote the libretto, so to that extent I was a participant in the process, but seeing it and hearing it again in Alice Tully Hall, it was so dramatic! The piano, the soprano - it was just a miraculous transformation.
SA: I want to ask you about teaching. Other writers of your stature have done stints of it, but you’ve had a whole career as a teacher. Obviously it’s not something that you’re obligated to do. It must be something you enjoy. Plus it forces you to get out of the house.
JCO: Absolutely. That’s very important. And, you know, I really like the discoveries that young people make about what talents they have. I identify very much with young writers. I feel much more identification with them than I would with my own professorial self. I think we always feel in some ways an adolescent’s thrill of newness and adventure - it doesn’t matter how old we are. And they really are adolescents. Seeing their discoveries, seeing how they present their own material - I could never give it up.
SA: Do you ever give your students something you’re working on and get their feedback?
JCO: Oh no!
SA: Okay. [Laughs]
JCO: I never talk about my own work with my students. It’s all about their work or other people’s work. It’s not about me. No.
SA: That’s very selfless of you, but I can imagine there are any number of students who would be intrigued, even flattered -
JCO: I would never do that. No, no. I can’t think of anything less … attractive.
SA: As you said that I’m thinking about a working definition of transgression, because the surprise of Faithless is the realization that there are a whole range of transgressive acts, and they can have deep reverberations in the psyche, no matter how minor they may seem to another person. I take it you see sharing your work with your students as transgressive. My view might be, “Oh, what’s the harm?” So how to define transgression? How you, the reader, react to each of these stories is, I think, what they’re all about. Because transgression is everything from revealing too much to or asking too much of your massage therapist, in the case of “Physical,” to actually drawing a bead with a rifle on your ex-wife’s new boyfriend in “The Vigil.” And then there are some genuine murders, the most horrific occurring in “The High School Sweetheart: A Mystery.” So the question that confronts the reader of this collection is, Have I thought deeply or intelligently enough about these matters? About transgression? And, I have to say, that’s
not a very comfortable position to be in.
JCO: I think art itself is transgressive - even mutinous and rebellious. Since our species is basically communal, it is transgressive to stand apart from the community. Even though the artist may love the community and may yearn to be part of it, there’s something in the artistic imagination that is taboo. It seems to be part of the natural restlessness of our species. Some people become scientists because, instinctively, they just don’t believe that the Elephant God created the earth. But then there are many people, I guess the mass of people, who accept the stories that are handed to them. So, to transgress, to write different stories - the consequence of this is that you have to take a fair amount of punishment. I have to accept being criticized, and being reviled, because that’s part of the life I’ve chosen. But at this point in my life - because I’ve been criticized very harshly since I started publishing in the 1960s - I think I’ve gotten to a philosophical position where I can see why I must be criticized.
SA: You know, it occurs to me that your work is doubly transgressive because you know it’s transgressive. And yet you do it anyway - “the madness of art.”
JCO: You do have to make choices, and you have to know why you made them. I remember points in novels I was writing when it would occur to me before I began a certain chapter that if I write this chapter the way it should be written, there goes the novel, in any commercial sense. If I make this choice it’s not going to be a popular success because it’s too dark, it’s too critical; it is - transgressive.
And I thought, Well, I just have to do it.
∗ ∗ ∗
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MANY THANKS TO the editors of the following magazines and anthologies in which the stories in this volume originally appeared, often in slightly different forms.
“Au Sable” in Harper’s
“Ugly” (previously titled “Ugly Girl”) in The Paris Review
“Lover” in Granta
“Summer Sweat” in Playboy
“Questions” in Playboy
“Physical” in Playboy
“Faithless” in The Kenyon Review and in The Best American Mystery Stories 1998 and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 1998
“The Scarf” in Ploughshares
“What Then, My Life?” in Fiction
“Secret, Silent” in Boulevard and in The Best American Mystery Stories 1999
“A Manhattan Romance” in American Short Fiction
“Murder-Two” appeared in Murder for Revenge, edited by Otto Penzler
“The Vigil” in Harper’s
“We Were Worried About You” in Boulevard
“The Stalker” in Press and in Unusual Suspects: An Anthology of Crime Stories, edited by James Grady
“The Vampire” appeared in Murder and Obsession, edited by Otto Penzler
“Tusk” appeared in Irreconcilable Differences, edited by Lia Matera
“The High School Sweetheart: A Mystery” in Playboy
“Death Watch” in Story
“In ∗COPLAND∗” in Boulevard
Books by Joyce Carol Oates
With Shuddering Fall
A Garden of Earthly Delights
Expensive People
them
Wonderland
Do with Me What You Will
The Assassins
Childwold
Son of the Morning
Unholy Loves
Bellefleur
Angel of Light
A Bloodsmoor Romance
Mysteries of Winterthurn
Solstice
Marya: A Life
You Must Remember This
American Appetites
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart
Black Water
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
What I Lived For
Zombie
We Were the Mulvaneys
Man Crazy
My Heart Laid Bare
Broke Heart Blues
Blonde
Faithless
Middle Age: A Romance
Big Mouth & Ugly Girl
I’ll Take You There
The Tattooed Girl
The Faith of a Writer
I am No One You Know
The Falls
Uncensored: Views & (Re)views
Missing Mom
High Lonesome
After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away
On Boxing
Black Girl/White Girl
The Gravedigger’s Daughter
The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates
Wild Nights!
My Sister, My Love
Dear Husband
Little Bird of Heaven
In Rough Country
A Widow’s Story
Sourland
Mudwoman
Patricide
Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You
Black Dahlia & White Rose
The Accursed
Carthage
Lovely, Dark, Deep
The Sacrifice
CREDITS
Jacket photograph by Nan Goldin
Jacket design by Roberto de Vicq
When one does not love too much,
one does not love enough.
—PASCAL
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
FAITHLESS: TALES OF TRANSGRESSION. Copyright © 2001 by the Ontario Review, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-061-74272-9
Joyce Carol Oates asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
“Dark Work: An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates” by Sean Abbott. Copyright © 2001 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
ePub Reader edition v 1. March 2001 ISBN 9780061742729
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Faithless: Tales of Transgression Page 49
