"Connecting the Unique and Universal" by Joyce Carol Oates

The following article "Connecting the Unique and Universal" by fiction writer Joyce Carol Oates discusses how art or the writing process connects people to one another.

We will discuss the article as it relates to her story in class.

Bibliographic citation:

Joyce Carol Oates. The Writer. Boston: Aug 2009. Tomo 122, No. 8; pág. 24

Article text:

Writers of great fiction draw upon specific experiences to illuminate the experiences of others


"AS A TEACHER of creative writing, as well as a writer, I am very deeply concerned with the phenomenon of creativity - it is one of the most mysterious of all human endeavors, and must ultimately be considered in the light of long-range evolutionary patterns in man. The process of creating art cannot be understood, cannot be explained in rational or scientific terms.

What writers can share with one another, however, is their knowledge of how the process can be stimulated and formalized into art. For, without the conscious and intelligent formalization of one's deepest, instinctive fantasies, no communication at all is possible.

I think that post-Romantic, existentialist attitudes toward art - that it should be spontaneous, that it should reflect a vital but unintellectual reality - are quite erroneous, and present a dangerous temptation to writers who are not certain of themselves. Whenever a writer or philosopher or poet stresses the unconscious, one should remember that it is not his unconscious that is speaking, but his conscious mind.

A celebration of the unique

Fiction and poetry celebrate the unique - what the writer has experienced or thought, personally; without this personal, private experience, the story or poem will be simply manufactured. One really cannot manufacture emotions. But there is no reason to make them up, since everyone has emotions - daydreams - unique and unrepeatable experiences.

The important thing is, do people correctly value themselves? If they are writing, why are they writing? Anyone who is writing to make money is deluding himself; he is writing for other, deeper reasons, reasons he cannot explain. But as long as he believes that he is writing for money or for prestige, he will write in a falsifying way, manufacturing emotions in conformity with emotions he sees in others; and yet his own life is filled with enough drama to constitute any number of novels.

When one writes about his true subject, in contrast to the usual false subject, he really has no difficulty with writing. But he must understand how his unique life is related to a vast universal life: the connection between the two is what he must write about.

Art that communicates

I would be unable to write about thing that did not seem to me both unique and universal - an event I have lived through myself, or experienced intensely through my imagination, and an event that has some meaning, some larger appeal, which may go far beyond the temporal limitations of the subject. If art has any general evolutionary function, it must be to enhance the race, to work somehow toward an essential unity and harmony - survival and growth -and perhaps an integration of the human world with the natural world.

The genesis for my novel Wonderland was a newspaper item I read years ago; it took a very long time for this to work its way through my imagination, and to emerge into consciousness, and the entire process is unknown to me. But the important thing, for me, is that the novel's basis is a real event; that it happened in the world out there and not in my head; that it must be sent back out into the world, and given a definite time and place, and related to current history.

Until this is settled, I am unable to write and would not care to write - my own fantasies, however intriguing, simply don't seem substantial enough for me to formalize into art. I can sometimes marry them to objective events, since we all experience a number of the same things, and this allows me to write quite swiftly and happily. One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it, especially one's triumph over it, to other people.

Critics who chide me for dwelling on unpleasant and even bloody subjects miss the point: Art shows us how to get through and transcend pain, and a close reading of any tragic work (Macbeth comes immediately to mind) will allow the intelligent reader to see how and why the tragedy took place, and how he, personally, need not make these mistakes. The more violent the murders in Macbeth, the more relief one can feel at not having to perform them. Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.

Therefore, one should contemplate his own experiences and see how they illuminate the experiences of others; how they transcend the finite; how they may be of value to other people. Unless there is a real value, the resulting art will be manufactured and one-dimensional.

I firmly believe that mankind is so instinctively, unconsciously involved with the survival and growth of the species that when an individual attempts to live selfishly, he will either fail or will fall into despair. Only when men are connected to larger, universal goals are they really happy- and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity. Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject, you will write.

Connecting on a deeper level

My purpose in writing this essay is to point out, I hope not dogmatically, that the average person is deeper, more talented and more intelligent than he probably believes. If man is faced with a new challenge, he can summon up amazing reservoirs of energy.

Unfortunately, our complex civilization reduces challenges for us or makes them seem insoluble. It is the task of the writer to think his way through all the temporal, private, petty, headline- tormented confusion of his life, and connect with deeper rhythms, either through a conscious exploration of art, history, music, literature, or through personal discipline and meditation. Man is the only creature in possible control of his own destiny, and the most imaginative people will imagine their futures and the future of their society, not through being passive or influenced by current trends, but through a conscious exertion of the mind.

How it all comes together

On a more practical level, I can offer a few general advisory words, which may be too personal for broader application. My ideas come to me partly out of the world (I scan newspapers often) and partly out of my own life. They seem to sink into unconsciousness, sometimes for a long period of time, and are drawn out again by some stray reminder in my daily life (in the case of Wonderland, I came across a number of similar news items - dealing with the murder-suicide tragedy, eerily common in our country, in which a father kills his entire family and then himself).

Then a long process of "dreaming-through" takes place, in which I think about the entire novel - living through various scenes, hearing or inventing dialogue, walking around with my characters in my head for months; only when the process is completed can I begin to write, and I can't hurry the process. I can assign to myself occasional tasks - how to manage a certain scene, how to dramatize the relationship of one character to another - before going to sleep at night, and sometimes by morning I have figured out the problem - sometimes - this might work about half the time. But I never despair or become impatient; it is simply a matter of waiting until the entire book is thought out.

After this strange, uncanny, intuitive stage of a novel is more or less completed in my mind, I write the first draft. I usually write very quickly, chapter by chapter, though I try to alter- nate work on a novel with shorter pieces - stories, articles or reviews - in order to keep some objectivity. I always know exactly how the novel will end, even the wording of the final paragraph. I always know ex- actly the crucial scenes, the dia- logue, even the way my char- acters look, though I may not describe them in that much detail.

But as I write this first draft, I often discover new, small things about my characters, and allow any workable rearrangements in. I wrote a rather long novel titled Do With Me What You Will, which is a complex narrative concentrating on two individuals who happen to be lovers, and who are married and thinking back over the circumstances of their having met and fallen in love; it involved many exasperating problems, but as long as I waited patiently, the narrative always straightened out, and the characters asserted themselves in accordance with their own integrity.

After the first draft is finished, I put it aside temporarily and work on other things. Then, when I feel the time is come for me to really formalize it, I begin the second and final draft - and this part of the process is, strangely enough, the most enjoyable of all. I cut each chapter drastically, seeing as objectively as possible what can be eliminated or shortened, trying to read the work as if from another part of myself, or from the point of view of another person. Though the original, spontaneous part of writing can be very exciting, the real reward for me at least is this third and most conscious, most intellectual organization of material. Man is a problem-solving animal, and the organizing of vast subjects must give pleasure, evidently; nothing seems to me to involve more in-tellectual effort than the organizing of a big novel, and I cannot imagine anything more rewarding.

In all this, I try to keep in mind the delicate relationship between what is unique, perhaps even eccentric, and what is universal - what will, hopefully, transcend the finite nature of newspaper headlines. Only in this relationship is there a true subject, worthy of long hours of work.

[Sidebar]
"Art shows us how to get through and transcend pain," Oates writes.

[Sidebar]
Only when men are connected to larger, universal goals are they really happy.

[Afiliaciones del autor]
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates has received the National Book Award and the PEN/Malomud Award for short fiction. Her latest novel, My Sister, My Love, was inspired by the real-life JonBenet Ramsey tragedy. Dear Husbond, a story collection, came out in March."