What is curious is that writing, the act of writing, often satisfies theseĭemands. The story of the elusive sacred text has something to do with a childlike notion of omnipotent thoughts, a wish for immortality through language, a command that time stand still. Content yields to form, theme to ''voice.'' But we don't know what voice is. It is one of the enigmas of our craft (so my writer friends agree) that, with the passage of time, how becomes an obsession, rather than what: It becomes increasingly moreĭifficult to say the simplest things.
ONE of the stories I tell myself has to do with the dream of a ''sacred text.'' Perhaps it is a dream, an actual dream: to set down words with such talismanic precision, such painstaking love, that they cannot be altered - that theyĬonstitute a reality of their own, and are not merely referential. If knowing oneself is an alphabet, I seem to be stuck at A, and take solace from the elderly Yeats's remark in a letter: ''Man can embody Reading is an admission of failure, or, at the very most, a record of failed attempts. Each miniature storyĮxerts so powerful an appeal (to the author, that is) that it could, in time, evolve into a novel - for me the divine form, the ultimate artwork, toward which all the arts aspire. Text: Each angle of vision, each voice, yields (by way of that process of fictional abiogenesis all storytellers know) a separate writer-self, an alternative Joyce Carol Oates. The miniature stories I have told myself, by way of analyzing ''myself,'' are not precisely lies but, since each contains so smallĪ fraction of the truth, it is untrue. With the rapt, naive certainty, At last I have it) very little strikes me as useful. Of the 40-odd pages I have written (each, I should confess, The necessary words will not arrange themselves. Stretched upon a grammatical framework, who among us does not appear to make sense? But the story will not cohere. Weeks - I have been tormented by the proposition that if I could set down, in reasonably lucid prose, the story of ''the making of the writer Joyce Carol Oates,'' I might in some rudimentary way be defined, at least
Storytellers may be finite in number but stories appear to be inexhaustible. A love of reading stimulates the wish to write - so that one can read, as a reader, the words one has written.
If I say that I write with the enormous hope of altering the world - and why write without that hope? - I should first say that I write to discover what it is
Like our dreams, the stories we tell are also the stories we are told. One picture yields another one set of words, another set of Stories That Define Me By JOYCE CAROL OATESĮlling stories, I discovered at the age of 3 or 4, is a way of being told stories.
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