On seduction and discipline – David Marchese interviewing Joce Carol Oates in NYT:
‘People are seduced by the beauty of the close-at-hand, and they don’t have the discipline or the predilection or the talent, maybe, to say: “I’m not going to go out tonight. I’m not going to waste my time on Twitter. I’m going to have five hours and work on my novel.”’
(…)
‘But I was saying, “Yes, an agent told me this.” People told me, “Joyce, it is true, but we don’t say it; you shouldn’t say it.” I was offering reasons why I thought it might be true, and one of them is that publishers publish to make money, and it might be that for publishers when they publish a book by a white male who’s not famous like Stephen King, it doesn’t sell as much. But Twitter is so truncated. It can’t get much of an argument out, and everything seems to be, like, “racism” — you just wave a flag. People seem reluctant to understand there are other factors in the world. I think class is much more important. Black people and persons of color who are wealthy, they have much more in common with white people who are wealthy. People don’t seem to want to talk about class in America. I’m from a working-class background, so I see things in terms of class struggle.’
(…)
‘I have a whole category of fun stories. They are usually very macabre and somewhat over the top. I’m working on a novel now, and it is really a fun novel. I look forward to writing it. I hope it doesn’t get canceled. We’re in an era that I would not have predicted, where a novel could be canceled because of its premise. My goodness. Some of our great, outrageous writers like Nabokov would never get published today.’
(…)
‘Sartre said — I don’t even particularly like Sartre — but he did say something very revealing: “Genius is not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.”’
(…)
‘After Cormac McCarthy died, The Times ran an essay saying that his career couldn’t happen today. Did you see that?
Yes, I think I responded to it on Twitter. It was probably true.
Could your career happen today?
Gosh, I don’t know. I really am an experimental writer, and I sort of downplayed that because experimental writing doesn’t sell. But when I look at a novel by Cormac McCarthy like “Child of God,” that is a novel that I love. I thought, Wow, it’s so funny and weird and wonderful, and I don’t think there’s almost any readership for that. I’m not so interested in mainstream writing. Some of my novels seem to be mainstream writing, but if you’re looking closely, you’ll see that it’s sort of meta, like a simulation of something rather than the actual thing. I have to write that way, I think, in order to even have a publisher.’
Read the interview here.
Nabokov would never get published today. Now, being outrageous is not by definition proof of genius or quality, but outrageousness has become suspicious. Nowadays, the book should be a sermon. Several takes on morality have replaced the belief in something like quality.
What’s to do?
This also will pass.
Don’t give in to the temptation of moralizing. Leave the sermons to the pastors. And intelligence is always outrageous, but not all outrageousness is intelligent, the rest is imitation. Sometimes very good imitation.