From The Life of the Writer and The Life of the Career

from The Life of the Writer and the Life of the Career: First Principles and “Transformations of Play” Joyce Carol Oates (bio) O Crayola! for John Updike Shall we tell them thanks but why reward us who, as children, filled in time by filling in coloring books? Or shall we lie? O Crayola!—even the taste was good. —Joyce Carol Oates All my life I’ve been fascinated with the mystery of human personality. Who are we?—so diverse, yet, perhaps, beneath diversity, so much akin? Why are we here? And where is here? The mystery of human existence shades into the mystery of physical matter itself and the questions that abide are those of the ancient philosophers: Why is there something and not instead nothing? What is the purpose of consciousness, and of human inquiry, itself? When we begin as writers, of course, it’s out of a fascination with language; with the mysterious sound, music, power of words. The sense of subterranean meanings beneath public discourse. The sense of the unpredictable, the playful and the ungovernable; the inexpressible as it defines itself, through us, in language. As children, we acquire a talismanic power by imitating the speech of our elders; what begins as mimesis evolves into what we realize, one day, glancing about ourselves in wonder, is—what? Life itself? The most seemingly conscious of artists acknowledges his subordination to discovery: . . . In fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, we do not choose how we shall make it but . . . it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature—that is to say, to discover it. —Marcel Proust [End Page 251] What beings in childlike wonder and curiosity becomes, with the passage of time, if we persist in our devotion (or delusion), a “calling”; a “profession.” Almost without knowing what we do, we find ourselves in places we’ve never been, nor even anticipated. We come into contact with worlds, and with people, utterly foreign to us. In doing so, in turn, we become other people; we mature into those adults of the world we’d so admired, in our youth. If we are very fortunate, we participate in a mystical evolution of the human spirit itself; that “enlargement of sympathy” of which George Eliot and D. H. Lawrence spoke in such idealistic terms. But what are the origins of the impulse Wallace Stevens calls the “motive for metaphor?”—the motive to record, transcribe, invent, speculate? The late William Stafford says in a poem So, the world happens twice— once we see it as is; second, it legends itself deep, the way it is. The crucial word here is “legends” with its suggestion of storytelling; a secondary creation over and above the existential experience of the world in which we find ourselves. To experience seems not quite enough for us, we want to know what we’ve experienced; we yearn to analyze it, debate it, even, at times, doubt and refute it. “There is an ancient feud between philosophy and poetry,” Socrates is noted as stating, in Book X of Plato’s Republic, but this is perhaps a way of saying that there is a continuous dissatisfaction in mankind with things as they are said to be; a continuous yearning for the playfulness of the imagination. I suggest several theories of the genesis of art: 1. Art originates in play—in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy; it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release. 2. Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsession, to resist what is; to defy one’s elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one’s generation, as new, novel, ungovernable. Virtually all artists begin as children or as adolescents; in adolescents, the need to break away from the past is as powerful as the drive to reproduce the species. “I have lived some thirty years on this

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