INTRODUCTION
Writing is
the most solitary of arts. The very act of withdrawing from the world
in order
to create a counter-world that is "fictitious"-“metaphorical"-is
so curious, it eludes comprehension. Why do we write? Why do we read?
What can
be the possible motive for metaphor? Why have some of us, writers and
readers
both, made of the "counter-world" a prevailing culture in which,
sometimes to the exclusion of the actual world, we can live? These are
questions I've considered for much of my life, and I've never arrived
at any
answers that seemed to me final, utterly persuasive. It must be enough
to concede,
with Sigmund Freud in his late, melancholy essay Civilization
and Its Discontents, that "beauty has no obvious use;
nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it. Yet civilization
could not do
without it." Each of these essays, written over a period of years,
represents
a distinct facet of writing to me. Obviously, the so-called creative
impulse
begins in childhood, when we are all enthusiastic artists, and so I've
included
several essays about childhood experiences and predilections. Since
writing is
ideally a balance between the private vision and the public world, the
one
passionate and often inchoate, the other formally constructed, quick to
categorize and assess, it's necessary to think or this art as a craft.
Without
craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork. The
majority
of the essays deal with this issue, most explicitly in "Reading as a
Writer: The Artist as Craftsman" which focuses upon several works of
fiction
in analytic detail. Young or beginning writers must be urged to read
widely,
ceaselessly, both classics and contemporaries, for without an immersion
in the
history of the craft, one is doomed to remain an amateur: an individual
for
whom enthusiasm is ninety-nine percent of the creative effort.
Because writing is solitary, and yet an art, we can
"learn" something about it; though fuelled by the unconscious, we can
make ourselves "conscious" and even rather canny-to a degree.
Certainly we can learn from others' mistakes, not only our own. We can
be
inspired by others' inspirations. In the essays "Notes on Failure,"
"Inspiration!" and "The Enigmatic Art of Self-Criticism"
I've suggested a commonality of psychological/aesthetic issues perhaps
unsuspected by the individual writers (Henry James, James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf
among others) who saw themselves, as most of us do, as solitary in
their
efforts. And there is the eerie dislocation of identity that all
writers come
to feel, especially with time: that we both are, and are not, our
writing
selves (" 'Jeo' and I").
When did you know that you
were going
to be a writer? is a question
writers are frequently asked. To me, the very question is a riddle,
unanswerable. My instinct is to shrink from it: the assumption that I
think of
myself as a "writer" in any formally designated, pretentious sense. I
hate the oracular voice, the inflated self-importance of the Seer. Bad
as it is
to encounter it in the world, it's worse to encounter it in oneself!
The spirit of The Faith
of a Writer is meant to be un-dogmatic, provisional. More about the
process
of writing than the uneasy, uncertain
position of being a writer. In my
life as a citizen as in my life as a writer I have never wished to
raise any practice
of mine into a principle for others. Underlying all these essays is my
prevailing sense of wonderment at how the solitary yields to the
communal, if
only, sometimes, posthumously, We begin as loners, and some of us are
in fact congenitally
lonely; if we persevere in our art, and are not discouraged in our
craft, we
may find solace in the mysterious counter-world of literature that
transcends
artificial borders of time, place, language, national identity. Out of
the
solitariness of the individual this culture somehow emerges,
variegated, ever-alluring,
ever-evolving.
March 2003
Joyce Carol Oates