Interviews

The following is Edmund White interviewing Joyce Carol Oates about her new book, The Gravedigger's Daughter.

Q: The Gravedigger's Daughter has some connections to your own life, I've been told, or at least to your grandmother's. Could you tell me what those links are?

A: The novel is an imagined journey through the life of my "Jewish" grandmother who had hidden her Jewishness, like most of her family background, from everyone including her husband and son. Because my grandmother Blanche Morgenstern--the name was changed to "Morningstar"--seemed to have no history, she came to seem to others admirably selfless; only decades later did I come to realize that she must have been terribly lonely, bereft of a family background and any ancestral history if even a despairing one. My grandmother was the person who bought me my first typewriter when I was fourteen, and always gave me books as presents; she has come to seem to me, across the decades, as across an abyss whose depths are obscured by picturesque mists, an utterly mysterious woman: the "muse" of much of my writing which has always been for me an exploration of mystery, though not invariably an explanation of it.

Q: This novel seems to me to be about the Holocaust though it takes place entirely in America and mostly in the period after the Second World War. Would you ever consider writing a direct, head-on account of the Holocaust-or do you feel more at home with this indirect approach?

A: No, I would never wish to attempt writing about the Holocaust since there is no point of entry for me. Such an obsessive quest would belong to the descendants of Holocaust sufferers orsurvivors who would likely be haunted by their relatives' memories.

Q: Tignor is a vibrant male who gradually falls apart and becomes dangerously jealous and violent. Another character, glimpsed fleetingly, is a serial killer. What I find remarkable is how well-rounded your representations of these characters are. Do you find it difficult to humanize these monsters?

A: I don't consider these men "monsters" really; they are not so very different from us, but the trajectories of their life-stories take them in ways radically different from our own. Writers are fantasists, not unlike serial killers who are utterly enthralled by the contents of the unconscious which they cannot expel or comprehend but which seems to guide them in their acts. Only when obeying the dictates of the unconscious is the serial killer "really alive"--so too for many artists, only when immersed in art are they "really alive."

Q: Just when it seems you have exploited all the possibilities of your tale you shift into a new, unexpected epistolary mode at the end of the book which provides a shocking and deeply moving coda. You have always struck me as a writer fully in command of her craft but if anything to me it seems that in Blonde and the novels that have followed you have reached new technical heights. Not that you are showing off your skills for their own sake; rather, you seem now to be able to go anywhere at anytime with a resourcefulness that is always surprising.

A: I had always intended the cousins Rebecca and Freida to meet after many years. In fact, it isn't clear if they will meet. The letters at the end of the novel --though written by me--yet have the power to bring tears to my eyes, after repeated readings. Isn't this strange! I think it must be because I feel that I am a kind of Freida, though more benign than this Freida, writing to my grandmother who has been dead for decades....

Q: Do you see any direct relationship between your teaching of fiction at Princeton and your own finesse as a writer? Between your work as a critic and as a novelist?

A: I don't think that there is much connection between my teaching and my writing. The one is so very social and outgoing, the other very solitary and often exhausting.

Q: Though your main female character changes her name several times in the course of the novel, this variability only serves to underline her rock-solid toughness, her amazing ability to endure. Are you an optimist about human nature -or are her survival skills merely idiosyncratic?

A: I don't think that I am particularly optimistic or pessimistic: so much of life is sheer contingency, sheer luck good or bad, one's perspective is inevitably an expression of one's luck good or bad. The optimist is someone to whom the bad things have not yet happened.... (This sounds like an Oscar Wilde aphorism though Oscar would have been more perversely witty in expressing it.)

Q: What are your favorite parts of the book?

A: My favorite parts of THE GRAVEDIGGER's DAUGHTER are the scenes in the gravedigger's miserable little house and in the graveyard, the exchanges between the father, the brothers, and Rebecca. The strange haunting rawness of a certain kind of utterly uncivilizable being like Rebecca's older brother and the furious befuddlement of the father who'd once been a math teacher and must now dig graves in a Christian cemetery; next, the scenes with Tignor. I think that this is a powerful "nostalgia for the depths" (is that the expression?) that evokes distant memories from my childhood, not to be replicated in any way in my present life, and not desirable in any case. I grew up amid men not unlike these, and while the warm and loving women of my childhood are not at all absent from my present life, these men are utterly absent and seem to belong almost to a pre-history.