Re: JCO: RE: Talent vs Experience

Hi, Joy. I would call those crude reality stories "ways not taken" rather
than experiences that JCO would have sampled had she had adequate time to spare.
In other words, I think that the writer makes deliberate life choices, and
perhaps JCO's stories were ways of exploring various options open to her and
discarding ones that may have been tempting but ultimately unacceptable.
For example: let's say I work for a boss who is mean. I fanticize about
how gratifying it would be to cuss him/her out in front of the whole company,
and how everyone would applaud my bold, incisive oratory. That's a pleasant
scenario but not very likely to happen in my situation. So I (A) write a
story about someone like me who cusses out someone like my boss and then has to
take the consequences. (B) Send out resumes and find another job working for a
different boss who is more to my liking.
I haven't got the exact quote in front of me, but James Joyce said
something to the effect that a writer should write a tragedy, not become a
participant in a tragedy.
Cyrano

In a message dated 10/23/2005 9:56:05 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
Cyranomish@aol.com writes:

<< So, are you saying that JCO keeps relying on talent instead of experience?
Although I believe most of the stories reflect the crude reality she hasn't
had
the time to live.

Joy >>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Tone Clusters: The Joyce Carol Oates discussion group

To send a message to the group, email jco@usfca.edu
To subscribe, email majordomo@usfca.edu: subscribe jco
To unsubscribe, email majordomo@usfca.edu: unsubscribe jco

Re: JCO: RE: Talent vs Experience

Hi, Steve, Joy, RF and all. Talent and application are key, no matter what
one's experience happens to be -- the cards one was delt, as JCO has so aptly
phrased it elsewhere, eg: the short story "Four Summers" in THE WHEEL OF LOVE.
("...lives are like cards delt out to them in their innumerable card games.
You pick up the sticky cards, and there it is: there it is. Can't change
anything, all you can do is switch some cards around, stick one in here, one over
here...pretend there is some sense, a secret scheme." from WHEEL OF LOVE,
1970, page 230. Perhaps we could see JCO as an extraordinarily good card-player.
Empathy and imagination have taken JCO and Mailer very far indeed. And
US literature would be poor indeed without their contributions.
It appears to me that JCO works her material every day, whereas Mailer's
writing work is more sporadic -- although he's gained some very broad, unique
experience such as running for mayor of NYC, covering Ali's fight in Africa,
soldiering in the south Pacific during WWII. To me, JCO's relatively
"limited" experience proves that it's possible to build exciting novels and stories
from what may at first glance seem to be "just" ordinary life experience.
"Ordinary" is a word that JCO used a lot to describe herself during the 1970s.
JCO's trips back to 1950s NY are most appealing to me because I come
from roughly the same region and era. I would guess that these memories power
her fiction as a whole, as our formative years power most of what we do decades
later.
Cyrano

<< hi steve!
So, are you saying that JCO keeps relying on talent instead of experience?
Although I believe most of the stories reflect the crude reality she hasn't had
the time to live.

Joy

jandsmerritt <jandsmerritt@earthlink.net> wrote:
Hi Everyone:

I notice that because of Mailer's unfortunate phrasing, we haven't addressed
the underlying question of how far talent (in any artist at all) can go to
make up for lack of experience.

JCO of course has managed to write about an enormous variety of people in an
enormous variety of situations. She does her homework (though I noticed,
when reading "Blonde", the one book I've read by her where I'm familiar with any
of the settings, that she did get occasionally get a few details wrong, but
still she did well for someone who's never lived in L.A.), and that's a big
help, but I think she also proves that empathy and imagination in general can take
you a long way. On the other hand, she certainly goes back to upstate New
York and to the 1950s a lot.

Steve

>>
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Tone Clusters: The Joyce Carol Oates discussion group

To send a message to the group, email jco@usfca.edu
To subscribe, email majordomo@usfca.edu: subscribe jco
To unsubscribe, email majordomo@usfca.edu: unsubscribe jco