everyone feels exiled

09:14 | 29-07-2013 | Literature | No Comments

старое, 1978 года, интервью Джой Кэрол Оутс, чудесной:

INTERVIEWER: Do you find emotional stability is necessary in order to write? Or can you get to work whatever your state of mind? Is your mood reflected in what you write? How do you describe that perfect state in which you can write from early morning into the afternoon?

OATES: One must be pitiless about this matter of “mood.” In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function—a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind—then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally I’ve found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been utterly exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes… and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so. Joyce said of the underlying structure of Ulysses—the Odyssean parallel and parody—that he really didn’t care whether it was plausible so long as it served as a bridge to get his “soldiers” across. Once they were across, what does it matter if the bridge collapses? One might say the same thing about the use of one’s self as a means for the writing to get written. Once the soldiers are across the stream…

или вот о поисках — и людях:

In a sense we are all post-Wake writers and it’s Joyce, and only Joyce, who casts a long terrifying shadow… The problem is that virtuoso writing appeals to the intellect and tends to leave one’s emotions untouched. When I read aloud to my students the last few pages of Finnegans Wake, and come to that glorious, and heartbreaking, final section (“But you’re changing, acoolsha, you’re changing from me, I can feel”), I think I’m able to communicate the almost overwhelmingly beautiful emotion behind it, and the experience certainly leaves me shaken, but it would be foolish to think that the average reader, even the average intelligent reader, would be willing to labor at the Wake, through those hundreds of dense pages, in order to attain an emotional and spiritual sense of the work’s wholeness, as well as its genius. Joyce’s Ulysses appeals to me more: That graceful synthesis of the “naturalistic” and the “symbolic” suits my temperament… I try to write books that can be read in one way by a literal-minded reader, and in quite another way by a reader alert to symbolic abbreviation and parodistic elements. And yet, it’s the same book—or nearly. A trompe l’oeil, a work of “as if.”

плюс, небольшая зарисовка.

  

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