All language subtitles for Masterclass Joyce Carol Oates Teaches the Art of the Short Story - 04.Ideas Exploring Taboo and Darkness

Another very strong motive throughout

history is bearing witness particularly

for people who can't speak for

themselves. writing about people,

telling the stories of people who have

been muted or s silenced or even even

exterminated

and being the one to tell their stories

in some of historic form or as

journalism or as fiction or poetry. I

think that's a very strong

very strong impulse. When I began

writing, the the the field of what women

would write about was really kind of

narrow. And when I first published my

novels, which have a kind of

sociological or political agenda, I was

told by some reviewers, quote, I should

leave the novel of this novel of social

unrest to Norman Mor. actually that was

that was a review that I should leave

this bit this the big novel I should

leave to people like Norman Maylor which

I thought was very funny and I thought

well Norman Mor has his own novels which

he's doing which are very different from

what I'm doing women were expected to

write more about household and domestic

issues and family life which many women

do very beautifully but I wasn't I

wasn't really interested in a domestic

novel but I'd never really let that

bother me.

Always look into the background of one's

family. If you go far enough back to

immigrant

ancestors, you probably find something

happened, something going on that was

pretty violent because lots of things

happened in the 19th century. Today

things are are a little more reported

on. Uh you can't get away with murder

today. In those days you could give a

baby away. Nobody cared. There were no

you didn't have to adopt. I mean nobody

was go there were no social services

didn't exist. There were no social

workers. Lots of things went on that are

not talked about. For instance, I've

written a lot about domestic abuse and

uh wife battering and

uh what we call wife battering didn't

exist. Domestic violence didn't exist.

Date rape didn't exist. None of those

terms that are common today, they didn't

exist because if you were raped by

somebody whom you knew, that wasn't

considered rape. It was probably

consensual. Well, there was no way you

could get a police officer to pay any

slightest attention to anything like

that. Girls were made pregnant who were

very young. It's just considered that

they were consensual or nobody cared. I

mean, basically, if you were 12, 13

years old and you were raped, you might

get married. You have to marry. You're a

rapist. Nobody cared. Um, there would be

nobody would make any arrests. Then

within a family, if a if a father got

drunk and beat his whole family, the

police didn't care. Police would not

come out at all. It sounds a little

fantastic today, but the police would

not cross this threshold. They they

considered domestic violence didn't

exist. The father could beat his

children sometimes pretty badly and it

would be very rare for the police to do

anything. Now, we lived we lived next

door when I was a girl to a family that

was in under the the terror terrorized

by their own father. So, I was friendly

with a girl in this with a family like

that. I've written a lot about this. I

remember my own father going next door

and trying to stop this violence and how

my father almost got killed. This man

had a gun and my father should not

really have done that, but he heard all

the screaming next door. He went over,

he could have died. And I remember this

man who was drunk who shot his own dog

and the dog died in the backyard when I

was like six years old. So I remember

all these things going on and there were

no police officers and nobody would ever

think of calling the police. So when I

write about these subjects, they're

they're really very haunting to me. I'm

thinking about the girl next door who's

my friend and she was almost my age. she

was a year older and she had a family

and some of those people were written to

me who who got out you know and that

girl wrote to me for years and so I'm

sort of still in contact with that world

if one can face the darkest elements in

oneself and things that are secret and

buried I think the the sto the the

there's a great deal of power

I can give you an example example of a

great work of art

that is great because the writer was

writing about a forbidden subject.

It was absolutely taboo. He could not

write about it openly. Oscar Wild in the

picture of Dorian Gay. Now that's a

novel about homosexuality and the

repression of desire.

Oscar Wild was in love with

some young man. He could not express

that in any open way. There were laws

against sodomy that might have actually

resulted in death. He might have he

might have been put to death. So the

novel is a reaction to the taboo. It's a

great novel. It's actually one of the

great novels in English literature of

its time. But it's only I think it's

only powerful because it's so forbidden

and you don't know what's going on. So

Dorian Gay is this very pretty boy. He's

just so beautiful. He's described as

beautiful and every man who sees him

sort of falls in love with him. But but

Oscar Wild doesn't say that. He doesn't

use those words. So Dorian Gray is

seduced by an older man, but

not in those words. We don't really know

what's going on. Then Dorian Gay gets

involved with somebody himself and he

becomes a predator, but he always stays

young. Everybody else gets older. He's

this pretty boy and finally he's like I

don't know he's like 85 90 years old.

He's still this pretty boy. And at the

end of the novel he dies and they see

his poor this picture up in the attic is

this elderly wrinkled

putessescent ciflitic rotted looking

horrible picture. So that's his soul.

The picture of Dorian Gay's soul is all

this rotted

flesh, but the face of Dorian Gay is

still this this boy. So that's that's a

good example of a writer confronting

taboo, but he knew he couldn't write

about it directly. Now, if these men

could have lived o lived open lives and

and didn't have to be um subversive

about their writing, would they have

been as good writers? That's a question.

I would think maybe not particularly in

the case of of um Oscar Wild because

being being

elliptical gives you a lot of power that

being headon and direct would not have.

It's a very interesting paradox. I think

that the most powerful writing often

comes from areas that are

repressed, you know, that one doesn't

want to talk about. But it's so

irresistibly interesting for people who

share that predilction, let's say, or

share certain obsessions that you you

will have almost like a guaranteed

audience of a number of a number of

people. If you write about certain

subjects that are have not been written

about very much because each subject

that's taboo and and hasn't been

discussed or is considered vulgar or

awful or unnatural all those subjects

relate to many people who share in them

but they they have no outlet. So

immediately you'll have a readership

which may be surprising. So people who

publish a memoirs on certain subjects

especially in the past were just

astonished at how many readers they had.

Mary Carr writes about very openly about

her own alcoholism and she writes about

her parents' alcoholism. So her memoir

was called is called her first memor is

called the liars club. That was a

phenomenal bestseller and I don't think

Mary Carr expected that at all. That

kind of openness about drinking and

about being a teenager and having

parents who were drunk and then drinking

herself that hit a that hit a nerve of

of canandor

in women young women that probably

nobody had written about before. In

every area of something that is

considered unspeakable, there are many

people who are waiting to hear about it.

obesity, bulimia, being feeling that

one's body is very ugly or or too too

big or something. All those subjects

have people yearning to share what they

feel, but they have no outlet.

Mainstream literature and conventional

forms of beauty are so dominant. We have

uh the image of like the perfect woman

or girl, the perfect man, the the

physical fitness, mania, a certain

healthy attitude toward life

predominates in our culture. But there

all these other people don't live up to

that and they feel maybe resentful, they

feel intimidated, they feel imperfect.

So all those people are are yearning to

have some a spokesperson. One very

evident example is William Styron wrote

about depression and darkness visible.

That's probably 25 years ago. His memoir

was also an enormous bestseller. I don't

think Bill Styin whom I knew had any

idea that so many people would buy his

book. He felt that he was a failure. He

felt he was suicidal. He couldn't write.

He was depressed. I mean he was so

depressed you know that he managed to

write that memoir but he felt he was a

failure he couldn't write fiction and

yet in writing that memoir he became an

enormous bestseller

and I have a friend Jonathan Santer who

doesn't feel like a failure but he lost

his wife very very abruptly and Jonathan

went into a kind of emotional tail spin

but I suggested to him and maybe other

people did too. But I said, "Why don't

you write about it?" Because there are

no memoirs about by widowers, almost

none. So he did. He wrote uh the the

widowers uh a widowerower's notebook. I

think his book is called a the

widowers's notebook, Jonathan Satloofer.

And that's become another surprise um

bestseller, I think. And Jonathan has

discovered he gives readings and men

come up to him and say that their story

is like his but they they have nobody to

talk to. So tapping on these um

these secret audiences is something that

is the consequence of writing about

taboos.