Interviews & Essays
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.
Read an Excerpt
The Gravedigger's Daughter Chapter One
Chautauqua Falls, New York
One afternoon in September 1959 a young woman factory worker was walking home on the towpath of the Erie Barge Canal, east of the small city of Chautauqua Falls, when she began to notice that she was being followed, at a distance of about thirty feet, by a man in a panama hat.
A panama hat! And strange light-colored clothes, of a kind not commonly seen in Chautauqua Falls.
The young woman's name was Rebecca Tignor. She was married, her husband's name Tignor was one of which she was terribly vain.
"Tignor."
So in love, and so childish in her vanity, though not a girl any longer, a married woman a mother. Still she uttered "Tignor" a dozen times a day.
Thinking now as she began to walk faster He better not be following me, Tignor won't like it.
To discourage the man in the panama hat from wishing to catch up with her and talk to her as men sometimes, not often but sometimes, did, Rebecca dug the heels of her work shoes into the towpath, gracelessly. She was nerved-up anyway, irritable as a horse tormented by flies.
She'd almost smashed her hand in a press, that day. God damn she'd been distracted!
And now this. This guy! Sent him a mean look over her shoulder, not to be encouraged.
No one she knew?
Didn't look like he belonged here.
In Chautauqua Falls, men followed her sometimes. At least, with their eyes. Most times Rebecca tried not to notice. She'd lived with brothers, she knew "men." She wasn't the shy fearful little-girl type. She was strong, fleshy. Wanting tothink she could take care of herself.
But this afternoon felt different, somehow. One of those wan warm sepia-tinted days. A day to make you feel like crying, Christ knew why.
Not that Rebecca Tignor cried. Never.
And: the towpath was deserted. If she shouted for help . . .
This stretch of towpath she knew like the back of her hand. A forty-minute walk home, little under two miles. Five days a week Rebecca hiked the towpath to Chautauqua Falls, and five days a week she hiked back home. Quick as she could manage in her damn clumsy work shoes.
Sometimes a barge passed her on the canal. Livening things up a little. Exchanging greetings, wisecracks with guys on the barges. Got to know a few of them.
But the canal was empty now, both directions.
God damn she was nervous! Nape of her neck sweating. And inside her clothes, armpits leaking. And her heart beating in that way that hurt like something sharp was caught between her ribs.
"Tignor. Where the hell are you."
She didn't blame him, really. Oh but hell she blamed him.
Tignor had brought her here to live. In late summer 1956. First thing Rebecca read in the Chautauqua Falls newspaper was so nasty she could not believe it: a local man who'd murdered his wife, beat her and threw her into the canal somewhere along this very-same deserted stretch, and threw rocks at her until she drowned. Rocks! It had taken maybe ten minutes, the man told police. He had not boasted but he had not been ashamed, either.
Bitch was tryin to leave me, he said.
Wantin to take my son.
Such a nasty story, Rebecca wished she'd never read it. The worst thing was, every guy who read it, including Niles Tignor, shook his head, made a sniggering noise with his mouth.
Rebecca asked Tignor what the hell that meant: laughing?
"You make your bed, now lay in it."
That's what Tignor said.
Rebecca had a theory, every female in the Chautauqua Valley knew that story, or one like it. What to do if a man throws you into the canal. (Could be the river, too. Same difference.) So when she'd started working in town, hiking the towpath, Rebecca dreamt up a way of saving herself if/when the time came.
Her thoughts were so bright and vivid she'd soon come to imagine it had already happened to her, or almost. Somebody (no face, no name, a guy bigger than she was) shoved her into the muddy-looking water, and she had to struggle to save her life. Right away pry off your left shoe with the toe of your right shoe then the other quick! And then— She'd have only a few seconds, the heavy work shoes would sink her like anvils. Once the shoes were off she'd have a chance at least, tearing at her jacket, getting it off before it was soaked through. Damn work pants would be hard to get off, with a fly front, and buttons, and the legs kind of tight at the thighs, Oh shit she'd have to be swimming, too, in the direction the opposite of her murderer . . .
Christ! Rebecca was beginning to scare herself. This guy behind her, guy in a panama hat, probably it was just coincidence. He wasn't following her only just behind her.
Not deliberate only just accident.
Yet: the bastard had to know she was conscious of him, he was scaring her. A man following a woman, a lonely place like this.
God damn she hated to be followed! Hated any man following her with his eyes, even.
Ma had put the fear of the Lord in her, years ago. You would not want anything to happen to you, Rebecca! A girl by herself, men will follow. Even boys you know, you can't trust.
Even Rebecca's big brother Herschel, Ma had worried he might do something to her. Poor Ma!
Nothing had happened to Rebecca, for all Ma's worrying.
At least, nothing she could remember.
Ma had been wrong about so many damn things . . .
Rebecca smiled to think of that old life of hers when she'd been a girl in Milburn. Not yet a married woman.
The Gravedigger's Daughter. Copyright © by Joyce Oates. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
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