A Word on Words; 2314; Joyce Carol Oates

a word on words of program delving into the world of books and there others this week joyce carol oates talks about what i lived for those forward on words mr john singleton the chairman of the freedom forum's first amendment center at vanderbilt university on the single once again welcome toward onwards i guessed joyce carol oates one of america's most noted writers your new novel is a grammy it reached right out and gravity what i live for and it's a story of corky corcoran where did corky corcoran come from or four years i've been wanting to read a novel that would encompass much of what i had what i know about the world in a sudden daily maybe even hourly way morally supported him rather than something that's exciting and corky corcoran is a character who may be considered an amalgam of people whom i've known income paso

he's a very i think representative american male of his time for action items that the average that representational he succumbs out of the site guys well he's a he's a young politician he is a he's a developer we don't we don't get a note too much about about his business life on this very long weekend but we do get to know a lot about the stark as personality and we know that you again i am the story begins at very early in his young life with tragedy with a christmas tragedy in you have to know a family with a young father who died

as score please follow the shot down and now i don't know anyone personally but it is based upon an incident in which a man were sad and the baptists while he was putting on a reef a christmas wreath on his front door and this is an incident that took place some years ago but i guess i have i do know since us the question of the main thing i do i do know someone who had been a friend of my father's who died fairly young and maybe maybe there's a sign of subterranean connection corby is only when we hear that and he hears it until it echoes in his ears throughout his life he was in the window looking down and the car which carried the murders was a

that car was of a vehicle that really served to to get me into the story i mean i wanted to know who killed court each fall or until the very end when i began to find out for shaun his uncle bob this is a really this really isn't a street store but i described his industry which you call it in israel it has a structure mystery now on definitely because there are actually two mysteries that a young black woman kill herself or worse murdered or what is somehow pressured into cutting herself and its oversight of the major or central mystery of in the background it's the father's death and we seem to know who killed him but the circumstances and some consequences of that we understood it i felt that mystery is so much a part of our lives and we never really know fully what goes on her own families so some questions are not

answered people don't talk about certain things and famines so the novels about that had a mistaken or his father's name was tim pat irish catholic corky is jerome to rome corky corcoran of irish catholic family you tell as early on temp that did not die in the senate race there is a roman catholic culture that sort of under girds the story always always room corky himself is the it seems to me like many roman catholic men carry is that monkey called build on his shoulder where ever he goes that you bring us into this

new prologue a scenario in which his father's murder then he is asked again and again whether he can see police on e mail can remember anything we find him know manny gaillard that race over a flex his room roman catholic culture in a meeting and they have a unique in a unique way a maine he knew exactly what he was doing he knew he wanted to do it he knew that by his standards he was going to commit adultery and sand and the

first thing to me fascinating to make that turn his love of christie was able to do something he never in this world could have done and she admitted to her husband she confessed to her husband that she was having an affair and courts he said he was furious after over that i'd like to i'd like to know how you as a writer manage that dynamic but between them mean first all you give us rather graphic depiction of the romance of the encounter and then you lead us from that into this moment in which she just tells him that her husband knows that she loved her husband but she tells them everything you want in fact a cookie overhears a telephone company

sensitive sonar he's very possessive now and many many american and craftsmen throughout history in an amish now this is very possessive and economic conceive of a love relationship especially very a radical in terms of one man and one woman and that kind of secrecy if it's an adulterous relationship you can't even begin to comprehend how she could've told her husband without telling him so that he's in a strange position of the other man knowing more about him and he knows about that husband so immediately as an irish american irish catholic guilt flares up and he's very angry so he stocks are furious over what that's the way ending this relationship knowing it i'm cutting it all goes he doesnt like thinking as a power center i think that he thinks he has the power to do everything he thinks he has the power or quit smoking he thinks he has the power to get off the sauce

he thinks he has the power to control and affect his own destiny and in the map as a matter of fact in almost every aspect of his life except one he's virtually up one being a sex life obviously youth is not really thought of this book and there is a moment in the book when you when he says something like this the irish ill and that is of great britain and where that line come from oh this is the well known line the irish her name's of europe i've heard that many times and quirky says that instead of flippant ways time goes putting a black people he wants these black people to like him so he's saying i know it's like i mean i'm irish charm from irish background and so i know it's like to be discriminated against and a black people just look through human element here

is such an excess of remark you create an individual who as a member of city council has a little bit of power but it is in the sphere of influence of a mayor american as a son who's a congressman corky has a good relationship with the congressman a congressman's wife very good relationship you then you give it make him a man of means you making one who looks upon the athletic loved and the room know to me if i can almost see the oak paneling in that in that in the dining room where where he goes to have a conversation with his financial consultant as a writer do

you see a movie set make it in your book are do you create loan from the midst of your rockefeller from here and from your imagination west was compatible i think it's very interesting how all of us not just the upwardly mobile pursue my cookie carbon that economists have places that means something to us but a symbolic and for some people getting into a certain club whether golf club where athletic club but whenever means so much in terms of personal identity and then there's a routine that comes with that or structure and it's almost like a mythical haven't that the person feels that he or she has arrived there so quirky as anomalies places around the city and some of them are also on cameron's reveals a very much on the latin and i'm not saying that i know them well but man who fills so welcome by certain bartenders and by certain environments in the end

they feel you know it's what it's worth it to have to live a difficult line with all the stress if you can get to one of these places may be once a day that's what he does and more than one all that's right and we go then and part of that syndrome is it's justice when he goes in its good morning ms corcoran how you must court legacy must corporate for me it's as if he doesn't realize that those attendants either in the club natalie club on the bar recognize every it's their job to recognize faces that the parade coming through there and it was jones mrs miller mr martin mr greenbaum immediately after its was to court and bloody as you say for him out a form for many people that identity that personal identity russo uses eagle great great player or asimov and he thinks a little later well he was once hacking on

attendance out and he did the same thing and he took money from tips are now so another part of his nine he knows very well he's very sure it is in a sense he has no illusions that to keep going you have to have some illusions he keeps going for a view he keeps going this weekend going strong this week anonymous it was bob he was again about town i mean he made that he made he had a it was almost like a milk route people he had to say i guess we should bring his stepdaughter into it about now because there is a mystery there is a mystique about her talk about her problems she is an elusive personality so elusive and it's not just a metaphor she is physically loose of amigos in the big breaks into a problem

one point she doesn't later i was hiding in the closet research the whole place for he was worried about it you're worried that your people grow by wanting to write also about the one of the central problems in american culture today which is very uneasy relationship between whites and blacks and the cookies and stepdaughter italian is a young woman of about twenty five or so and she comes every generation has very different ideas about race about what you do with your life about sexuality about women and men very different from an older generation so quirky is that his fascination with his own step daughter she's also very good friends with this young black woman who seems to commit suicide so to find out what really happened to merrily corky also has the final word and stepdaughters and she seems of stolen one i'm gonna years and he's very concerned with her but he really doesn't love her in a he loves everybody i think and a

kind of helpless way he's a tough talking characters very vulgar and he liked to think of himself as quite sardonic but basically he sees with his sweet news always willing to forgive people at one point dump at a crucial point dalia is devil's voice is mechanized and the returns were total message and which she says something like this she didn't commit suicide he doesn't know what that means and he's frightened in a sense by and that's why he finds his way into her apartment and researcher in search of her i'm not clear why she didn't come out cause i didn't

really know was quirky it could have been someone and bow with the mayor and these these politicians who are rather corrupt and since a young woman who committed suicide basically because you're a young woman was involved in a certain corruption and secret doing this but he never really really finds out what's been going on that i think the reader can deduce that money as james hansen most are telling us that they picked up the mayors dave merrily fifty thousand dollars to claim that a political opponent writer and everybody in town is talking about about this this trial is gonna come up and what's gonna happen and what really happened was a rape of course then she dies and it's anna sosa and then tal year when she tells court is not suicide has a real

sense that was not suicide that it was in fact the mayor and maybe a fellow who works for the man hasn't read it so one does in an olive oil briefly in enough for us to think all read my job might've not nearly all but what's the point of it is the reporter mike myers an inquiry here is is that thought is a i'm elusiveness is almost a metaphor for what todd is about xi you keep our away from him until until memorial day the end of the weekend so that the truth really is not revealed until and i take it that that was a device to lead to tension bill unquestioned will in a minute read an mri well i suppose so it's just this kind of

inherent structure of the quotes that from one point you know it's like a pastime it's worth what i lived for and that main characters are really dead is looking back over his whole life and trying to figure now and i've often thought that if we could see ourselves from some perspective some transcendent respect only see the struggle of each day and each hour what a comic chaos that would get through the whole atmosphere know the things a concert anxiety anyone such excitement and whole hour by hour seen from some larger perspective it seems so common you know that we really care so much and yet the quest has to be live than an accord he does love her and annick he he thinks in the end of his life how much you really love that world and i feel that way myself i think of some of the cities that i i lived there in evoking a city like buffalo new york how much you really love the place of your childhood even even ugly place sense that this is a kind of

spiritual dimension to you you give it to an assumed name but real census is buffalo and it's something like buffalo it's not literally about lonely or that close to a gift from decision twenty fifth twenty fourteen book yes i'm sure has another and probably some of those all away because you are neither but do you find that characters do what you envision at the outset they would do good you know tall year was going to be as this mysterious and she turned out to be a mean was it in your mind that that that elusiveness would be part of her identity what's interesting question because it in their respects to the heart of the creative process do we know all what we're going to create and

did mozart no one began writing this symphony how would an order did he somehow intuitive recently the mansion that without knowing you know a preset that knowledge as a form of the conscious brain pan the intuition and the unconscious a set of guiding the now so it's hard to answer the question that's very provocative because i feel that i know my characters perfect when they come out of some netherworld and i use eight identify with them even though this is a nail ends an antithetical to me in many ways haven't identify with him so subtle know what is what he would do in the circumstance but until he's a little leaky on a certain cocktail lounge or driverless car or have a conversation i don't know in a minute sense how he will react let me ask you to just pursue that line for of ramon because he finally comes down to a confrontation with the with the congressman with the

mayor's sons with it and he puts the ultimate question to vic and then worries about having done and did you create that scene before you started only six hundred pages well the central scene in the novel is really the scene with the mother and assists of flashback that takes place when his own eleven years old and his mother comes to take a risk pool three sons and she takes him on a somewhat dream like our nightmarish trips she says that people are after them and you don't know if she pares she paranoid hours there were the justification because her husband bill said it takes away an incentive of three pages long and i spent a night out on top of the world and it's a very strange she's a schizophrenia woman but isn't the real rationality to what she says so that to me was the center of the novel and then on that that's over the buried memory then he hasn't sided caucus

so fascinated by women of course many men are but secondly a man who's had a difficult relationship with his own mother his mother was young man and very beautiful and it follows thirty six when he died i was very young to i feel that we have a certain romance that is intended by our earliest memories are young parents not so much a parent is that as they get older and we get older and woman but to her that our memories which are very dream like and learn about very young parents who are attractive and mysterious to us you can imagine a baby in there and the cradle looking up and seeing these figures and how like deities there and how beautiful and how the hubbub at hearings for them and i think we carry that strange romance with us all to our lives and then how old we are and they were much much older than our parents were when they had us and so quirk is always so

fascinated by women by the feminine because it's a way of getting better that mother from the headlines so most of those killings and end and then take me to the confrontation with a cookie and where he is very accusatory an enemy thereafter wonders if he's made a bad mistake by you a question about what happened what i think many of us iran have felt since the time of watergate and perhaps even before that we just can't believe our leaders we want to believe and we see that they're there in old won some respects they seem to have ideals they may be articulate and yet when they talk to us and i don't mean you know that they're any particular party the democrats and republicans and whatever that their aunts and now telling the two they can say callahan second look and i said dick does with his

and quirky and the lion at one point vix slattery who wants to run for the center says to court game well the truth is somewhere it's so much more complicated i can't tell you just now and this is the voice of say a john kennedy might say sinner and lyndon johnson once said that george bush would say that ronald reagan the clinton ages we know richard nixon did exactly and nixon and nine and nine and president clinton are they all are saying things that that so hard analysis about that frustration at the same time a kind of yearning that you want to believe we always want the bling we eventually were quote i'm very i'm very interested in politics and the whole cultures politicized it's a very it's almost like an erotic some politics in this culture some newspapers are just festooned with their figures these iconic figures of our great leaders on all

going on him up and billboards as they head and arm camus china or in paris russia but we have the man in the media so it's the same sort of thing that's being radiated outward to us all we have here are two mysteries one bidder racketeers kill him but corcoran at the early age of thirty six and court he gets some insights into that rome is often shown very like local sean from think so that a second mystery of course has to do with with mary louise call rate the payment of a crime bringing a politician for the game of a telephone

i'm sure that so it's really rang like a ballad writer of the truth a couple of bell i am i am i must say i wondered at the outset how sick summit of six under the basics of the book sick celebrated in late would hold my attention when i was only going to be taught reading about the memorial day weekend your long weekend live in helmand and i think one reason only is that the dial or so conversational and so real that i don't know how you do it i do not understand how you put yourself in the persona of a male why corky take yourself out of that and put yourself into the puzzle of female like christie or his wife or his stepdaughter bum or to crest politicians i

mean how do you switch gears well is that if a company i i can enhance again i guess that's lamb like the world is a listening ear i guess i listen you have an endless james joyce had a great respect for the speech of so called common people and shakespeare's language of courses elevated employed and people call that shakespeare to have this ability to really listen to people and to hear what they're saying and how they revealed themselves in unanticipated ways i love to hear people talk about and i love that the cadences of natural speech can be very beautiful new arch while part one part and descended partly from how hondurans an irish and english so especially we are federally of peace joyce carol oates author of what i lived

or as ben our guest on a word un were heroes does ben johnson chairman of the freedom forum's first amendment center vanderbilt university this program was produced in the studios of wbez nashville nina