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Uncensored:
ContentsPreface Reviews
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PrefaceEssays, reviews, and unclassifiable "prose pieces" have always seemed to me elliptical forms of storytelling. Despite their evident objectivity, the most eloquently rendered aspire to a kind of curious lyricism. Certainly these difficult-to-define forms require the obvious strategies of art: selection of detail, enhancement or emphasis, tone. Where Cynthia Ozick and John Updike, to name two writer-friends who have speculated on the subject, are inclined to rank their non-fiction prose somewhat lower than their fiction ("essays seem a deviation, a diversion: the region of the trivial," says Cynthia Ozick in Art & Ardor; "writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea," says John Updike in Hugging the Shore), I've been inclined to feel that the "voice" of non-fiction, seemingly unmediated, un-invented, is an artful enough variant of fiction's voice, or voices. In the essay or review, the dynamic of storytelling is hidden but not absent. For prose is a kind of music: music creates "mood." What is argued on the surface may be but ripples rising from a deeper, sub-textual urgency. In virtually none of my prose fiction, with the possible exception of the novel I'll Take You There, and in that novel only intermittently, do I allow myself to speak in my "own" voice, but in my non-fiction prose, it is always my "own" voice that speaks. For I think of non-fiction as a conversation among equals on impersonal issues; I am an individual with a high regard for literature addressing an (imagined, hoped-for) audience of individuals like-minded enough to wish to read about literature. Often I'm excited by what I've read, and want to talk about it with others; nearly always, I'm interested and engaged; years ago I discovered that when I feel most combative, disturbed, irritated and upset by another's writing, as in the case (long ago, in my early twenties) of D. H. Lawrence, it's probably a sign that I feel challenged, perhaps threatened, and need to carefully re-read, and re-think. (In the case of Lawrence, years were required.) As a young reviewer it was my practice to review nearly everything offered to me, for the New York Times Book Review (what a succession of editors, over the decades!), the Saturday Review of Literature (does anyone remember this wonderful, so diligently "literary" publication, with its regular contributors Granville Hicks and John Ciardi?), and the Detroit News (one of the few publications for which I wrote, not review-essays, but reviews), but in recent years I decline most offers of books to review. I hope to be as idealistic as a critic as I am, at least to myself, in other regards. My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books "negatively" except in those instances in which the "negative" is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author. (In assembling this collection, I immediately rejected all "negative" reviews on moral grounds, as unworthy of reprint, as, perhaps, they were unworthy of being written. How small-minded we seem to ourselves in retrospect, chiding others! Much better to have passed over such disappointments in silence. Then, as the pile of rejected pieces grew, I began to feel that I was too-primly censoring myself, and eliminating much that might be of interest despite its critical tone. Of the numerous "censored" reviews I retrieved only three, of short story collections by Patricia Highsmith and Richard Yates and a novella by Anita Brookner, all of which have been sufficiently praised elsewhere, in any case.) As our relations with others are essentially ethical encounters, so our relations with books, and with those individuals who have written them, whom perhaps we will never meet, arc ethical encounters. Ohviously, a critic who "likes everything" is a very bland personality hardly to be trusted, but there might be a respectable category of critic who, disliking something, refrains from making public comment on it. In America, do we need to caution anyone against buying a book? Though I've assembled several collections of review-essays over the years, I have never included a single "review" of the kind that most newspapers publish in their cramped "arts" sections. In another lifetime in Detroit, Michigan, 1962 to 1968, I reviewed regularly for the Detroit News, countless brief reviews as ephemeral as the newspaper pages on which they were printed, and of these, seemingly lost in time, one review recently surfaced: of Don DeLillo's first novel, Americana (1971). I include it here not with pride exactly but with extreme relief that, so long ago, I had a reviewer's good sense to lavishly praise a difficult work of fiction by a writer at that time wholly unknown. —Joyce Carol Oates |
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