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INTERVIEWER
Do you consider yourself religious? Do you feel there is a firm religious basis to your work?
OATES
I wish I knew how to answer this. Having completed a novel that is saturated with what Jung calls the God-experience, I find that I know less than ever about myself and my own beliefs. I have beliefs, of course, like everyone—but I don’t always believe in them. Faith comes and goes. God diffracts into a bewildering plenitude of elements—the environment, love, friends and family, career, profession, “fate,” biochemical harmony or disharmony, whether the sky is slate-gray or a bright mesmerizing blue. These elements then coalesce again into something seemingly unified. But it’s a human predilection, isn’t it?
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| Authors Mentioned |
| John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, John Fowles, Mavis Gallant, Ernest Hemingway, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Katherine Anne Porter, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Gustave Flaubert, Eugène Ionesco, Henry James, Henry James, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Friedrich Nietzsche, Flannery O'Connor, John O'Hara, William Shakespeare, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy |
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