Foer ’99, Oates, discuss writing, Jewish identity

"I remember sitting in class here," Jonathan Safran Foer ’99 said as he sat down with creative writing professor Joyce Carol Oates for an armchair discussion, "Writing Life," in McCosh Hall 50 on Thursday. "It's strange and exciting to be back and on stage."

Foer is the author of "Everything is Illuminated" and "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close." Oates, award-winning author of over 50 novels, was Foer's senior thesis advisor while he was at Princeton.

When Foer started Princeton, he said, he had no intention of becoming a writer until he took Oates' class. Oates took him aside before class started and told him, "I’m really glad you took this class, because I am afan of your writing."

Throughout the lecture, the two compared notes, with often amusing results.

Oates told Foer she admired his writing method, in which he starts writing without knowing the final destination.

"I want to feel like an adventurer, an explorer—without the energy of that freedom I would just run out of steam,” Foer said. “I imagine you have felt this way?"

"No, not really," Oates answered. "Most writers need a destination. Just starting off is riskier."

"Only risky if you're excited about your own potential, which I have never been," Foer said. "I'm excited about exceeding my own potential. That's something art can do. But I have to set myself up so that accidents are possible, fortuity is possible."

Foer's method is to overwrite, he said. He compared this to Jackson Pollock, who would paint enormous swaths of canvas and then walk around them and decide which parts of the canvas deserved to be made into 3 feet by 5 feet paintings.

In reference to Pollock, the two discussed the nature of avant-garde art. Oates showed the audience Foer's most recent book, "Tree of Codes," which Foer put together by doing die-cuts of every page of Bruno Schulz's "The Street of Crocodiles," and thus making an entirely different story.

"I had been wanting to write a book by erasing parts of another book for a long time," Foer said, "and I had been interested in die-cutting for a while."

Oates said, "I was so taken with this book. It's so strange. I admire it. I could never do it."

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"I'm sure you could. You'd never want to do it," Foer joked.

"Well, I would find it so obsessive and bizarre that I'd become deranged," Oates said. "It's like you were moving blindly across the floor pushing a beam with your nose and not knowing if you turned the page whether you would find the word you were looking for."

Foer credited his family history when asked what led him to become a writer. It was in writing that he could discuss the taboo topics of his household, he said.

"I've never met a Jewish person who didn't have some kind of storytelling taboos in their family," he said. "The taboos are glaring, not subtly handled — and I think what happens in a lot of Jewish families is a very rambunctious humour takes its place — a sacrificial substitute."

He shared a story from his childhood to illustrate this: "We were on a long car ride, and we were all acting crazy—me, my older brother, my mom. My dad pulled the car over and told us all, 'Whatever's going on, let's just get it out of our systems right now.' My mom said, 'Well, I'm cranky because of what you said that time...' and my brother said, 'Jonathan's been annoying me,' and when it was my turn—and I was like three or four—my dad asked me, 'Jonathan, what's upsetting you?' and I said, 'Fuck.' My dad said, 'You are absolutely right. Is that all?' I said, 'No. Shit, motherfucker...’ and probably some words my dad didn't even know. And everybody laughed, and I knew that I had been funny because I knew I had been saying the words you're not supposed to say, but also they weren't the words you're really not supposed to say. So our humor, our irreverence, is organized around the good bad words. It's safe. It's almost like we rehearse the real conversations that we're never going to have. But in my writing I can actually have those conversations."

Foer is a collegiate professor in the Creative Writing Program at NYU. His version of the Passover Haggadah will appear in 2012.