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‘To be there, inside, and not be there’: Raymond Carver and class

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360701642409

1470-1308

Ben Harker,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See Stephen Berg (ed.), In Praise of What Persists (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), pp. 33–44. Carver explains how ‘Fires’ came to be written in his essay ‘On Rewriting’, first published in Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, 1st edn (Santa Barbara, California: Capra Press, 1983), pp. 187–189, and reprinted in William L. Stull (ed.), Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Prose (London: Harvill, 2000), pp. 181–185. ‘Fires’ was first published in Antaeus [New York], no. 47 (Autumn 1982), pp. 156–167 and then in a slightly different form in Syracuse Scholar [Syracuse University] 3, no. 2 (Fall 1982), pp. 6–14. 2. Raymond Carver, ‘Fires’, in Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (1985; London: Picador, 1986), p. 33. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as F. 3. Tess Gallagher, foreword to Raymond Carver, Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Prose, ed. William L. Stull (London: Harvill, 2000), p. xiv. 4. Twenty-five Carver interviews are anthologized in Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull (eds.), Conversations with Raymond Carver ( Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1990). In compiling the book, the editors drew upon the 50 or so interviews Carver gave between 1977 and 1988; Carver seems to have given no interviews between 1977 and 1979, the period in which he finally overcame his longstanding alcoholism. 5. For Carver as a blue-collar writer see Bruce Weber, ‘Raymond Carver: A Chronicler of Blue-Collar Despair’, New York Times Magazine, 24 June 1984, pp. 36–38; Gordon Burn, ‘Poetry, Poverty and Realism Down in Carver Country’, The Times [London], 17 April 1985, p. 12. Both are reprinted in Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L Stull (eds.), Conversations with Raymond Carver (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1990). See also Robert Towers, ‘Low-Rent Tragedies’, New York Review of Books, 14 May 1981, p. 38, and Jonathan Yardley, ‘Ordinary People from an Extraordinary Writer’, Washington Post Book World, 4 September 1983, p. 3. 6. Raymond Carver, ‘My Father's Life’, originally published in Esquire (September 1984) and reprinted in Raymond Carver, Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (1985; London: Picador, 1986), p. 13. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as F. 7. As Michael Denning has pointed out, the migration of 350,000 south-westerners became ‘the story by which Americans narrated the depression’ and it found almost instant iconic status through a range of texts including the photographs of Dorothea Lange (1935), documentary films such as The Plow Which Broke The Plains (1936), political pamphlets like the Lang-Steinbeck collaboration Their Blood is Strong (1938), historiography such as Carey McWilliams' Factories in the Field (1939), and the novels of John Steinbeck and their film adaptations. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Labouring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 262. For a discussion of these texts, see pp. 260–261. 8. For the period's industrial relations, see Denning, The Cultural Front, pp. 3–20, Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 52–73 and David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 165–228. For the Communist Party, see Albert Fried (ed.), Communism in America: A History in Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 227–337. The Lukács quotation is from Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 326. See also Georg Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Talisman and Dialectic, trans. Esther Leslie (London and New York: Verso, 2000). 9. Denning, The Cultural Front, p. 261. 10. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; London: Penguin, 1980), p. 9. For an account of the time spent by Guthrie on the Grand Coulee Dam project, see Ed Cray, Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie (New York: Norton, 2004), pp. 207–214. 11. These lyrics are from Guthrie's ‘Grand Coulee Dam’, quoted in Cray, Ramblin' Man, p. 212. For analysis of Guthrie's class conscious lyrics, see Bryan K. Garman, A Race of Singers: Whitman's Working Class Hero from Guthrie to Springstein (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press), pp. 104–135. 12. Fredric Jameson, ‘Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film’ (1977) reprinted in Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 35–55 (p. 37). 13. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 8–9. 14. Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 69. I am indebted to the work of Michael Denning for bringing Przeworski's book to my attention. For Denning on Przeworski, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working Class Culture in America (London and New York: Verso, 1987), pp. 77–79. 15. For a résumé of these shifts, see Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (1983; London: Pluto Press, 1985), pp. 124–125. For the 1950s boom, see Nigel Harris, Of Bread and Guns: The World Economy in Crisis (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp. 30–73. For the significance of credit, home and car ownership see Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience, trans. David Fernbach (1976; London, New Left Books, 1979), pp. 141–160. For the emergence and consolidation of Fordism, see Nick Heffernan, Capital, Class and Technology in Contemporary American Culture (London: Pluto, 2000), pp. 1–28. 16. The 1950 General Motors-UAW contract or ‘Treaty of Detroit’ famously ushered in a period in which collective wage bargaining and the quid pro quo became the dominant paradigm of industrial relations. See Denning, The Cultural Front, pp. 22–24; Gordon, Edwards and Reich, Segmented Work, pp. 165–170; Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973), pp. 214–264; and Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, pp. 102–124. 17. B. and J. Ehrenreich, ‘The Professional-Managerial Class’ in P. Walker (ed.), Between Labor and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979), pp. 5–45 (p. 19). 18. Heffernan, Capital, Class and Technology, p. 34. 19. For increased access to higher education between 1940 and 1970, see Table 5.1 in Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, p. 191. For Carver's life, see Adam Meyer, Raymond Carver (New York: Twayne, 1995), pp. 1–18. 20. Aronowitz, False Promises, p. 6. 21. Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, p. 8. 22. Larry McCaffrey and Sinda Gregory, ‘An Interview with Raymond Carver’, in Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s, ed. McCaffrey and Gregory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 66–82, reprinted in Conversations with Raymond Carver, ed. Gentry and Stull, pp. 98–116 (p. 112). 23. See also Michael Schumacher, ‘After the Fire, into the Fire: An Interview with Raymond Carver’, in Conversations with Raymond Carver, ed. Gentry and Stull, pp. 234–235. 24. For the controversy over Lish's editorial role, see D. T. Max, ‘The Carver Chronicles’, New York Times Magazine, 9 August, 1998, p. 34. For a balanced overview, see Arthur F. Bethea, Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver (New York and London: Routledge, 2001). 25. For the ‘mechanization of bookkeeping’ see Aronowitz, False Promises, pp. 293–295; for the social mobility of those working in sales, see p. 307. For the significance of the professional-managerial class in post-1945 US class relations, see Nick Heffernan, Capital, Class and Technology in Contemporary American Culture (London: Pluto, 2000), pp. 29–36. 26. See David Boxer and Cassandra Phillips, ‘Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: Voyeurism, Dissociation, and the Art of Raymond Carver’, Iowa Review, 10.3 (summer 1979), pp. 75–90, and Kirk Nesset, The Stories of Raymond Carver (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995), pp. 11–14. 27. The collections are Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (1976), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) and Cathedral (1983). These three books are collected in The Stories of Raymond Carver (London: Picador, 1985). References are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as SRC. 28. John Alton, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Literature: An Interview with Raymond Carver’, Chicago Review, 36 (Autumn 1988), pp. 4–21; reprint, Conversations with Raymond Carver, ed. Gentry and Stull, p. 157. Further references to this interview will be cited parenthetically as CRC. 29. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 132. 30. Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 134. 31. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (1961: London: Hogarth, 1992), p. 49. 32. David Kaufmann, ‘Yuppie Postmodernism’, Arizona Quarterly, 47.2 (summer 1991): pp. 93–116 (p. 99). 33. Kaufmann, ‘Yuppie Postmodernism’, p. 99. 34. For a critical take on Carver's lack of historical perspective, see Frank Lentricchia, introduction to Lentricchia (ed.), New Essays on White Noise (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 35. Carver later changed the title of this story to ‘Are These Actual Miles’. 36. See Appendix 6, ‘Chronology’ in Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected Poems, pp. 371–375. 37. This trend is mapped by William Stull in ‘Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond Carver’, Philological Quarterly, 64 (1985), pp. 1–15. 38. There are inevitably significant exceptions to this trend. ‘Preservation’ from Cathedral is a relatively late story that exceeds even the early work in exploring how the loss of narrative converts the domestic sphere from the stuff of ready-made realism into a site of shock and dislocation. Furthermore, the degree of Gordon Lish's editorial input into the early work has only recently come to light, and paradoxically, the early stories most frequently recognized as quintessentially Carversque – the baffling, the ruthlessly pared-down – are those to which Lish contributed most. Carver freely admitted the value of a keen-eyed editor. Once, when asked about the relationship between writer and editor, he quoted Ezra Pound's observation – ‘It's immensely important that great poems be written, but makes not a jot of difference who writes them’ – to emphasize the collaborative relationship (CRC, p. 23). 39. The term famously used by Theodor Adorno to describe Brecht's later work. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Ronald Taylor (ed.), Aesthetics and Politics (1977; London and New York: Verso, 1992), pp. 177–196 (p. 191). 40. Raymond Carver, Elephant and Other Stories (London: Harvill, 1989), pp. 73–91. 41. ‘Shiftless’ was first published in Poetry [Chicago, IL], 146.6 (September 1985), p. 344. Reprinted in Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1996), pp. 175–176. 42. ‘Fordism refers to the way in which economic, social and even cultural life was organized in the United States and Western Europe for the duration of the long postwar boom between 1945 and the early 1970s. The principal feature of this period was the establishment of a durable balance between the mass production of standardized goods on the one hand, and the mass consumption of such goods on the other’. Nick Heffernan, Capital, Class & Technology in Contemporary American Culture: Projecting Post-Fordism (London: Pluto Pres, 2000), p. 3. 43. A process chronicled by Davis in Prisoners, p. 103. 44. B. and J. Ehrenriech, ‘The Professional-Managerial Class’, in Walker (ed.), p. 17. 45. In one passage of ‘Fires’ he recalled the aura of the prestigious ‘little magazines’ whose existence seemed to negate society's dominant rules: inverting the laws of the market, these journals consistently published the best in contemporary American writing and remained exotically obscure (F, pp. 37, 44). 46. Carver described his writing practices as follows: ‘I try to do the story once in maybe 35 or 40 pages, in longhand, knowing I'll have to go back, and that the real work will begin later after I get it typed up. And then it's not at all uncommon to do 10 or 15 drafts, 20 drafts of that story’ (CRC, p. 13). 47. ‘The postwar explosion in higher education, writes Nick Heffernan, ‘the expansion of the mass media, and the extension of the corporate bureaucratic apparatus from the regulation of consumption into the regulation of consumption and demand meant that “the material position of the [PMC during the 1950s and 1960s] was advancing rapidly’. Heffernann, Capital, Class and Technology, p. 88. The inset quotation is from B. and J. Ehrenreich, ‘The Professional-Managerial Class’, pp. 30–31. 48. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 7. 49. The idea that in the context of a newly pressured post-war Fordist consensus Carver might instead become a working-class organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense – an organizer of masses of men, shaping and directing the consciousness of the class to which he originally belonged – is as far-fetched as the endings of 1930s proletarian novels, with their conversions to socialism and eruptions of social solidarity, seemed to Carver. Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Intellectuals’ in Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (trans. and ed.), Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971), pp. 3–23. In a significant article, Bill Mullen argues that whether he intended it or not, Carver does actually represent a late flowering of ‘social realism in the tradition of working-class or proletarian writing’. Carver, Mullen claims, is different from his forebears in that he leaves out ‘the overt didacticism and attendant sentimentality of earlier proletarian realism’; Carver's pared down objectivity, for Mullen, ‘may be read as a satiric comment on the voyeuristic restraint with which contemporary American society – including its own diminishing traditional working class ranks – has observed the diminution of its human resources’ (pp. 101, 102). Bill Mullen, ‘A Subtle Spectacle: Televisual Culture in the Short Stories of Raymond Carver’, Critique, 39.2 (Winter 1998), pp. 99–114. 50. Raymond Carver, ‘Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying To Get Back In’, Pequod, 18 (1985), pp. 48–49, reprinted in Raymond Carver, All Of Us: The Collected Poems (1996; New York: Vintage, 2000), pp. 73–74.