The Afterlife of Raymond Carver

206 Pages·2017·1.57 MB·English

The Afterlife of Raymond Carver: Authenticity,
Neoliberalism and Influence

A thesis submitted to The University of Manchester for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Faculty of Humanities

2017

Jonathan N P Pountney

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
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Table of Contents

Abstract 4
Declaration 5
Copyright Statement 6
Acknowledgements 7

Introduction 8
i. The Emergence of Neoliberalism 9
ii. Carver, Neoliberal Hegemony and Craftsmanship 13
iii. Theoretical Approaches to Carver’s Influence 25
iv. Gordon Lish and Tess Gallagher 31

Three Case Studies 36
i. The Transatlantic Political Convergence and Stuart Evers 36
ii. Diminished Class-Consciousness and Denis Johnson 43
iii. Transnational Adaptations and Ray Lawrence’s Jindabyne 47
iv. Raymond Carver’s Afterlife 49

Chapter One – ‘Carveresque Realism’: Raymond Carver and Jay McInerney 53
i. Early Years and Correspondence 53
ii. Vintage Contemporaries 1984 60
iii. Carver’s Realism, Minimalism and Literary Accuracy 68
iv. Carver and John Gardner 73
v. McInerney’s Early Fiction 79
vi. The Calloways: An Example of Carveresque Realism? 86

Chapter Two – ‘The Transpacific Partnership’: Raymond Carver and Haruki
Murakami 101
i. Carver’s American Postwar Context 106
ii. Humiliation, Consumption and Idleness in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? 108
iii. Murakami’s Japanese Postwar Context 115
iv. Humiliation, Consumption and Conformity in The Elephant Vanishes 120
v. Turning Points: The Impact of Life-Altering Events on Carver and Murakami 127
vi. Residual Spirituality in ‘All God’s Children Can Dance’ 135
vii. Residual Craft in ‘Kindling’ 138
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viii. Epilogue: ‘The Projectile’ 142

Chapter Three – ‘Why Raymond Carver?’: The Equivocal Carver in Alejandro
González Iñárritu’s Birdman 144
i. Neoliberalism, NAFTA and Alienation in Iñárritu’s Early Trilogy 147
ii. Iñárritu’s Preoccupations and Carver in Birdman’s Opening 153
iii. Divergent Approaches to Adaptations of Carver’s Writing 157
iv. ‘Why Raymond Carver?’: Riggan’s Conservative Carver 160
v. Riggan’s Theatrical Adaptation of ‘What We Talk About When We Talk
About Love’ 163
vi. Revision, Opposition, Appropriation: Mike’s Radical Carver 173
vii. Surface, Ephemerality and Riggan’s Alter Ego 183

Conclusion 190

Bibliography 195

Word Count: 79, 593
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Abstract

This thesis explores the afterlife of Raymond Carver in relation to a number of important
writers and artists that claim Carver as an influence and who are working within countries or
cultures that have recently made, or are in the process of making, the transition from embedded
liberalism to neoliberalism. This project argues that while Carver’s influence has been
conventionally limited to what critic A.O. Scott calls ‘a briefly fashionable school of
experimental fiction’, in recent years his writing has come to represent a ‘return’ to a more
‘real’ form of literature, one that, his advocates would argue, is more ‘authentic’ than other
kinds of recent writing. Carver’s ‘authenticity’ is closely tied to the idea that his fiction is a
response to his own working-class experience and is seen to be more broadly synecdochic of the
socioeconomic struggles faced by many other Americans during this period.
Given the cultural and aesthetic differences between Carver’s life and work, and those
studied in the main chapters of this thesis – Jay McInerney, Haruki Murakami and Alejandro
González Iñárritu – I argue that Carver’s afterlife is best viewed as being a social phenomenon,
born out of the social relations, historical circumstances and economic forms that resulted from
the US’s move to neoliberalism in the late-1970s. My introduction historicizes this transition
and argues that while Carver may have struggled to make productive sense of his
socioeconomic circumstance, it affected his life in very pointed and particular ways, trapping
him between the conventional American dream of individual freedom and equal opportunity
and the reality of inequality and social immobility. For those who claim Carver as an influence,
his fiction represents a zone where the difference between hegemonic narratives and lived
experience is explored and embodies a model of how to negotiate, for better or worse, the
complex and shifting foundations of this recent political transition.
My introduction then continues to argue that of equal importance to Carver’s afterlife is
the fact that, in his late-writing in particular, Carver’s work represents a ‘retreat’ from the short-
term, competition-based notions of neoliberal labour towards a non-incorporated residual
alternative that has particular artisanal tenets associated with craftsmanship. Carver’s texts
operate beyond their initial cultural and historical moment by becoming distinctive sites of
resistance to the hegemonic norms of late-capitalism. In this way, I argue, Carver’s
‘authenticity’ combines with a consolatory craftsmanship to become a coping mechanism that
offers other writers and artists working in neoliberalism a way of navigating a world which
seems to exceed the frame of conceptual mapping.
By working through a series of short case studies on Stuart Evers, Denis Johnson and
Ray Lawrence, and then moving on to more detailed explorations in my three central chapters,
this thesis will consider how this is the case in relation to a number of important artists who
claim Carver as an influence. Chapter one utilises my archival research to historicize the
relationship between Carver and McInerney and argues that Carver’s pedagogy pushed
McInerney towards the idea that the writing process is connected to residual narratives of
American craft. It also contends that many of the orthodox ideas that Carver held about
literature proved particularly enabling for McInerney’s novel Brightness Falls, which, through
parody and satire, signals a retreat from postmodern experimentation towards a more
‘Carveresque’ realism. Chapter two similarly chronicles Carver’s relationship with Murakami
and argues that, for Murakami, Carver’s fiction is an important example of writing that explores
the difference between hegemonic narratives and lived experience. The chapter moves on to
argue that what some critics view as Carver’s reformed post-alcoholic fiction helped facilitate
Murakami’s own unorthodox spiritual response to the twin tragedies of the Kobe earthquake
and Tokyo gas attack in 1995. Chapter three proceeds on slightly different lines in that it
considers Iñárritu’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) and argues that while
Iñárritu uses Carver as the foundation for his film, the film is particularly interesting because it
is, itself, a study of Carver’s afterlife. My final chapter suggests that while there is merit in
viewing Carver as an ‘authentic’ artist (a kind of model for negotiating neoliberal culture), the
totality of that solution is more ambivalent than his advocates might initially suggest.
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Declaration

No portion of the work referred to in this thesis has been submitted in support of an application

for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.
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Copyright Statement

i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns
certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The
University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for
administrative purposes.
ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy,
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in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses
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Acknowledgements

Thanks to my supervisors Ian McGuire and Ben Harker for their support, criticism and guidance
throughout this project. Thanks also to Matthew Francis, Jem Poster, Katherine Stansfield,
Rhodri Brady, Dan Meiring, Barrie Hope, Neil Hume, Peter Knight, David Alderson, Greg
Lainsbury, Sandra Lee Kleppe, Phil O’Brien, Jonathan Carswell, Nick Brake, John Robb and
Robert Skipper. Robert Miltner is singled out for his encouragement and advice. Likewise,
thanks to James Carver for answering my queries about his brother’s early life.

My trip to Carver’s archives at Ohio State University was co-sponsored by the Manchester
Doctoral College, the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Travel Fund and the Harris
Charity – my thanks, once again.

This thesis would have been impossible without the encouragement and financial support of my
family over the years. I owe a debt of gratitude too deep for words to my wife, whose steadfast
love is another reason for its completion and to whom this thesis is dedicated.

A version of chapter two has been published in The Raymond Carver Review, 5/6 (2017), 58-78.
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Introduction

A decade after his death, A.O. Scott wrote that Raymond Carver:
has gone from being an influential – and controversial – member of a briefly
fashionable school of experimental fiction to being an international icon of traditional
American literary values. His genius – but more his honesty, his decency, his
commitment to the exigencies of craft – is praised by an extraordinary diverse cross
section of his peers.1
As Scott’s generous assessment suggests, for a writer who only published a total of sixty-eight
short stories and four major story collections during his lifetime, Carver’s influence is
exponential. The list of those who attest to its impact includes artists as diverse as Robert
Altman, Salman Rushdie and Bob Adelman, and their admiration suggests that Carver’s
writing, despite its distinct subject, is not bound by its immediate geographic or cultural
context.2 His stories have been translated into over twenty languages, and even nearly thirty
years after his death, Carver is still widely read, with new editions being frequently printed.3
The result is that Carver has been canonized into the world of American letters. As Kasia Boddy
makes clear, ‘Although his final years were marked by warm attention from the literary
establishment, few would have predicted how central and secure Carver’s place in the story of
twentieth-century American literature would become’.4 At least part of the reason for this is, as
Scott indicates, a tight and intricate relationship between Carver’s texts and his perceived
lifestyle and writing practice. Underlying these ideas is the perception that Carver broadly
represents a ‘return’ to a more ‘real’ form of writing – what Scott calls ‘traditional American

1 A.O. Scott, ‘Raymond Carver’s Enigma’, New York Review of Books, 12 August 1999, p. 52.
2 I will discuss Carver’s influence on Altman in chapter three. For Rushdie’s claim, see, Salman Rushdie
‘Raymond Carver’, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta, 1991), pp.
340-2. For Adelman see, Bob Adelman, Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver (New York:
Quantuck Lane Press, 2013), pp. 104-7. For more photographs not published in the book see the featured
collection on his website, ‘Richard Ford and Raymond Carver – 1987’
<http://bobadelman.net/galleries/richard_ford/index_6.html> [accessed 23 May 2017]
3 In 2009 The Library of America published The Collected Stories in the US. Meanwhile in the UK,
Vintage brought out new paperback editions of his collections, which have now sold over 43,000 copies
between them.
4 Kasia Boddy, ‘Why Raymond Carver’s Legacy Keeps On Growing’, Telegraph, 2 August 2008
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3557635/Why-Raymond-Carvers-legacy-keeps-on-
growing.html> [accessed 23 May 2017]
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literary values’ – one that is, Carver’s advocates would argue, more ‘authentic’ than other kinds
of recent writing. This thesis explores why Carver’s ‘authenticity’ is an important aspect in his
influence on other writers and artists.
Underpinning the forthcoming discussions is the proposal that Carver’s influence is, in
the first instance, a social phenomenon, born out of the social relations, historical circumstances
and economic forms that were produced by the US’s move from embedded liberalism to
neoliberalism in the late-1970s. Read within this socio-historical context Carver’s realist
authenticity appears to embody a model for retreat from the bewildering world of late-
capitalism, and in turn becomes a coping mechanism, or form of consolation, that offers other
writers and artists a way of navigating a world which seems to exceed the frame of conceptual
mapping. In this sense, Carver’s work appears to inhabit a zone that explores the differences
between the hegemonic narratives of late-capitalism – that is, the conventional American dream
of equal opportunity, individual freedom and upward socioeconomic mobility for all who work
hard enough – and the reality of lived experience at the turn of the neoliberal era. This idea is
reinforced by Carver’s late fiction, which offers a muted oppositional alternative based on
residual values of craftsmanship which, for those who are influenced by him, provides a
distinctive site of resistance to the hegemonic norms of late-capitalism. The three expository
chapters that follow consider the effect and impact of this idea on three important contemporary
artists who all claim Carver as an influence.

The Emergence of Neoliberalism
While critical attention has previously been paid to the relationship between Carver’s writing
and his socioeconomic context, there has been little that explicitly analyses his writing – and, of
course, his influence – in connection with the neoliberal turn. Carver, himself, was affected by
the socioeconomic changes in US capitalism in the 1970s and ’80s, and his experience, which is
communicated through his writing, became a model for later artists of how to negotiate, for
better or worse, the complex and shifting foundations of this significant political transition.
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His influence is further augmented by significant advances in neoliberal communication,
technology and media that mean that his influence is disseminated across cultural and
geographic borders. The process of this socioeconomic change – what has been called
elsewhere the eras of Fordism and post-Fordism, or, now more commonly, embedded liberalism
and neoliberalism – has been the subject of much sociological, political, historical and
geographical discussion.5 Since neoliberalism is central to large portions of my argument in this
project it is worth providing a detailed summary of its background.
Perhaps most notably, neoliberalism is associated with the rejection of ideals that are
commonly represented by the Keynesian economics favoured by welfare-capitalist states in the
western world during the postwar era. In this sense the emergence of neoliberalism can be
traced to a number of important breaks or shifts away from this system. The first was the
dissolution of the Bretton Woods currency agreement between 1968 and 1973, brought about
largely because the US was seeking to respond to the increasing domestic crises of
overaccumulation, unemployment and inflation, and also their loss of control over the global
free-flow of US dollars, which, because of their high value, had been deposited en masse into
European banks. In 1971 President Nixon announced the suspension of the dollar’s
convertibility into gold and international currency and exchange rates were allowed to float.
Meanwhile The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil shock
between 1970 and 1973 tripled the price of crude oil for The Organization for Economic Co-
operation and Development (OECD) Member countries, which dramatically increased
production costs for private corporations. The solution was for the US to put military pressure
on Saudi Arabia to force them to recycle their petrodollars through the New York investment
banks. The banks then had command of massive funds for which they needed profitable outlets,
and because of the poor domestic economic conditions they sought opportunities in the Global

5 A short-list of some of the most important studies might include: Thomas Edsall, The New Politics of
Inequality (London: Norton, 1984); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso,
1994); Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (London: Norton, 2002); David Harvey, The
New Imperialism (Oxford: OUP, 2003); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: OUP,
2005); Earl Wysong, Robert Perrucci and David Wright, The New Class Society: Goodbye American
Dream?, (Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).