Raymond Carver in The Viewfinder
Raymond Carver in The Viewfinder
Raymond Carver in The Viewfinder
the Viewfinder
Tamas Dobozy
Carver Country
Late in Raymond Carvers career, his widow, Tess Gallagher, bought
him a leather jacket prior to a trip to Paris (Country 18). Her reason,
she joked to Carver, was because she wanted him to look like
Camus (18). Three years later, Carver critic William L. Stull com6 Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne detudes americaines 41, no. 3, 2011
doi: 10.3138/cras.41.3.279
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Such photographs suggest a problematic that occupies much scholarship on Carver and realism as a whole: the doubleness of a writing
that is at once artistic and artless. Examining the photo-essay, Carver
Countryan important biographical and aesthetic document for
Carver scholarsand Carvers story, Viewnder, I will discuss
the use of photography as a metaphor for the politics of Carvers
aesthetic, especially in regard to his representation of the loss of subjectivity in late capitalism, a loss in which Carver nds possibility
even a utopian possibilityrather than limitation.
Critical/Political Contexts
In Carver Country, Gallaghers interpretations of Bob Adelmans
photographs (of the milieu from which Carver emerged) are critical
interventions into Carvers stories, most often to evade the contradictions they present:
One of his [Carvers] French translators, Francois Lascan, had
originally mis-apprehended Rays stance in the stories as ironic.
Then I happened to see a photograph of Raymond Carver and I
had to revise my whole idea of his tone and attitude, he told me
in Paris. I knew the man I was looking at in the photograph
could never condescend to his characters. (10)
Other contemporary critics similarly relate Carvers work to sociopolitical contexts, including its relevance to social class; authenticity;
political, historical, and cultural determinism; and aesthetic and
ontological theory. In 2006 the Journal of the Short Story in English
devoted a special issue to Carver, in which Vasiliki Fachard writes
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Here, the photographed landscapes of Yakima County are homologous to Carvers aesthetic. The lack of cover in the surroundings is
one with the oodlight intensity of the writing. The landscape
evinces qualitiessimplicity over ornamentation, economy as the
most telling sign of veracityshe associates with Carver. Carvers
aesthetic is one with the earth from which it sprang, and thus has
a fundamental truth-value. The most telling aspect of Gallaghers
description is that she makes no mention of Adelmans photographs
mediating the landscapeoffering an aesthetic performancejust as
Carvers writing mediated the lives of the underclass. Instead, that
photography, like Carvers writing, captures landscape exactly.
Thus, for Gallagher, Carvers work is not a representation but one
with the thing represented. With this notion, she negotiates the
contradiction between an artist who is not an artist because all he
does is provide what is already there, and an artist who is an artist
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because his aesthetic lets us see in ways weve never seen before.
As Lilian Furst indicates in All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of
Realist Fiction, this dilemmabetween artlessness and artfulness
had long occupied realism, charged with representing both faithfully and artistically (67). Gallagher reconciles this paradox by
conating style of representation with subject of representation. Her
dictum, that economy is the most telling sign of veracity, makes
one wonder, however, as to which is more unmediated: a writing
that masks the work of artice behind a myth of unmediated immanence, or a writing that foregrounds artice in order to alert us
to it? Charles May responds to exactly this by reminding us of
Carvers doubleness, in which reality seems both real and unreal
at once. For May, stories such as Put Yourself in My Shoes ask
the reader to identify with the [. . .] process by which a story is
created, rather than [. . .] identifying with [. . .] as-if-real characters
(34). I would extend this observation to Viewnder also, which
considers the role of artistic mediation vis-a`-vis subjectivity, especially working-class subjectivity. What we must never forgetbut
which arguments such as Gallaghers make it easy to forgetis
the difference between Carvers representation of poverty and poverty
itself. However his subjects might have described their lives, they
would not have described them as art. In conating precisionism
with non-mediation, and this with political validity, Gallagher
argues for what her introduction is written against: namely, that
the subject of Carvers stories is in fact Carver: For Ray had been
one of these people (10). The writers legitimacy rests on the fact
that his experience, his background, his aesthetic form the contours
of the stories. We are thinking of Carver when we think were
thinking of the working class.
Working the Underclass
For all of Carvers working-class associations and precisionism, he
was, as Stull and Harker point out, a nancially successful writer, so
that what we seein the monumentalizing of Carver in Adelmans
black and white photosis a transition similar to that undergone by
his subject matter: where lives that are ephemeral, transient, below
the radar become immortalized in canonical stories and, ultimately,
under the banner of Carver Country. But Carvers precisionism
does not provide a portrait of the working class with delity;
rather, it provides a portrait of what we are told is the way to represent the working class with delity. What is culturally invisible
becomes a photograph; what is transient becomes xed text; what
is ephemeral becomes set in the literary canon.
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tion between the aesthetic and the real, between the story that
represents and what it represents. This is not the panoramic truth
of Carver Country, but the evanescent world of Carverland.
Viewnder revisits the dilemma of realismthe conicted desire
to mediate transparently and artisticallybut not in order to resolve
it: Adorno, militating against the expulsion of negativity from art,
which he read as a form of quietism, argued in favor of an art, such
as Raymond Carvers, that refused to defuse the contradictions and
quandaries out of which it was born (Chenetier 182). As Chenetier
suggests, Carvers negativity is not the elucidation of symptoms
and cures, but rather the making manifest [of what] cannot be
pointed at, or the pointed use of misrepresentation.
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own break with an aesthetic sensibility that would make sense out
of the chaos of experience and thereby transcend it. Carver counters
the claim Bell makes on the generic status of minimalism in the
same breath as he counters Gallaghers monumental vision of his
work. The Polaroid serves not because Carver feels that his stories
(or Polaroids) are necessarily throwaway, but because it is precisely
in the throwaway, the ephemeral, the misused (a Polaroid taking
action shots) that the characters have agency, that they can
aestheticize their lives. They resist their generic status not when
they aspire to transcendencethe cultural success storybut
when they try to make a Polaroid do what it cant.
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art that transcends its moment, and triumphs over social conditions. But Carvers writing, rather than upholding modernist ambition, probes the way in which mass production, consumerism,
and the levelling of pop culture have become the register of a postindividualistic society. The absence of the psychic autonomy demanded by individualisma prerequisite for the artistic heroism
Gallagher witnesses and Bell eulogizesrequires us to read in
Carver another power altogether, one derived from the evanescent,
the temporary, the disintegrated.
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It is at this point that the Polaroid, its difference from the developed
photograph, takes on greatest signicance. As Tom Wolfe says in
his introduction to the photographs of Marie Cosindas, the Polaroid
dispenses with the mysteries of the Darkroom, which had always
been synonymous with professionalism itself among photographers
(506). As well, the nal print of the Polaroid was like a painted
portrait in that it could not be duplicated. The Polaroid negative
is destroyed in the process of instant development (507). These
aspects of the Polaroid set it apart from traditional photography:
the absence of Darkroom professionalism, and the negative (in
that each photo becomes the only example of its kind). The Polaroid
is the scene of an escape: it bears less of the photographers signature
than standard photography since it does not lend itself to darkroom
manipulation; and it resists control by not permitting tampering with
its uniqueness via multiple prints of the same negative. In a sense, the
Polaroid is a photograph like any othercapturing an instant that
can never be repeatedat the same time as it is singular, unrepeatable. It casts doubt on artistic intention: [Walker] Evans worked with
the Polaroid SX-70 system, a fully automatic method that timed the
lms development inside the camera and expelled a nal print for
which the photographer made no contribution to the color scheme
[. . .] He praised the Polaroids quick payback process, saying that
it encouraged sudden inspiration (Marien 362). In Evans work
the Polaroid circumscribes not only the photographers agency,
conning him to a color scheme automatically rendered by the
camera, but also his preparedness in terms of subject matter, making
him reliant on chance. While the second of these is a positive aspect
of the Polaroid for Evans, it connes the artist to the moment, to the
particularities of time and place, not permitting the space in which
to formulate an independent artistic practice. It undermines the
notion of artistic autonomy, of a will and selfhood isolable from
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Community is constant attentiveness. Carver suggests that objectless writing, like a targetless throwing of rocks, or the snapping of
misrepresentative Polaroids, is the leveraging of anonymity and interchangeability and disposability to expose a society that demands that
you connect while denying you the very means of making connections. There is power in the frivolous insofar as it brings pleasure
only in itself, in refusing the control of a purpose.
Note
1 The full quote from Fachard reads: Of course, Carver scholars and
readers can only pray that the uncut stories will soon see the light.
Juxtaposed to the Carver we now have, the two may yield to us what
the narrator of Viewnder sought from the man with the polaroid: a
motion shot of the tremolo or oscillation between the two, a fuller gaze
into the moving process of its construction, a possible glimpse at the
kind of material Carver was appropriating, collecting, during a
fourteen-year correspondence and friendship with Lish (19). Fachard
is, of course, talking about the infamous expose of the relationship
between Carver and his early editor, Gordon Lish, by D.T. Max in a
1998 article, The Carver Chronicles, published in The New York Times
Magazine of 9 August 1998. Looking through editorial revisions for
Carvers rst two books, Max uncovered countless cuts and additions
to the pages; entire paragraphs [. . .] added (37). He noted that Lishs
black felt-tip markings sometimes obliterate the original text [. . .]
[cutting] about half the original words and [rewriting] 10 of the 13
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endings. Carol, story ends here, he would note for the benet of his
typist (37). Of less interest to me here is the relationship between an
intrusive editor and writerand certainly the Lish/Carver relationship in this sense is not the rst of its kindthan the oscillation
Fachard derives from it, and which I appropriate to examine Carvers
interest in process versus product (the movement of the subject always
in excess of determination). To some degree, my study is further
enabled by this metacritical perspective on the provenance of Carvers
stories, though the oscillation is ultimately more important for what it
says about the stories representation of subjectivity than in determining where Lish ends and Carver begins. Perhaps most suggestively
the interest and in some cases outrage over this controversy draws
attention to an expectation (including on Carvers part) of single
authorshipthe notion of a highly individualistic, even heroic, artist
enacting a unique visionary artthat speaks more to the Romantic
myth that informs the capitalist art market (including the literary
market) than it does to the history of authorship, which has more often
than not been characterized by collaboration, plagiarism, inuence,
censorship, and compromise. This anxiety over the uniqueness and
autonomy of the subject is of course manifest everywhere in Carvers
work and criticism, and might be partly explained by his anxiety over
Lishs perceived inuence (and Lishs own anxiety over not being duly
recognized as the presiding genius of Carvers early collections), but is
not reducible to it, or is only part of a larger anxiety over the status of
the subject in late capitalism in general. One is tempted, here, to invoke
the name of one of Carvers collections as the guiding statement on this
concern: No Heroics, Please.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodore. Minima Moralia: Reections on a Damaged Life. Trans.
E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso, 2005.
Amir, Ayala. I Dont Do Motion Shots: Photography, Movement, and
Change in Raymond Carvers Stories. The Raymond Carver Review 1 (2007):
3352. 4 Aug. 2010.
Anderson, Quentin. The Emergence of Modernism. Columbia Literary
History of the United States. Ed. Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia UP,
1988. 695714.
Bal, Mieke. Light Writing: Portraiture in a Post-Traumatic Age. Mosaic: A
Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 37.4 (2004): 119.
Bell, Madison. Less is Less: The Dwindling American Short Story.
Harpers (1986): 649.
Bellamy, Joe David. Literary Luxuries: American Writing at the End of the
Millennium. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1995.
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Furst, Lilian. All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction. Durham:
Duke UP, 1995.
Verley, Claudine. Errand, or Raymond Carvers Realism in a Champagne Cork. Journal of the Short Story in English 46 (2006): 14763. 25 Oct.
2011. Web.
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