Ben Harker

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

In 1983 Raymond Carver was invited to contribute to In Praise of WhatPersists, a collection of essays in which prominent writers talked abouttheir influences.1 ‘Fires’, the essay he submitted, was conspicuous in thatit declined to talk about literary influences at all.2 Instead Carver’s essaychronicled the hardship that had shaped his writing so decisively: ‘I’mtalking about real influence now’, he wrote, describing raising his children,struggling to get an education, or working ‘some crap job or other’ (F, 33;Carver’s italics). The economic pressure of working-class life, Carverclaimed, had not only provided subject matter; it had dictated the veryforms in which he worked – poems and short stories were all he hadtime for as a young writer, and these were the forms with which he stuck.

This article is about Carver and class. It argues that the early stories,aptly described by Tess Gallager as possessing an ‘honed “dis-ease” ’, aregenerated from a very particular conjuncture of socio-economic disempo-werment and diminished class-consciousness; these texts, I claim, are thesite of a creative struggle to narrate apparently inexplicable social experi-ences.3 I also read a selection of later Carver texts – especially interviews,poems and essays – as textual spaces negotiating the contradictory classlocation of a distinguished professional writer synonymous withworking-class settings.

�

Famous for his precisionist, pared down-aesthetic, in his later yearsCarver was surprisingly willing to talk to interviewers, and did so some-thing like 50 times over the 7-year period of his greatest celebrity.4 Inthese interviews, as in his autobiographical essays, he consistently pushedhis background into the foreground and, in so doing, played an importantrole in shaping and reinforcing the reading public’s perception of him as achronicler of blue-collar despair.5 He was a genial interviewee, butthere was a prickly moment in one interview from 1986 when JohnAlton raised the question of class to suggest that Carver actually wrote

Textual Practice 21(4), 2007, 715–736

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09502360701642409

about the lower-middle class rather than the working class. Immediatelywary of Alton’s line of questioning, Carver first responded with a bluffanti-intellectualism – ‘Working class, lower-middle class, sure’ – tosignal that Alton was splitting hairs (CRC, 161). Carver then movedonto the terra firma of the real world and insisted that he wrote about a‘very populous substratum of American life’, before invoking his own auto-biographical qualifications to describe it with, ‘That’s where I lived for avery long while’ (CRC, 161). He closed the matter by invoking his father:

My father and all my father’s friends and family were working-classpeople. Their dreams were very circumscribed. They were people in adifferent social situation than the people you and I hang out withtoday, and they didn’t seem to have the same sets of problems. Pro-blems and worries, yes, but they were different. For the most partthey worked their jobs and took care of their property and theirfamilies (CRC, 161).

The move here is from an ambiguous present to an apparentlysimpler, more clear-cut past, from Raymond Carver’s own contestedclass location to the irrefutable proletarian credentials of his father,Raymond Carver senior. It was a move that, towards the end of hiscareer, Carver would make on a number of occasions. In the celebratedessay ‘My Father’s Life’, first published in 1984 for instance, Carver com-pares his own insecurity – living ‘between lives’, moving from place toplace, trying to raise a family – with that of his father.6 RaymondCarver senior’s story, the essay insists, was also one of physical movementand economic distress, but of a more easily narrated and deciphered kind.In short, it was a recognizable story, and a set of already-coded narrativeconventions exist to tell it: Carver’s father was a victim of the GreatDepression, a farm worker from Arkansas who travelled north in searchof work. Of all the biographical data available to Carver about hisfather’s life, he selects those that most resemble the scenarios of familiardepression era representations to tell the story:7 Carver’s narration of hisfather’s migration – on foot, hitching lifts, riding boxcars – reads like asynopsis of a depression era novel or film plot. Like the characters fromSteinbeck’s In Dubious Battle (1936) Raymond Carver senior workedpicking apples; like those of the Darryl Zanuck film adaptation of Stein-beck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), he found refuge from the ravages ofthe free market, in his case not with the Joads in a government camp,but in a New Deal economic project where he was hired as a constructionworker on the Grand Coulee Dam (F, 13). Raymond Carver senior was noactivist, but his was the moment of the militant Committee of IndustrialOrganizations (CIO), the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) famous victory

Textual Practice

716

over General Motors, the pro-Trade Union Wagner Labor Relations Act,and the high point of the Communist Party, the organization which forGeorg Lukacs was destined to mediate between social reality and politicalconsciousness and enable the working class ‘to become fully aware of itsexistence as a class’.8 In short it was a moment when, as MichaelDenning points out, working people found representation in a doublesense of the word: political and industrial representation and represen-tation in cultural forms.9 Carver continues:

My dad was still working on the dam, and later, with the huge tur-bines producing electricity and the water backed up for a hundredmiles into Canada, he stood in the crowd and heard FranklinD. Roosevelt when he spoke at the construction site. ‘He never men-tioned those guys who died building that dam’, my dad said. Someof his friends had died there, men from Arkansas, Oklahoma, andMissouri (F, 14).

In this passage, Raymond Carver junior has his father quietly givingvoice to, or being given voice by, the class-consciousness of thatmoment. Class, as E. P. Thompson noted, is something that happensand it is happening here just as it happens in the 26 songs that dustbowl balladeer Woody Guthrie wrote during his commissioned 3-weekresidency on the dam construction project.10 Like the sharply class-conscious songs of Guthrie, here Carver, on behalf of Raymond Carversenior, measures the scale of the engineering feat undertaken (‘huge tur-bines’, ‘hundred miles’); Carver’s father’s words then register the differencebetween the official history (public oratory) and the unrecorded exploita-tion and suffering: ‘he never mentioned the guys who died building thatdam’. (Guthrie’s songs do mention them: ‘men have fought the poundingwaters, and met a watery grave’.)11

Whether Carver junior is faithfully transcribing his father’s words ormaking up dialogue is beside the point: Raymond Carver senior is beingsimultaneously presented in terms of objective social relations – as aworking man – and in terms of his experience of that position. ‘Socialclass’ writes Fredric Jameson, ‘is not merely a structural fact but alsovery significantly a function of class consciousness, and the latter,indeed, ends up producing the former just as surely as it is produced byit’.12 ‘And class happens’, writes E P. Thompson:

when some men [sic], as a result of common experiences (inheritedor shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as betweenthemselves, and as against other men whose interests are differentfrom (and usually opposed to) theirs.13

Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

717

Carver’s re-telling of the story emphasizes that the experiences of hisfather’s generation were denselymediated – that a network of political insti-tutions, organizations, initiatives and cultural forms represented a sharedsocial experience to those undergoing it, and that class was happening.The passage is a contradictory mix of nostalgia for a clear-cut class locationand a form of ventriloquism in which Carver’s own disputed and hesitantclass feelings find voice through his father’s experiences. In ‘My Father’sLife’ and the interview quoted above, Carver the professional writer pullsin two directions: he insists that his father’s experiences of class are part ofhis story and identity (‘all my father’s friends and family were working-class people’); and he acknowledges that they are remote from him (‘a differ-ent social situation than the people you and I hang out with today’).

�

‘Social reality’, writes Adam Przeworski:

is not given directly through our senses . . . .What people come tobelieve and what they happen to do is an effect of a long-termprocess of persuasion and organization by political and ideologicalforces engaged in numerous struggles for the realization of their goals. . . Social cleavages, the experience of social differentiation, are nevergiven directly to our consciousness. Social differences acquirethe status of cleavages as an outcome of ideological and politicalstruggles.14

The Fordist society that emerged in America in the post-war period –characterized by a scientifically managed balance between the mass pro-duction of standardized goods/working-class consumption patterns, col-lective wage bargaining, and the social security apparatus – was in part aresponse to the oppositional cultures and ideologies of the PopularFront years.15 Rather than representing the end of class, the post-war settle-ment was another instance of class happening, and comprised a ‘process ofpersuasion and organization’ that re-defined the American Century interms inextricably connected to economic, social and cultural power of adistinctive Professional Managerial Class (PMC) positioned betweenlabour and capital.16 Emerging in the Progressive era, the PMC differedfrom the conventional American middle class in its lack of property andits indispensable abundance of educational, technical and professionalexpertise with which it came to manage and control the structures ofincreasingly complex and bureaucratic corporate capitalism. As B. andJ. Enrenreich observe, the PMC historically ‘understood that their ownself-interest was bound up in reforming capitalism . . . The role of theemerging PMC as they saw it, was to mediate the basic class conflict of

Textual Practice

718

capitalist society and create a “rational” and reproducible social order’.17

Integral in shaping and managing the corporate and institutional structuresof American Fordism, as a class the PMC experienced and described itselfas representing what was best for society collectively; its central ideologywas the redundancy of ideology. The discourse of professionalism –measured primarily in terms of educational achievement, technicalknow-how and organizational efficiency – is, Nick Heffernan argues, fun-damental to ‘the class’s understanding of its social objectivity, the disinter-ested nature or ideological “neutrality” of its expertise, and its autonomyfrom both capital and labour’.18

�

Born on the cusp of the baby-boom in 1939, Raymond Carver hadslightly better access to education than his father. In 1956 Raymondjunior was the first Carver to graduate from high school; 7 years later hegraduated from Humboldt State College.19 But even so, Carver’s earlyadulthood – he had two children by the time he was 20 – was one ofchronic insecurity (Przeworski’s ‘social difference’) with the familycaught between aspirations of social mobility and a treadmill of non-union and unskilled service sector shift-work.

When Carver describes these years, and they were an important part ofhis own working-class credentials, the emphasis is upon both the difficultsocio-economic conditions and of subjective confusion, of being withouta means to comprehend and narrate what is happening. Those oppositionalmediations which Przeworski describes – trade unions, political parties andcampaigns, modes of political analysis, cultural forms and representationsthrough which objective social conditions are embodied and experiencedand which shape class consciousness – are so weak as to be barelypresent. The submerged population to which Carver describes belonginglacked visibility in a double sense: they were under-represented politicallyand culturally. In E. P. Thompson’s terms, class was ‘felt’ – sometimesvaguely, sometimes sharply – but there wasn’t a functional set ofmediationsthrough which to ‘articulate’ it. By the early 1970s anxious debate aboutlevels of class-consciousness was a dominant discourse on the Americanleft. Stanley Aronowitz’s 1973 book False Promises: The Shaping of AmericanWorking Class Consciousness addressed the question ‘why theworking class inAmerica remains a dependent force in society and what the conditions arethat may reverse the situation’.20 Thirteen years later, after two Reagan vic-tories, Mike Davis put the point more strongly. ‘The American workingclass’, he wrote, ‘lacking any broad array of collective institutions or anytotalizing agent of class consciousness (that is, a class party), has beenincreasingly integrated into American capitalism through the negativitiesof its stratification, its privatization of consumption, and its disorganizationvis-a-vis political and trade-union bureaucracies’.21

Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

719

In ‘Fires’ Carver writes:

For years my wife and I had held to a belief that if we worked hardand tried to do the right things, the right things would happen. It’snot such a bad thing to try to build a life on. Hard work, goals, goodintentions, loyalty, we believed these were virtues and would someday be rewarded. . . .The time came and went when everything my wife and I held sacred,or considered worthy of respect, every spiritual value, crumbled away.Something terrible had happened to us. It was something that we hadnever seen occur in any other family. We couldn’t fully comprehendwhat had happened. . . . We simply could not have anticipatedanything like what was happening to us (F, pp. 33–34).

Like the working class Davis describes, Carver and his wife are rep-resented here as ‘integrated into American capitalism’. They invested inthe hegemonic narratives of contemporary consumer society – workinghard, loyalty, trying to advance themselves through education, doing theright things. But the socio-economic world inflicted experiences – bank-ruptcy, unemployment, and working hard and getting nowhere – aboutwhich those hegemonic narratives had little or nothing to say. WhatCarver is describing here in autobiographical terms is common in hisearly fiction. As he once put it, ‘Essentially, I am one of those confused,befuddled people’.22

�

In 1968, aged 30, Carver secured his first white-collar job as a textbookeditor in Palo Alto. It was here he met Gordon Lish, who went on to becomefiction editor of Esquire. In his new post, Lish encouraged Carver to submitsome stories. According to this re-telling – there would be a number over theyears – Carver sent in four or five before striking lucky:23

. . . I was writing a short story that I’d called ‘The Neighbors’. Ifinally finished it and sent it off to Lish. A letter came back almostimmediately telling me how much he liked it, that he was changingthe title to ‘Neighbors’, that he was recommending to the magazinethat the story be purchased. It was purchased, it did appear, andnothing, it seemed to me, would ever be the same again. Esquiresoon bought another story, and then another story, and thenanother story, and so on (F, p. 39).

For Carver the moment was significant in that it consolidated aworking relationship that would continue for the best part of his career.Lish not only facilitated the publication of ‘Neighbors’ (the story appeared

Textual Practice

720

in Esquire in June 1971) but was instrumental in Carver securing a contractwith McGraw-Hill for his first collection,Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?(1976). Lish became Carver’s editor and made a significant, and now con-troversial contribution, helping to shape the remorselessly pared-down aes-thetic for which Carver became renowned. (A forceful and sometimesoverbearing editorial presence in Carver’s first two books, Lish took alesser role in the third).24 ‘Neighbors’ also marked Carver’s passage fromsmall literary journals into a lucrative mass readership: as Carver empha-sizes, this alleviated financial burdens – the stories were not only acceptedand published, they were ‘purchased’ and ‘bought’. The same year, Carversecured a foothold in the rapidly expanding structure of American aca-demic creative writing programmes, taking up a post at the Universityof Santa Cruz. His writing and reputation had become a marketable com-modity and it is appropriate that ‘Neighbors’, the five-page story thatlaunched his career as professional writer and university lecturer, dealswith questions of class and social mobility. The first paragraph runs:

Bill and Arlene Miller were a happy couple. But now and then theyfelt they alone among their circle had been passed somehow, leavingBill to attend to his bookkeeping duties and Arlene occupied withsecretarial chores. They talked about it sometimes, mostly in com-parison with the lives of their neighbours, Harriet and Jim Stone.It seemed to the Millers that the Stones lived a fuller and brighterlife. The Stones were always going out to dinner, or entertainingat home, or travelling about the country somewhere in connectionwith Jim’s work (SRC, p. 17).

The stuttering prose of the second sentence, with its ungainly syntaxand long string of monosyllables, enacts the difficulty of constructing acoherent story from intractable and confusing social material. TheMillers have done the right things, but the right things have not happenedfor them. They feel this, but do not understand it and have no language ornarrative through which to articulate or explain it. While others havemoved up through work, the Millers are simply left doing it. Jim Stonehas made it onto the threshold of the professional-managerial class withhis career as a salesman; Bill Miller is a bookkeeper, an occupation under-going a period of de-skilling and mechanization at the time when the storywas written.25 Jim Stone has a profession; Bill Miller has ‘duties’; Arlenehas only ‘chores’.

Although critics have tended to discuss this tale of house-sitting interms of voyeurism – and this is indeed a text about the otherness ofother people – Carver makes it explicit that questions of social hierarchyplay an important role in the Millers’ responses to the Stones’ apartment.26

Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

721

Bill Miller searches the apartment, moving ‘slowly through each room con-sidering everything that fell under his gaze, carefully, one object at a time’(SRC, p. 19). Part hunt, part inventory, at these moments he seems to besearching for the secret of the Stones’ success. Arlene conducts a search ofher own and finds some photographs (SRC, p. 21).

Like many of Carver’s characters, the Millers improvize with the avail-able materials. Watching the Stones drive away, Arlene complains, ‘Godknows, we could use a vacation’ (SRC, p. 17) and the Millers proceed tomake the best of things by taking a vacation in the neighbouring apart-ment. Contact with the apartment arouses a tired sex life – both Millersmasturbate in the Stones’ apartment. Bill truants from work to enjoy theapartment; like a relaxed holidaymaker, he forgets what day it is whenhe enters the place (SRC, p. 20). And like the ideal holiday destination,the apartment provides an opportunity to explore different identities –Bill sheds his own clothes and dresses up in Jim Stone’s holiday clothes(Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts) before trying on Harriet’s outfits(SRC, p. 20).

Initially the Millers’ behaviour is roughly obedient to hegemonicmores and narratives. The couple indulge in a type of vicarious consump-tion; they create a holiday from unpromising materials; they ease theirsocial frustrations by impersonating the Stones and playfully occupyingthe higher social niche that the Stones’ apartment describes; they imagi-natively perform the social promotion onto the edge of the PMC notavailable in the real world. But from the outset, this consumption byproxy exists alongside a more subversive mode of response: Bill searchesfor the secret of the Stones’ success, pilfers what he can (an unofficialremuneration for his time), and ‘steals’ back time from his own employerin order to devote himself to pleasure in the Stones’ place. At the end ofthe story, this mode becomes pronounced. Both Millers move from‘wishing’ it was them to imagining how it might become them. Theystart to think in terms of the dream home materializing into a realhome, of somehow expropriating their neighbours’ status and assumingtheir identity: Bill initially ‘wondered whether they would ever return’(SRC, p. 20); Arlene confesses to a similar fantasy (SRC, p. 20). Optimis-tically he replies that ‘Anything could happen’; Arlene adds, ‘Or maybethey’ll come back and . . .’. It is at this moment of muffled utopian think-ing, hesitant confession and conspiratorial murmuring that they realizethe key is locked in the flat and that they are locked out. The storyends with a Beckettian tableau: ‘They stayed there. They held eachother. They leaned into the door, as if against a wind, and braced them-selves’ (SRC, p. 22).

The Millers’ momentary desire to wrest a realm of freedom fromthe realm of necessity is, of course, partly comic. The joke at the heart

Textual Practice

722

of the story is that the Millers and Stones are so similar. They live in thesame apartment block and move in the same circles. At the same time,the story explores the reason why this small social difference is experiencedas being so vast. It appears vast because it is inexplicable: it is a slight differ-ence, but as real and insurmountable as a glass ceiling. The Millers havedone the right things, but the right things have not happened. Thecouple have no way to comprehend or talk about this, but nonethelessbegin to imagine making the right things happen – becoming theStones – by doing the wrong things – somehow expropriating their apart-ment. This is an unusual moment in Carver’s fiction. The Millers’ mischiefin the Stones’ apartment begins to edge towards something more con-scious. Rather than resourcefully coping with the way things are, theMillers tentatively begin to imagine a structural reversal. It is a momentof hesitant redistributive thought in which the vagueness of their plansreflects the fact that they are pushing against the weight of the storiesthrough which they live their lives, in an attempt to hook onto otherstories, other mediations. Utopian thinking, the text implies, is like ahalf-remembered dream – a depleted discourse only possible when theimagined reversals are very slight. At the exact moment when the Millersbegin to imagine the social cleavage being overcome, in other words,just as class begins to happen, they are punished by the story’s plot. Thelogic of the story reflects the rules of society and functions as a punitivesuperego. Utopian thought is slapped down by the reality principle andthe Millers are locked out of the flat. They are alert to the symbolism ofthe everyday. The portentous ending suggests that they are braced tosuffer more than social embarrassment. Dissatisfied with their lot andunable to attain any other, they are marooned in the corridor, suspendedin limbo between their apartment and the one they have dreamed of. Theirphysical position reflects their social location. They realize that their desirescan neither be satisfied by doing the right things nor by not doing them.Opaque and dense, Carver’s text allegorizes the difficulty of developingand sustaining oppositional consciousness in the current climate.Utopian thought exists as a trace. The text both creates a space for itsexpression and, by punishing it, enacts Carver’s political pessimism.There is apparently no outlet for utopian impulses here beyond the consu-merist modes sanctioned by hegemonic discourses.

�

Published in 1976, Carver’s first book of stories presents equally com-pressed mediations of a social world in which full time work in heavyindustry is in decline and low paid, irregular work in the service sectortakes up the slack.27 Carver found that the predominantly realist and nat-uralist formations of earlier working-class protest fiction had no purchase

Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

723

on his world: he did not see himself as belonging to a tradition of working-class fiction, any more than to a tradition of working-class militancy(though, he insisted, it was not the socialism of writers like TheodoreDreiser and John Dos Passos he objected to, but their prose).28 The claus-trophobic fables of alienation written by Kafka and Beckett were more sig-nificant to him.

His subject matter is a particular ‘structure of feeling’, the term usedby Raymond Williams to cover ‘meanings and values as they are activelylived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematicbeliefs’, ‘practical consciousness of a present kind’, ‘a social experiencewhich is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social buttaken to be private, idiosyncratic’.29 For the reasons outlined above,Carver’s structure of feeling is ‘at the edge of semantic availability’,in Raymond William’s terms.30 Whereas a fully functional set of alreadycodified narrative strategies and conventions are in place to explain andgive narrative form to his father’s experiences – including 1930sworking-class fiction – no such conventions are available to representCarver’s own generation (‘the new generation’, wrote Williams, ‘willhave its own structure of feeling, which will not appear to have come“from” anywhere’).31

Shock, not solidarity, is common in Carver’s early writing. Shock –‘immediate’ experience, or experience unmediated by narrative – occurswhen characters are confronted with events that do not feature in the hege-monic stories through which they experience the social world. The realworld, in Carver, is often de-realized in a gap between the way thingsshould be (according to hegemonic stories), the way they are (unemploy-ment, bankruptcy), and the absence of a functional language (oppositionalrepresentation) to explain (‘articulate’) the difference. The everyday worldCarver ‘knew’ was mysterious and not available for coherent representation.Like the slippage between hegemonic stories and real socio-economicexperience, the related struggle to represent a distinctive structure offeeling from within a cultural and political context of under-representationis an important source of Carver’s novel off-centre realism. As critic DavidKauffman points out, the ‘conjunction of incomprehension and inexpressi-bility – whichmanifest itself in empty epiphanies brought on by an oddnessin the everyday – runs through Carver’s work’.32 And if empty epiphaniesare a recurrent experience in Carver, parataxis, as Kauffman stresses, is theirmedium. The struggle to sustain a narrative, to connect events, to dis-tinguish between the more and less important, to describe and explain, tofeel and articulate, finds its linguistic form in the fractured syntax of someof Carver’s most disquieting sentences.33

�

Textual Practice

724

Many of Carver’s early stories both address and reproduce a crisis innarrative; they deal with situations in which nobody knows either what ishappening or what is going to happen next. The stories are anti-realist –even cartoon-like – in erasing almost all oppositional mediations fromthe social world, that is, in emphasizing the absence of those types of oppo-sitional representation and consciousness that might shed some light onwhat’s happening. It’s a critical commonplace to point out that inCarver’s fiction the characters lack both historical perspectives and politicalopinions.34 There are almost no dates in Carver: his characters inhabit aperpetual present. In the entire corpus of America’s most famous blue-collar realist, there is not a single strike, trade unionist, political party orsustained political discussion. Set in this highly magnified context, thetexts dramatize characters confronting experiences that lie outside the hege-monic stories through which they apprehend the social world.

�

Earl Ober, the unemployed salesman in ‘They’re Not Your Husband’,is typically making it up as he goes along and improvising with the avail-able materials. Carver’s text reproduces his perspective – the storiesthrough which he experiences the world – and no public, political or econ-omic explanations are given for his situation. He copes with his unemploy-ment – of having nothing to manage or sell – privately, domestically. Hissocial identity is defined by his occupation as a salesman. Denied that rolein the productive economy – there’s no work for salesmen – he reproducesand performs it at home, aggressively managing his wife’s diet before com-modifying and selling her, inviting other men to look at her over thecounter where she works as a waitress. He lives in a culture that commo-difies women and, without a story or identity, uses her as his lastsample. The story’s grim humour resides in the bland unscrupulousnesswith which he privileges his identity as a salesman over being his wife’shusband. Carver’s tale dramatizes the effects of a particular type of disem-powerment. Thrown back on his resources, and having no available oppo-sitional narratives and no identity outside his economic function, Earlblithely deconstructs the perceived opposition between the competitiveworkings of the broader economy and the domestic sanctuary wheredifferent values supposedly prevail. When push comes to shove, Carver’stext suggests, home isn’t where the heart is: the market is the overpoweringstory.

‘What Is It?’ covers similar ground.35 The unemployed and bankruptLeo also views his wife as his last commodity: her body represents the soleremnant of a vanished era of prosperity, and he touches her ‘stretch marks’while recalling a bygone era of easy credit and voracious consumerism(SRC, p. 159). Again, the narrative both reproduces and thematizes the

Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

725

shock of having no story or language to describe or explain events (it’snever even clear who’s telling the story, or why). Mulling over his inexplic-able bankruptcy, Leo thinks: ‘But bankruptcy is a company collapsingutterly, executives cutting their wrists and throwing themselves fromwindows, thousands of men on the street’ (SRC, p. 154). Leo is heregroping for a counterpoint or oppositional mediation to describe orexplain what is happening. Under-represented both culturally and politi-cally, all he can come up with are the half forgotten cinematic cliches ofmovies about the Wall Street crash and the depression (‘thousands ofmen on the street’). Again, Carver’s tale dramatizes the effects of disen-franchisement in which, in the absence of a language of class and opposi-tional mediations, the social world is thoroughly naturalized.Unemployment is inexplicable and the only available responses to it areprivate and self-destructive. These texts are the location of a struggle toarticulate a structure of feeling on the edge of semantic availability, tofind aesthetic forms to narrate social experience that seem beyond narra-tive. Produced from a context of weak class mediation and under-represen-tation in political and cultural senses, they are simultaneously inhabited byclass feeling and struggle to dramatize and articulate those feelings. They’remost suggestive politically when chronicling the consequences of theabsence of class-consciousness, and the absence of strong mediationsthrough which to apprehend, narrate and explain social cleavage. Theyare oppositional, counter-hegemonic mediations (they tell differentstories) and knowingly symptomatic of the historically generated crisis inclass-consciousness identified by Davis and Aronowitz.

�

Writing provided Carver with the social promotion unavailable to hismost memorable characters, and the upward trajectory of his career is wellchronicled. He broke into further mass-circulation magazines includingHarper’s Bazaar and the New Yorker; after overcoming alcoholism in1977 he published two more critically acclaimed story collections, WhatWe Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) and Cathedral (1983);he scooped increasingly prestigious awards. The 5-year Mildred andHarold Strauss Livings Fellowship (1983) enabled him to withdrawfrom his parallel career as creative writing lecturer.36 As critics haveoften pointed out there is a gradual shift in his writing from the dead-end minimalism of the early work to the more coherent narratives andoptimistic outcomes of the later.37 Aesthetic shifts are not, of course, redu-cible to biographical facts, but there is a broad correspondence between themore generous scope and moods of the later writing and Carver’s socialmobility.38 ‘The characters in the later stories’, Carver admitted, ‘are not

Textual Practice

726

destitute or trapped or beaten up on by circumstances. . . . They makedecisions’ (CRC, p. 157).

In his comparatively affluent and sober years, Carver’s fiction oftenexplored different settings – many of the stories are focused through thelikes of the Stones rather than the Millers. Two of his best-knownstories, ‘Feathers’ and ‘Cathedral’, show characters moving from prejudiceto respectful decency, measuring Carver’s progress from a writer strugglingto articulate the structure of feeling of a submerged population to whatTheodor Adorno described, in another context, as a more fluent ‘friendof mankind’.39 Other stories revisit the old life, but tell different stories,retroactively suffusing the earlier settings with new optimism. The posthu-mously published ‘Elephant’, for example, returns to the blue collar milieuof the early work, but in a conservative revision, shows the protagonistdealing with financial strain by discovering resources of inner strength.40

The ending, which seems ‘unrealistic’ in comparison to the early work’sdensity, opacity and ‘dis-ease’, endorses those same hegemonic narratives(doing the right things, pulling oneself up by the boot straps) that theearly stories figured as part of the problem.

�

The autobiographical poem ‘Shiftless’ (1985) revisits the sharp socio-economic stratifications of Carver’s earlier life, in this case, his 1940s child-hood. In the poem, the Carver family are suspended precariously between‘people who were better than us’ – the more affluent ‘comfortable’ definedby their painted houses, flush toilets and ‘cars whose year and make wererecognizable’ – and the ‘sorry’ who ‘didn’t work’, with ‘strange cars . . . onblocks in dusty yards’. The text runs on:

The years go by and everything and everyonegets replaced. But this much is still true –I never liked work. My goal was alwaysto be shiftless. I saw the merit in that.I liked the idea of sitting in a chairin front of your house for hours, doing nothingbut wearing a hat and drinking cola.What’s wrong with that?Drawing on a cigarette from time to time.Spitting. Making things out of wood with a knife.41

Light-hearted and self-mocking in tone, the poem offers a wry line insocial comment. It registers, for instance, that according to society’s hege-monic discourses, to be better off is to be better (being able to afford a flushtoilet is a measure of human worth); those worse off are sorry (in the sense

Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

727

of pathetic, according to dominant discourses, and also apologetic: here thetext registers that, in the absence of oppositional mediations, the worse offinvest in the dominant stories and are compliantly sorry for their economicinactivity). By italicizing ‘sorry’, and refusing to describe the lower socio-economic group as ‘worse’ (rather than ‘worse off ’), the speaker declinesto repeat the dominant logic. ‘The years go by and everything and everyonegets replaced’ then catches a glimpse of determining economic and politicalstructures behind the familiar social world: workers, like the cars theyproduce in order to live (and consume in order to keep the economybuoyant/describe their status), have to be reproduced if the system is tobe maintained. Fordist systems of production and consumption aresubtly invoked by the text’s association of cars, shifts, work, consumption,people and objects being replaced.42 Written at a moment ofde-industrialization, when the Fordist post-war settlement was bucklingbeneath economic and political pressure, the poem sets off a series ofpuns around the meaning of ‘shiftless’: the speaker always had ambitionsto be shiftless, or without ambition; he always had ambitions to bewithout a shift, without shiftwork (perhaps like a writer); shift workersare currently being replaced, becoming shiftless, due to plant closures,imports and automation.43 The puns on ‘shiftless’ establish an uneasy alli-ance between those now without shifts and the poem’s perpetually shiftlessspeaker: always reluctant to be part of this pattern of mechanized socialreproduction, he preferred the idea of ‘sitting in a chair’ and ‘[m]akingthings out of wood with a knife’ – a type of anachronistic craftsmanshipseemingly outside or pre-dating the alienating processes whereby thingsand people are reproduced (‘the professional managerial workers exist’,write B. and J. Ehrenreich, ‘only by virtue of the expropriation of theskills and culture once indigenous to the working class’).44 The poemjokily makes the case for preferring artisan-like, pre-Fordist, shiftless crea-tive work (making things out of bits of wood). It also shies from theimplied political analysis (Fordism as mechanised expropriation ofworking-class skills). Instead the poem situates shiftless creativity – suchas Carver’s writing of the poem – squarely outside the circle of real econ-omic activity (shiftless wood-whittling/writing is not presented as analternative career plan). Nor is whittling/writing presented as oppositional,insubordinate or politicized – even in the sense of a purposefully shiftlessrefusal to obey dominant ideologies, rules and expectations. Removed fromthe economic sphere and the practice of constructing social meaning,writing is an innocently autonomous and idiosyncratic pastime: ‘Where’sthe harm there?’

�

As Carver passed beyond the pressured creative struggle of the earlywork – up through text-book editor, lecturer, writer – he became at

Textual Practice

728

once more forthcoming and contradictory about writing, class, politics andthe relationship between them, and repeatedly worried away at these issuesin essays, poems and interviews. It was in the period of his celebrity andsocial mobility that he consistently emphasized his background, particu-larly his father’ class profile. He also conceptualized and described hisown literary work in a variety of ways: in the section of ‘Fires’ (1982)quoted previously, he directly addressed the economics of success –‘Neighbors’ was ‘purchased’ by Esquire (F, p. 39); elsewhere in ‘Fires’, asin ‘Shiftless’ and other 1980s retrospective accounts of his emergence asa writer, financial questions are suppressed and writing is instead presentedas an activity serenely remote from the workaday world.45 Unlike his dayand night jobs, but like making things out of wood, writing was a ‘craft’,and Carver’s commitment to both performing and describing the materialwork of writing – drafting, editing, revising, polishing – was a recurrenttheme in the 1980s (F, p. 45).46 ‘I respect that kind of care for what isbeing done’ he explained in ‘On Writing’ (1981):

That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the rightones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can bestsay what they are meant to say . . . if the writing can’t be made asgood as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end, thesatisfaction of having done our best, and the proof of that labour,is the one thing we can take into the grave (F, pp. 24–25).

Unlike the job opportunities offered by the real world, writing isworthwhile creative work (it’s made) that promises ‘satisfaction’ if ‘madeas good as it is within us to make it’. Typically, however, Carver’s discourseon writing is a fraught space: writing is a craft outside the alienation andtransactions of the productive economy; it’s also ‘labour’ – the wordimmediately repositions writing back inside the productive economy,and perhaps betrays an anxiety that the shiftless craft of writing is notwork at all. He wants writing to be a craft rather than a commodity, butis loath altogether to relinquish its social function. In another essay firstpublished in 1983 writing is not ‘labour’ but now a ‘profession’(F, p. 46), a ‘career’ (in the same sentence it’s also a ‘calling’) (F, p. 47).

�

The proliferation of competing descriptions reveal contradictions thatCarver never resolved: writing is ‘labour’ with a social function; a craftoutside alienating processes; and a reputable profession. The intrinsicallycontradictory class location of the professional middle class – to whichthe work of writing was always central – is at play here: historically thePMC belongs neither to capital nor labour but anxiously mediates

Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

729

between the two.47 The structural contradiction of the PMC is magnifiedby the blue-collar social mobility of Carver’s own biography. In late inter-views Carver asserts that he’s still on the side of the submerged population,and that his credentials to speak on behalf of that population are in order:‘The things that have made an indelible impression’ he said in one inter-view, ‘are the things I saw in lives I witnessed being lived around me,and in the life I myself lived’ (CRC, p. 112); situating himself in the tra-dition of Chekhov, he describes writing about ‘a submerged population’and giving ‘voice to people . . . not so articulate’ (CRC, p. 112). At thesame time, there’s a reluctance to be identified as a partisan, politicalwriter, even when that submerged population are being replaced andbecoming shiftless during the era of Reaganomics and the breakdown ofthe post-war consensus. ‘I write oftentimes about working-class people,and the dark side of Reagan’s America. So in that regard I suppose thestories can be read as a criticism, as an indictment’ he said on one occasion,before qualifying the remark: ‘But that has to come from the outside.I don’t feel I’m consciously trying to do that’ (CRC, p. 201). A felt buthesitant class affiliation is in conflict with a desire is to emphasize athorough and overriding professional affiliation to the ‘writer’s valuesand craft’ (F, p. 46): technical expertise, social detachment, not allowingwords to become ‘heavy with the writer’s unbridled emotions’(F, p. 25). On the one hand this is a familiar discourse of what AntonioGramsci called the ‘traditional’ intellectual – a group existing in the inter-stices of society and experiencing itself as ‘autonomous and independent ofthe dominant social group’ ‘endowed with a character of their own’seemingly apart from social life.48 At the same time, it’s a discourse ofprofessional impartiality fundamental to the PMC to which Carveractually, and inevitably, now belonged.49

�

Fourteen years after his breakthrough, Carver’s late poem ‘LockingYourself Out, Then Trying to Get Back In’ (1985) revisits and re-writesthe closing tableau of ‘Neighbors’.50 The poem is confessional in tone,autobiographical in focus, and knowingly translates a slight anecdoteinto a broader moral with ‘If this sounds/like the story of a life, okay’.The poem’s speaker – it is probably safe to call him Carver – describeslocking himself out of his comfortable home on a rainy day. He longinglypeers through a downstairs window at the consumer durables within, ‘thesofa, plants, the table / and chairs, the stereo set-up’. He climbs a ladderand looks into his writing room, ‘at my desk, some papers, and mychair’. Circling his own property like a prospective burglar leads to a famil-iarly Carveresque sense of dissociation. The writing desk becomes thepoem’s focal point and Carver temporarily enjoys the complex vision

Textual Practice

730

offered by the new perspective of being in two places at once, ‘To be there,inside, and not be there’, of looking in and imagining himself at the desklooking out. Carver then visualizes himself at his desk, ‘Thinking aboutsome other place / and some other time’, and mining the past for material,writing about the former life he no longer leads. But being temporarilylocked out of the comfortable professional writer’s life suddenly bringsthe other world dangerously close to home. From imagining himselfsitting at his writing desk and thinking about that other life, that otherlife looms up before him: what if he can’t get back in? The poem thenrecords a jolting, visceral response to the old life: ‘a wave of grief passedthrough me’, ‘I felt violently ashamed / of the injury I’d done backthen’. It’s at this point that he enacts violence on the new home. Ratherthan remaining suspended outside the threshold of the PMC – like theMillers in ‘Neighbors’ – he breaks and re-enters: ‘I bashed that beautifulwindow. / And stepped back in’. And rather than re-visiting andwriting-up the old life, as in ‘Shiftless’, this poem – written when he’ssafely reinstalled at his desk – scrutinizes some of the complexities andcontradictions involved in that process. An allegory of social mobilityand class guilt, Carver presents the material comfort of the writer’slife – consumer goods and a room in which to work – as an occasionto reflect on former ‘dis-ease’, and a sanctuary from it.

University of Salford

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 (SantaBarbara, California: Capra Press, 1983), pp. 187–189, and reprinted inWilliam L. Stull (ed.), Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction andProse (London: Harvill, 2000), pp. 181–185. ‘Fires’ was first published inAntaeus [New York], no. 47 (Autumn 1982), pp. 156–167 and then in aslightly different form in Syracuse Scholar [Syracuse University] 3, no. 2 (Fall1982), 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 citedparenthetically as F.

3 Tess Gallagher, foreword to Raymond Carver, Call If You Need Me: The Uncol-lected Fiction and Prose, ed. William L. Stull (London: Harvill, 2000), p. xiv.

4 Twenty-five Carver interviews are anthologized in Marshall Bruce Gentry andWilliam L. Stull (eds), Conversations with Raymond Carver ( Jackson andLondon: University Press of Mississippi, 1990). In compiling the book, the

Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

731

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 periodin which he finally overcame his longstanding alcoholism.

5 For Carver as a blue-collar writer see Bruce Weber, ‘Raymond Carver: AChronicler of Blue-Collar Despair’, New York Times Magazine, 24 June1984, pp. 36–38; Gordon Burn, ‘Poetry, Poverty and Realism Down inCarver Country’, The Times [London], 17 April 1985, p. 12. Both are rep-rinted in Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L Stull (eds), Conversationswith Raymond Carver (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi,1990). See also Robert Towers, ‘Low-Rent Tragedies’, New York Reviewof Books, 14 May 1981, p. 38, and Jonathan Yardley, ‘Ordinary Peoplefrom an Extraordinary Writer’, Washington Post Book World, 4 September1983, p. 3.

6 Raymond Carver, ‘My Father’s Life’, originally published in Esquire (Septem-ber 1984) and reprinted in Raymond Carver, Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories(1985; London: Picador, 1986), p. 13. Further references are to this editionand will be cited parenthetically as F.

7 As Michael Denning has pointed out, the migration of 350,000 south-wester-ners became ‘the story by which Americans narrated the depression’ and itfound almost instant iconic status through a range of texts including the photo-graphs of Dorothea Lange (1935), documentary films such as The Plow WhichBroke The Plains (1936), political pamphlets like the Lang-Steinbeck collabor-ation Their Blood is Strong (1938), historiography such as Carey McWilliams’Factories in the Field (1939), and the novels of John Steinbeck and their filmadaptations. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Labouring of AmericanCulture 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, seeDenning,TheCultural Front, pp. 3–20,Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the Historyof the US Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 52–73 and DavidM. Gordon, Richard Edwards and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, DividedWorkers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridgeand New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 165–228. For theCommunist Party, see Albert Fried (ed.), Communism in America: A Historyin Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 227–337.The Lukacs quotation is from Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness:Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 1999), p. 326. See also Georg Lukacs, A Defence of History andClass Consciousness: Talisman and Dialectic, trans. Esther Leslie (London andNew 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 theGrand Coulee Dam project, see Ed Cray, Ramblin’ Man: The Life andTimes of Woody Guthrie (New York: Norton, 2004), pp. 207–214.

Textual Practice

732

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, seeBryan K. Garman, A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working Class Hero fromGuthrie to Springstein (Chapel Hill and London: University of North CarolinaPress), pp. 104–135.

12 Fredric Jameson, ‘Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture:Dog DayAfternoon 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 thework of Michael Denning for bringing Przeworski’s book to my attention.For Denning on Przeworski, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: DimeNovels and Working Class Culture in America (London and New York:Verso, 1987), pp. 77–79.

15 For a resume of these shifts, see Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consu-mer Society’ in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (1983; London: PlutoPress, 1985), pp. 124–125. For the 1950s boom, see Nigel Harris, OfBread and Guns: The World Economy in Crisis (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1983), pp. 30–73. For the significance of credit, home and car ownershipsee 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’ famouslyushered in a period in which collective wage bargaining and the quid proquo became the dominant paradigm of industrial relations. See Denning,The Cultural Front, pp. 22–24; Gordon, Edwards and Reich, SegmentedWork, pp. 165–170; Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of Amer-ican 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 AdamMeyer, 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 andStull, pp. 98–116 (p. 112).

Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

733

23 See also Michael Schumacher, ‘After the Fire, into the Fire: An Interview withRaymond Carver’, in Conversations with Raymond Carver, ed. Gentry andStull, pp. 234–235.

24 For the controversy over Lish’s editorial role, see D. T. Max, ‘The CarverChronicles’, New York Times Magazine, 9 August, 1998, p. 34. For a balancedoverview, see Arthur F. Bethea, Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction andPoetry 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. Forthe significance of the professional-managerial class in post-1945 US classrelations, see Nick Heffernan, Capital, Class and Technology in ContemporaryAmerican 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 RaymondCarver (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995), pp. 11–14.

27 The collections are Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (1976), What We TalkAbout When We Talk About Love (1981) and Cathedral (1983). These threebooks 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 AboutWhenWe Talk About Literature: An Inter-view 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: OxfordUniversity 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 Lentric-

chia, introduction to Lentricchia (ed.), New Essays on White Noise (Cambridgeand 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 exploringhow 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 ofGordon Lish’s editorial input into the early work has only recently come tolight, and paradoxically, the early stories most frequently recognized as

Textual Practice

734

quintessentially Carversque – the baffling, the ruthlessly pared-down – arethose to which Lish contributed most. Carver freely admitted the value of akeen-eyed editor. Once, when asked about the relationship between writerand editor, he quoted Ezra Pound’s observation – ‘It’s immensely importantthat 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 wasorganized in the United States and Western Europe for the duration of thelong postwar boom between 1945 and the early 1970s. The principalfeature of this period was the establishment of a durable balance betweenthe mass production of standardized goods on the one hand, and the mass con-sumption of such goods on the other’. Nick Heffernan, Capital, Class & Tech-nology 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 lawsof the market, these journals consistently published the best in contemporaryAmerican writing and remained exotically obscure (F, pp. 37, 44).

46 Carver described his writing practices as follows: ‘I try to do the story once inmaybe 35 or 40 pages, in longhand, knowing I’ll have to go back, and that thereal work will begin later after I get it typed up. And then it’s not at all uncom-mon to do 10 or 15 drafts, 20 drafts of that story’ (CRC, p. 13).

47 ‘The postwar explosion in higher education, writes Nick Heffernan, ‘theexpansion of the mass media, and the extension of the corporate bureaucraticapparatus from the regulation of consumption into the regulation of consump-tion and demand meant that “the material position of the [PMC during the1950s and 1960s] was advancing rapidly’. Heffernann, Capital, Class andTechnology, p. 88. The inset quotation is from B. and J. Ehrenreich, ‘TheProfessional-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 theGramscian sense – an organizer of masses of men, shaping and directing theconsciousness of the class to which he originally belonged – is as far-fetchedas the endings of 1930s proletarian novels, with their conversions to socialism

Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

735

and eruptions of social solidarity, seemed to Carver. Antonio Gramsci, ‘TheIntellectuals’ in Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (trans. and ed.),Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrenceand Wishart, 1971), pp. 3–23. In a significant article, Bill Mullen arguesthat whether he intended it or not, Carver does actually represent a late flower-ing 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 ‘theovert didacticism and attendant sentimentality of earlier proletarian realism’;Carver’s pared down objectivity, for Mullen, ‘may be read as a satiriccomment on the voyeuristic restraint with which contemporary Americansociety – including its own diminishing traditional working class ranks –has observed the diminution of its human resources’ (pp. 101, 102). BillMullen, ‘A Subtle Spectacle: Televisual Culture in the Short Stories ofRaymond 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.

Textual Practice

736