Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ben Harker
To be there, inside, and not be there: Raymond Carver
and class
Textual Practice
about the lower-middle class rather than the working class. Immediately
wary of Altons line of questioning, Carver first responded with a bluff
anti-intellectualism Working class, lower-middle class, sure to
signal that Alton was splitting hairs (CRC, 161). Carver then moved
onto the terra firma of the real world and insisted that he wrote about a
very populous substratum of American life, before invoking his own autobiographical qualifications to describe it with, Thats where I lived for a
very long while (CRC, 161). He closed the matter by invoking his father:
My father and all my fathers friends and family were working-class
people. Their dreams were very circumscribed. They were people in a
different social situation than the people you and I hang out with
today, and they didnt seem to have the same sets of problems. Problems and worries, yes, but they were different. For the most part
they worked their jobs and took care of their property and their
families (CRC, 161).
The move here is from an ambiguous present to an apparently
simpler, more clear-cut past, from Raymond Carvers own contested
class location to the irrefutable proletarian credentials of his father,
Raymond Carver senior. It was a move that, towards the end of his
career, Carver would make on a number of occasions. In the celebrated
essay My Fathers Life, first published in 1984 for instance, Carver compares his own insecurity living between lives, moving from place to
place, trying to raise a family with that of his father.6 Raymond
Carver seniors story, the essay insists, was also one of physical movement
and economic distress, but of a more easily narrated and deciphered kind.
In short, it was a recognizable story, and a set of already-coded narrative
conventions exist to tell it: Carvers father was a victim of the Great
Depression, a farm worker from Arkansas who travelled north in search
of work. Of all the biographical data available to Carver about his
fathers life, he selects those that most resemble the scenarios of familiar
depression era representations to tell the story:7 Carvers narration of his
fathers migration on foot, hitching lifts, riding boxcars reads like a
synopsis of a depression era novel or film plot. Like the characters from
Steinbecks In Dubious Battle (1936) Raymond Carver senior worked
picking apples; like those of the Darryl Zanuck film adaptation of Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath (1940), he found refuge from the ravages of
the 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 construction
worker on the Grand Coulee Dam (F, 13). Raymond Carver senior was no
activist, but his was the moment of the militant Committee of Industrial
Organizations (CIO), the United Auto Workers (UAW) famous victory
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over General Motors, the pro-Trade Union Wagner Labor Relations Act,
and the high point of the Communist Party, the organization which for
Georg Lukacs was destined to mediate between social reality and political
consciousness and enable the working class to become fully aware of its
existence as a class.8 In short it was a moment when, as Michael
Denning points out, working people found representation in a double
sense of the word: political and industrial representation and representation in cultural forms.9 Carver continues:
My dad was still working on the dam, and later, with the huge turbines producing electricity and the water backed up for a hundred
miles into Canada, he stood in the crowd and heard Franklin
D. Roosevelt when he spoke at the construction site. He never mentioned those guys who died building that dam, my dad said. Some
of his friends had died there, men from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and
Missouri (F, 14).
In this passage, Raymond Carver junior has his father quietly giving
voice to, or being given voice by, the class-consciousness of that
moment. Class, as E. P. Thompson noted, is something that happens
and it is happening here just as it happens in the 26 songs that dust
bowl balladeer Woody Guthrie wrote during his commissioned 3-week
residency on the dam construction project.10 Like the sharply classconscious songs of Guthrie, here Carver, on behalf of Raymond Carver
senior, measures the scale of the engineering feat undertaken (huge turbines, hundred miles); Carvers fathers words then register the difference
between the official history (public oratory) and the unrecorded exploitation and suffering: he never mentioned the guys who died building that
dam. (Guthries songs do mention them: men have fought the pounding
waters, and met a watery grave.)11
Whether Carver junior is faithfully transcribing his fathers words or
making up dialogue is beside the point: Raymond Carver senior is being
simultaneously presented in terms of objective social relations as a
working man and in terms of his experience of that position. Social
class writes Fredric Jameson, is not merely a structural fact but also
very significantly a function of class consciousness, and the latter,
indeed, ends up producing the former just as surely as it is produced by
it.12 And class happens, writes E P. Thompson:
when some men [sic], as a result of common experiences (inherited
or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between
themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different
from (and usually opposed to) theirs.13
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In 1968, aged 30, Carver secured his first white-collar job as a textbook
editor in Palo Alto. It was here he met Gordon Lish, who went on to become
fiction editor of Esquire. In his new post, Lish encouraged Carver to submit
some stories. According to this re-telling there would be a number over the
years Carver sent in four or five before striking lucky:23
. . . I was writing a short story that Id called The Neighbors. I
finally finished it and sent it off to Lish. A letter came back almost
immediately telling me how much he liked it, that he was changing
the title to Neighbors, that he was recommending to the magazine
that the story be purchased. It was purchased, it did appear, and
nothing, it seemed to me, would ever be the same again. Esquire
soon bought another story, and then another story, and then
another story, and so on (F, p. 39).
For Carver the moment was significant in that it consolidated a
working relationship that would continue for the best part of his career.
Lish not only facilitated the publication of Neighbors (the story appeared
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Bill Miller searches the apartment, moving slowly through each room considering 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 be
searching for the secret of the Stones success. Arlene conducts a search of
her own and finds some photographs (SRC, p. 21).
Like many of Carvers characters, the Millers improvize with the available materials. Watching the Stones drive away, Arlene complains, God
knows, we could use a vacation (SRC, p. 17) and the Millers proceed to
make the best of things by taking a vacation in the neighbouring apartment. Contact with the apartment arouses a tired sex life both Millers
masturbate in the Stones apartment. Bill truants from work to enjoy the
apartment; like a relaxed holidaymaker, he forgets what day it is when
he 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 Stones holiday clothes
(Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts) before trying on Harriets outfits
(SRC, p. 20).
Initially the Millers behaviour is roughly obedient to hegemonic
mores and narratives. The couple indulge in a type of vicarious consumption; they create a holiday from unpromising materials; they ease their
social frustrations by impersonating the Stones and playfully occupying
the higher social niche that the Stones apartment describes; they imaginatively perform the social promotion onto the edge of the PMC not
available in the real world. But from the outset, this consumption by
proxy exists alongside a more subversive mode of response: Bill searches
for the secret of the Stones success, pilfers what he can (an unofficial
remuneration for his time), and steals back time from his own employer
in order to devote himself to pleasure in the Stones place. At the end of
the story, this mode becomes pronounced. Both Millers move from
wishing it was them to imagining how it might become them. They
start to think in terms of the dream home materializing into a real
home, of somehow expropriating their neighbours status and assuming
their identity: Bill initially wondered whether they would ever return
(SRC, p. 20); Arlene confesses to a similar fantasy (SRC, p. 20). Optimistically he replies that Anything could happen; Arlene adds, Or maybe
theyll come back and . . .. It is at this moment of muffled utopian thinking, hesitant confession and conspiratorial murmuring that they realize
the key is locked in the flat and that they are locked out. The story
ends with a Beckettian tableau: They stayed there. They held each
other. They leaned into the door, as if against a wind, and braced themselves (SRC, p. 22).
The Millers momentary desire to wrest a realm of freedom from
the realm of necessity is, of course, partly comic. The joke at the heart
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of the story is that the Millers and Stones are so similar. They live in the
same apartment block and move in the same circles. At the same time,
the story explores the reason why this small social difference is experienced
as being so vast. It appears vast because it is inexplicable: it is a slight difference, but as real and insurmountable as a glass ceiling. The Millers have
done the right things, but the right things have not happened. The
couple have no way to comprehend or talk about this, but nonetheless
begin to imagine making the right things happen becoming the
Stones by doing the wrong things somehow expropriating their apartment. This is an unusual moment in Carvers fiction. The Millers mischief
in the Stones apartment begins to edge towards something more conscious. Rather than resourcefully coping with the way things are, the
Millers tentatively begin to imagine a structural reversal. It is a moment
of hesitant redistributive thought in which the vagueness of their plans
reflects the fact that they are pushing against the weight of the stories
through which they live their lives, in an attempt to hook onto other
stories, other mediations. Utopian thinking, the text implies, is like a
half-remembered dream a depleted discourse only possible when the
imagined reversals are very slight. At the exact moment when the Millers
begin to imagine the social cleavage being overcome, in other words,
just as class begins to happen, they are punished by the storys plot. The
logic of the story reflects the rules of society and functions as a punitive
superego. Utopian thought is slapped down by the reality principle and
the Millers are locked out of the flat. They are alert to the symbolism of
the everyday. The portentous ending suggests that they are braced to
suffer more than social embarrassment. Dissatisfied with their lot and
unable to attain any other, they are marooned in the corridor, suspended
in limbo between their apartment and the one they have dreamed of. Their
physical position reflects their social location. They realize that their desires
can neither be satisfied by doing the right things nor by not doing them.
Opaque and dense, Carvers text allegorizes the difficulty of developing
and sustaining oppositional consciousness in the current climate.
Utopian thought exists as a trace. The text both creates a space for its
expression and, by punishing it, enacts Carvers political pessimism.
There is apparently no outlet for utopian impulses here beyond the consumerist modes sanctioned by hegemonic discourses.
Published in 1976, Carvers first book of stories presents equally compressed mediations of a social world in which full time work in heavy
industry is in decline and low paid, irregular work in the service sector
takes up the slack.27 Carver found that the predominantly realist and naturalist formations of earlier working-class protest fiction had no purchase
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on his world: he did not see himself as belonging to a tradition of workingclass fiction, any more than to a tradition of working-class militancy
(though, he insisted, it was not the socialism of writers like Theodore
Dreiser and John Dos Passos he objected to, but their prose).28 The claustrophobic fables of alienation written by Kafka and Beckett were more significant to him.
His subject matter is a particular structure of feeling, the term used
by Raymond Williams to cover meanings and values as they are actively
lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic
beliefs, practical consciousness of a present kind, a social experience
which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but
taken to be private, idiosyncratic.29 For the reasons outlined above,
Carvers structure of feeling is at the edge of semantic availability,
in Raymond Williams terms.30 Whereas a fully functional set of already
codified narrative strategies and conventions are in place to explain and
give narrative form to his fathers experiences including 1930s
working-class fiction no such conventions are available to represent
Carvers own generation (the new generation, wrote Williams, will
have its own structure of feeling, which will not appear to have come
from anywhere).31
Shock, not solidarity, is common in Carvers early writing. Shock
immediate experience, or experience unmediated by narrative occurs
when characters are confronted with events that do not feature in the hegemonic stories through which they experience the social world. The real
world, in Carver, is often de-realized in a gap between the way things
should be (according to hegemonic stories), the way they are (unemployment, bankruptcy), and the absence of a functional language (oppositional
representation) to explain (articulate) the difference. The everyday world
Carver knew was mysterious and not available for coherent representation.
Like the slippage between hegemonic stories and real socio-economic
experience, the related struggle to represent a distinctive structure of
feeling from within a cultural and political context of under-representation
is an important source of Carvers novel off-centre realism. As critic David
Kauffman points out, the conjunction of incomprehension and inexpressibility which manifest itself in empty epiphanies brought on by an oddness
in the everyday runs through Carvers work.32 And if empty epiphanies
are a recurrent experience in Carver, parataxis, as Kauffman stresses, is their
medium. The struggle to sustain a narrative, to connect events, to distinguish between the more and less important, to describe and explain, to
feel and articulate, finds its linguistic form in the fractured syntax of some
of Carvers most disquieting sentences.33
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The autobiographical poem Shiftless (1985) revisits the sharp socioeconomic stratifications of Carvers earlier life, in this case, his 1940s childhood. In the poem, the Carver family are suspended precariously between
people who were better than us the more affluent comfortable defined
by their painted houses, flush toilets and cars whose year and make were
recognizable and the sorry who didnt work, with strange cars . . . on
blocks in dusty yards. The text runs on:
The years go by and everything and everyone
gets replaced. But this much is still true
I never liked work. My goal was always
to be shiftless. I saw the merit in that.
I liked the idea of sitting in a chair
in front of your house for hours, doing nothing
but wearing a hat and drinking cola.
Whats 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 in
social comment. It registers, for instance, that according to societys hegemonic discourses, to be better off is to be better (being able to afford a flush
toilet is a measure of human worth); those worse off are sorry (in the sense
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once more forthcoming and contradictory about writing, class, politics and
the relationship between them, and repeatedly worried away at these issues
in essays, poems and interviews. It was in the period of his celebrity and
social mobility that he consistently emphasized his background, particularly his father class profile. He also conceptualized and described his
own 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, as
in Shiftless and other 1980s retrospective accounts of his emergence as
a writer, financial questions are suppressed and writing is instead presented
as an activity serenely remote from the workaday world.45 Unlike his day
and night jobs, but like making things out of wood, writing was a craft,
and Carvers commitment to both performing and describing the material
work of writing drafting, editing, revising, polishing was a recurrent
theme in the 1980s (F, p. 45).46 I respect that kind of care for what is
being done he explained in On Writing (1981):
Thats all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right
ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best
say what they are meant to say . . . if the writing cant be made as
good as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end, the
satisfaction 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 is
worthwhile creative work (its made) that promises satisfaction if made
as good as it is within us to make it. Typically, however, Carvers discourse
on writing is a fraught space: writing is a craft outside the alienation and
transactions of the productive economy; its also labour the word
immediately repositions writing back inside the productive economy,
and perhaps betrays an anxiety that the shiftless craft of writing is not
work at all. He wants writing to be a craft rather than a commodity, but
is loath altogether to relinquish its social function. In another essay first
published in 1983 writing is not labour but now a profession
(F, p. 46), a career (in the same sentence its also a calling) (F, p. 47).
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Notes
1 See Stephen Berg (ed.), In Praise of What Persists (New York: Harper and Row,
1983), pp. 33 44. Carver explains how Fires came to be written in his essay
On Rewriting, first published in Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, 1st edn (Santa
Barbara, California: Capra Press, 1983), pp. 187189, and reprinted in
William L. Stull (ed.), Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and
Prose (London: Harvill, 2000), pp. 181185. Fires was first published in
Antaeus [New York], no. 47 (Autumn 1982), pp. 156167 and then in a
slightly different form in Syracuse Scholar [Syracuse University] 3, no. 2 (Fall
1982), pp. 614.
2 Raymond Carver, Fires, in Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (1985; London:
Picador, 1986), p. 33. Further references are to this edition and will be cited
parenthetically as F.
3 Tess Gallagher, foreword to Raymond Carver, Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Prose, ed. William L. Stull (London: Harvill, 2000), p. xiv.
4 Twenty-five Carver interviews are anthologized in Marshall Bruce Gentry and
William L. Stull (eds), Conversations with Raymond Carver ( Jackson and
London: University Press of Mississippi, 1990). In compiling the book, the
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9
10
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editors drew upon the 50 or so interviews Carver gave between 1977 and 1988;
Carver seems to have given no interviews between 1977 and 1979, the period
in which he finally overcame his longstanding alcoholism.
For Carver as a blue-collar writer see Bruce Weber, Raymond Carver: A
Chronicler of Blue-Collar Despair, New York Times Magazine, 24 June
1984, pp. 3638; Gordon Burn, Poetry, Poverty and Realism Down in
Carver Country, The Times [London], 17 April 1985, p. 12. Both are reprinted in Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L Stull (eds), Conversations
with Raymond Carver (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi,
1990). See also Robert Towers, Low-Rent Tragedies, New York Review
of Books, 14 May 1981, p. 38, and Jonathan Yardley, Ordinary People
from an Extraordinary Writer, Washington Post Book World, 4 September
1983, p. 3.
Raymond Carver, My Fathers Life, originally published in Esquire (September 1984) and reprinted in Raymond Carver, Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories
(1985; London: Picador, 1986), p. 13. Further references are to this edition
and will be cited parenthetically as F.
As Michael Denning has pointed out, the migration of 350,000 south-westerners became the story by which Americans narrated the depression and it
found almost instant iconic status through a range of texts including the photographs of Dorothea Lange (1935), documentary films such as The Plow Which
Broke The Plains (1936), political pamphlets like the Lang-Steinbeck collaboration Their Blood is Strong (1938), historiography such as Carey McWilliams
Factories in the Field (1939), and the novels of John Steinbeck and their film
adaptations. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Labouring of American
Culture in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 1997),
p. 262. For a discussion of these texts, see pp. 260261.
For the periods industrial relations, see Denning, The Cultural Front, pp. 320,
Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History
of the US Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 5273 and David
M. Gordon, Richard Edwards and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided
Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 165228. For the
Communist Party, see Albert Fried (ed.), Communism in America: A History
in Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 227337.
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 and
Class Consciousness: Talisman and Dialectic, trans. Esther Leslie (London and
New York: Verso, 2000).
Denning, The Cultural Front, p. 261.
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; London:
Penguin, 1980), p. 9. For an account of the time spent by Guthrie on the
Grand Coulee Dam project, see Ed Cray, Ramblin Man: The Life and
Times of Woody Guthrie (New York: Norton, 2004), pp. 207214.
11 These lyrics are from Guthries Grand Coulee Dam, quoted in Cray,
Ramblin Man, p. 212. For analysis of Guthries class conscious lyrics, see
Bryan K. Garman, A Race of Singers: Whitmans Working Class Hero from
Guthrie to Springstein (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina
Press), pp. 104135.
12 Fredric Jameson, Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day
Afternoon as a Political Film (1977) reprinted in Signatures of the Visible
(New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 35 55 (p. 37).
13 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 89.
14 Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 69. I am indebted to the
work of Michael Denning for bringing Przeworskis book to my attention.
For Denning on Przeworski, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime
Novels and Working Class Culture in America (London and New York:
Verso, 1987), pp. 7779.
15 For a resume of these shifts, see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and Consumer Society in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (1983; London: Pluto
Press, 1985), pp. 124125. For the 1950s boom, see Nigel Harris, Of
Bread and Guns: The World Economy in Crisis (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1983), pp. 3073. For the significance of credit, home and car ownership
see Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience,
trans. David Fernbach (1976; London, New Left Books, 1979), pp. 141
160. For the emergence and consolidation of Fordism, see Nick Heffernan,
Capital, Class and Technology in Contemporary American Culture (London:
Pluto, 2000), pp. 128.
16 The 1950 General Motors-UAW contract or Treaty of Detroit famously
ushered in a period in which collective wage bargaining and the quid pro
quo became the dominant paradigm of industrial relations. See Denning,
The Cultural Front, pp. 22 24; Gordon, Edwards and Reich, Segmented
Work, pp. 165170; Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973), pp. 214
264; and Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, pp. 102 124.
17 B. and J. Ehrenreich, The Professional-Managerial Class in P. Walker (ed.),
Between Labor and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979), pp. 545 (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 Carvers life, see Adam
Meyer, Raymond Carver (New York: Twayne, 1995), pp. 1 18.
20 Aronowitz, False Promises, p. 6.
21 Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, p. 8.
22 Larry McCaffrey and Sinda Gregory, An Interview with Raymond Carver, in
Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s, ed.
McCaffrey and Gregory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987),
pp. 66 82, reprinted in Conversations with Raymond Carver, ed. Gentry and
Stull, pp. 98 116 (p. 112).
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23 See also Michael Schumacher, After the Fire, into the Fire: An Interview with
Raymond Carver, in Conversations with Raymond Carver, ed. Gentry and
Stull, pp. 234235.
24 For the controversy over Lishs editorial role, see D. T. Max, The Carver
Chronicles, New York Times Magazine, 9 August, 1998, p. 34. For a balanced
overview, see Arthur F. Bethea, Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and
Poetry of Raymond Carver (New York and London: Routledge, 2001).
25 For the mechanization of bookkeeping see Aronowitz, False Promises, pp.
293295; for the social mobility of those working in sales, see p. 307. For
the significance of the professional-managerial class in post-1945 US class
relations, see Nick Heffernan, Capital, Class and Technology in Contemporary
American Culture (London: Pluto, 2000), pp. 29 36.
26 See David Boxer and Cassandra Phillips, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?:
Voyeurism, Dissociation, and the Art of Raymond Carver, Iowa Review,
10.3 (summer 1979), pp. 75 90, and Kirk Nesset, The Stories of Raymond
Carver (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995), pp. 11 14.
27 The collections are Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (1976), What We Talk
About When We Talk About Love (1981) and Cathedral (1983). These three
books are collected in The Stories of Raymond Carver (London: Picador,
1985). References are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as SRC.
28 John Alton, What We Talk About When We Talk About Literature: An Interview with Raymond Carver, Chicago Review, 36 (Autumn 1988), pp. 421;
reprint, Conversations with Raymond Carver, ed. Gentry and Stull, p. 157.
Further references to this interview will be cited parenthetically as CRC.
29 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), p. 132.
30 Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 134.
31 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (1961: London: Hogarth, 1992),
p. 49.
32 David Kaufmann, Yuppie Postmodernism, Arizona Quarterly, 47.2 (summer
1991): pp. 93 116 (p. 99).
33 Kaufmann, Yuppie Postmodernism, p. 99.
34 For a critical take on Carvers lack of historical perspective, see Frank Lentricchia, introduction to Lentricchia (ed.), New Essays on White Noise (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
35 Carver later changed the title of this story to Are These Actual Miles.
36 See Appendix 6, Chronology in Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected
Poems, pp. 371375.
37 This trend is mapped by William Stull in Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side
of Raymond Carver, Philological Quarterly, 64 (1985), pp. 115.
38 There are inevitably significant exceptions to this trend. Preservation from
Cathedral is a relatively late story that exceeds even the early work in exploring
how the loss of narrative converts the domestic sphere from the stuff of readymade realism into a site of shock and dislocation. Furthermore, the degree of
Gordon Lishs editorial input into the early work has only recently come to
light, and paradoxically, the early stories most frequently recognized as
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