Raymond Carver inthe Viewfinder

Tamas Dobozy

Abstract: This paper examines the use of photography in Raymond Carver,both in the short story, Viewnder, and in the biographical photo-essay,Carver Country, as a metaphor for the political implications of the authorsaesthetic. Beginning with a consideration of the claims made in CarverCountry, the essay examines the scholarship on Carvers politics, especiallyclass politics, and then brings this discussion to bear on photography ingeneral, and the Polaroid photograph in particular, in Viewnder, toargue that Carvers work offers a utopian subjectivity in deance of thecapitalist norms that oppress his characters.

Keywords: Raymond Carver, photography, aesthetics, Reaganism,subjectivity, capitalism, short story, American literature

Resume : Le present article evalue lutilisation de la photographie dans lanouvelle Viewnder de Raymond Carver, ainsi que dans son diaporamabiographique, Carver Country, a` titre de metaphore des repercussions delesthetique de lauteur sur le plan politique. Lessai, qui commence parune etude des allegations presentees dans Carver Country, examine lamission professorale des politiques de Carver, et en particulier la politiquedes classes, puis ame`ne cette discussion vers la photographie en general,et la photographie polaroid en particulier, dans Viewnder , et fait valoirque luvre de Carver offre une subjectivite utopique qui dee les normescapitalistiques qui oppressent ses personnages.

Mots cles : Raymond Carver, photographie, esthetique, Reaganisme,subjectivite, capitalisme, nouvelle, litterature americaine

Carver Country

Late in Raymond Carvers career, his widow, Tess Gallagher, boughthim a leather jacket prior to a trip to Paris (Country 18). Her reason,she joked to Carver, was because she wanted him to look likeCamus (18). Three years later, Carver critic William L. Stull com-

6 Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne detudes americaines 41, no. 3, 2011

doi: 10.3138/cras.41.3.279

mented on such a jacket as an icon in one of two late photographsof Carver:

[Carver] and Gallagher both lived in Port Angeles, but theyshuttled between [. . .] his [house] in a blue-collar neighbourhood,hers in an upscale development. The doubleness appeared as wellin the faces Carver showed the world. In the jacket photo onUltramarine, he sports a shiny suit and looks every inch thefamous writer. On Where Im Calling From, he hunches in a well-worn leather jacket. (5)

Such photographs suggest a problematic that occupies much scholar-ship on Carver and realism as a whole: the doubleness of a writingthat is at once artistic and artless. Examining the photo-essay, CarverCountryan important biographical and aesthetic document forCarver scholarsand Carvers story, Viewnder, I will discussthe use of photography as a metaphor for the politics of Carversaesthetic, especially in regard to his representation of the loss of sub-jectivity in late capitalism, a loss in which Carver nds possibilityeven a utopian possibilityrather than limitation.

Critical/Political Contexts

In Carver Country, Gallaghers interpretations of Bob Adelmansphotographs (of the milieu from which Carver emerged) are criticalinterventions into Carvers stories, most often to evade the contra-dictions they present:

One of his [Carvers] French translators, Francois Lascan, hadoriginally mis-apprehended Rays stance in the stories as ironic.Then I happened to see a photograph of Raymond Carver and Ihad to revise my whole idea of his tone and attitude, he told mein Paris. I knew the man I was looking at in the photographcould never condescend to his characters. (10)

This is, in short, the primary argument of Carver Country: thatbecause photographs of Carver (and of his world) can be read un-problematically, so can Carvers writing, especially its politics. Thisdoes a disservice to both mediumsphotography and writingwhose bearing on the issue of artistic mediation has a long criticalhistory, as suggested by Ayala Amir, who probes Carvers use ofphotography to suggest the failed correspondence between textand story, representation and reality (39). Amir argues that thefailure of such correspondence is precisely the mental condition

280

Can

adia

nRev

iew

ofAm

eric

anSt

udie

s41

(2011)

of Carvers characters (45), so that photography serves, in storiessuch as Viewnder, to remind us of the limitstechnologicaland aestheticof artistic representation, and a society in whichsubjectivity is marked by a disjunction between experience andunderstanding.

Gallagher further presents Carvers work as a protest against thatsociety: what was happening in America during the Reagan eraand what continues under the Bush administration (10), especiallythe abdication of governmental concern for the lower and middleclasses. Her argument contrasts with early detractors of Carver,such as Madison Smartt Bell, who regards the short stories as bothproducts and producers of a relentless sameness, in which charactersresemble one another interchangeably, where settings are identicalto the point of placelessnes, and a uniformity of language erasesdistinctions between character and author. Instead of a clear-eyedportrait of working-class conditions in America in the 1970s and1980s, Bell nds a dime-store determinism in which Carverabuses his characters, presenting them as utterly unconscious onemoment and turning them into mouthpieces for his own notionsthe next. The characters come to resemble rats negotiating a mazethat the reader can see and they cannot (67). Such characterscannot envision an alternative subjectivity that might allow for thealleviation of the social illsdivorce, alcoholism, domestic violence,joblessnessthat oppress them. Similarly, Mark A. Facknitz speaksof Carver back during the dismal Reagan administration (149),while Joe David Bellamy and Charles Newman both charge himwith literary Republicanism (Bellamy 80). Josephine Hendin, bycontrast, sees in Carvers work a critique of the commercial cultureof the 1980s, with its collisions between emotion and materialism,individualism and commercial culture (233). Recently, Ben Harkerhas taken a nuanced stand between such positions, suggesting thatCarvers world is one in which there is apparently no outlet forutopian impulses [. . .] beyond the consumerist modes sanctionedby hegemonic discourses (723); in other words, the work is impli-cated in the politics of its time yet also critical of the social illseffected by those politics.

Other contemporary critics similarly relate Carvers work to socio-political contexts, including its relevance to social class; authenticity;political, historical, and cultural determinism; and aesthetic andontological theory. In 2006 the Journal of the Short Story in Englishdevoted a special issue to Carver, in which Vasiliki Fachard writes

281

Revue

canadiennedetudes

americaines

41

(2011)

of the doubleness that continues to confront scholars, and confounddualistic discourse. For Fachard, the stories are more about oscilla-tion (19)1 itself, about aesthetic process, than about what theymove toward. The articles oscillate between a view of Carver as anexponent of referential realism and a self-referential postmodernist,ranging from considerations of intrinsic doubleness (May); inter-textuality (Runyon); symbolic and factual control (Lehman); refer-entiality versus metactional self-regard (Bethea); a focus on humansubjects within a social framework and reality (Kleppe); a grapplingwith a temporality that escapes words (Schweizer); and explora-tions of narrative performance (Verley). The articles indicate thatCarver managed to accommodate both the self-referentiality ofmetaction, and the topicality of realism. The issue is not choosingsides, but on grappling with this movement within his textsachallenge to confront without reconciling the disparity between theaesthetic and the real.

Sandra Lee Kleppe and Robert Miltners 2008 anthology, New Pathsto Raymond Carver, also includes politically inected scholarshipon Carver. Kirk Nesset foregrounds social issues in his foreword,citing contemporary instances of corporate greed, failed politics,ecological disasters, and then following with,

Carvers gures are more relevant now than in the 1980s becausea larger swath of the population feels bewildered and helplessand numbers continue to rise. Yet [. . .] decency and compassionare key. They arise in Carver [. . .] from useful acts of theimagination, from the transmission and reception of stories andpoemsgestures that activate empathy, then recognition, andthen further acts of imagination, ideally, beyond reading andtexts, where restoratives lie. (xii)

Nesset suggests that the aestheticacts of imagination embodiedin stories and poemscan effect activism, so that acting uponCarvers politics involves considering exactly those acts of imagina-tion from which his work springs, how they are usefully embodiedin the works, and the possibilities they raise for political subjectivity.In his own way, Nesset, like Harker, asks us to consider the utopianimpulse within Carvers work, the degree to which that work is notjust symptomatic but resistant.

Fiction about Fiction versus Fiction about Life

This critical legacy is complicated by Carvers rejection of the textualtrickery of metaction (Fires 14). For Gallagher, overt intellectualism

282

Can

adia

nRev

iew

ofAm

eric

anSt

udie

s41

(2011)

(such as that of metaction) is at odds with Carvers desire to depictunderclass conditions. She recalls an episode in which Carver wasattacked by a woman for not being intellectually stimulating, towhich Gallagher imagines the response: Hey Toots, why dont youjust pop a Valium and get with the Wittgenstein (16). Wittgensteingures as the over-intellectual, hyper-theoretical world she denesCarvers aesthetic against. Richard Ford, while suggesting that theimmediate reaction to Carvers stories is an aesthetic onean aware-ness of Carvers stylistics (72)nonetheless writes that the storieshave life, not art, as [their] subject (72), suggesting that self-conscious artistry was secondary to Carvers work.

Gallagher links this refusal of aesthetic self-consciousness, andCarvers precisionism (18), with the plainspokenness of Adelmansphotography:

Landscape [was] crucial to the way Bob was able to suggest aforsaken quality in the lives of Rays characters. There is nothing,for instance, to give cover in the photograph of Wenas Ridge and,in this, it is like the oodlight intensity of Rays own writing,which put honesty of emotion and truth-telling above all, even tothe point of laying his characters lives open and vulnerable atmoments when they were most shamed and overwhelmed. Raysproclivity for scorning tricks in his writing, for choosing simplicityover ornamentation, for choosing economy as the most tellingsign of veracitythese seem present in elements of the Yakimalandscape. (9)

Here, the photographed landscapes of Yakima County are homolo-gous to Carvers aesthetic. The lack of cover in the surroundings isone with the oodlight intensity of the writing. The landscapeevinces qualitiessimplicity over ornamentation, economy as themost telling sign of veracityshe associates with Carver. Carversaesthetic is one with the earth from which it sprang, and thus hasa fundamental truth-value. The most telling aspect of Gallaghersdescription is that she makes no mention of Adelmans photographsmediating the landscapeoffering an aesthetic performance just asCarvers writing mediated the lives of the underclass. Instead, thatphotography, like Carvers writing, captures landscape exactly.

Thus, for Gallagher, Carvers work is not a representation but onewith the thing represented. With this notion, she negotiates thecontradiction between an artist who is not an artist because all hedoes is provide what is already there, and an artist who is an artist

283

Revue

canadiennedetudes

americaines

41

(2011)

because his aesthetic lets us see in ways weve never seen before.As Lilian Furst indicates in All Is True: The Claims and Strategies ofRealist Fiction, this dilemmabetween artlessness and artfulnesshad long occupied realism, charged with representing both faith-fully and artistically (67). Gallagher reconciles this paradox byconating style of representation with subject of representation. Herdictum, that economy is the most telling sign of veracity, makesone wonder, however, as to which is more unmediated: a writingthat masks the work of artice behind a myth of unmediated im-manence, or a writing that foregrounds artice in order to alert usto it? Charles May responds to exactly this by reminding us ofCarvers doubleness, in which reality seems both real and unrealat once. For May, stories such as Put Yourself in My Shoes askthe reader to identify with the [. . .] process by which a story iscreated, rather than [. . .] identifying with [. . .] as-if-real characters(34). I would extend this observation to Viewnder also, whichconsiders the role of artistic mediation vis-a`-vis subjectivity, espe-cially working-class subjectivity. What we must never forgetbutwhich arguments such as Gallaghers make it easy to forget isthe difference between Carvers representation of poverty and povertyitself. However his subjects might have described their lives, theywould not have described them as art. In conating precisionismwith non-mediation, and this with political validity, Gallagherargues for what her introduction is written against: namely, thatthe subject of Carvers stories is in fact Carver: For Ray had beenone of these people (10). The writers legitimacy rests on the factthat his experience, his background, his aesthetic form the contoursof the stories. We are thinking of Carver when we think werethinking of the working class.

Working the Underclass

For all of Carvers working-class associations and precisionism, hewas, as Stull and Harker point out, a nancially successful writer, sothat what we seein the monumentalizing of Carver in Adelmansblack and white photosis a transition similar to that undergone byhis subject matter: where lives that are ephemeral, transient, belowthe radar become immortalized in canonical stories and, ultimately,under the banner of Carver Country. But Carvers precisionismdoes not provide a portrait of the working class with delity;rather, it provides a portrait of what we are told is the way to repre-sent the working class with delity. What is culturally invisiblebecomes a photograph; what is transient becomes xed text; whatis ephemeral becomes set in the literary canon.

284

Can

adia

nRev

iew

ofAm

eric

anSt

udie

s41

(2011)

Harker describes Carvers stories as textual spaces negotiating thecontradictory class location of a distinguished professional writersynonymous with working-class settings (715), and, further, thatthe later stories reinforce the very American Dream (720) thattorments the protagonists of earlier stories with its demand for aheroic subjectivitytranscending class barriers to achieve successwhich obscures other kinds of subjectivity that might offer morecommunal solutions to social ills:

When Carver describes [his impoverished early 20s], and theywere an important part of his own working-class credentials, theemphasis is upon both the difcult socio-economic conditions andof subjective confusion, of being without a means to comprehendand narrate what is happening. Those oppositional mediations[. . .]trade unions, political parties and campaigns, modes ofpolitical analysis, cultural forms and representations throughwhich objective social conditions are embodied and experiencedand which shape class consciousnessare so weak as to be barelypresent. The submerged population to which Carver describesbelonging lacked visibility in a double sense: they were under-represented politically and culturally. [. . .] class was felt [. . .]but there wasnt a functional set of mediations through which toarticulate it. (719)

Harkers argument is crucial to mine in suggesting that Polaroidsnon-functional and underrepresentationaloffer a better aes-thetic analogy for Carver than Adelmans black and whites. WhileBell and Gallagher (however much they supercially disagree) xateon the idea of the individual artist as autonomous, transcendentvisionary, Harker suggests that Carvers aesthetic is conned andcompromised precisely because he himself was self-consciouslyconned and compromised. The disposable, instant, non-technical,expertise-less Polaroid locates the story amidst the same absence ofauthenticity, sense of uniqueness, means of forging a connectionwith the real that Carver faced. I would further suggest that Carverpermitted standing contradictions in his work because impasse wasprecisely what he wrote about. His stylistics invoke not only, inGallaghers words, economy as the most telling sign of veracity,but economy as the most telling sign of the economy. Newmanscommentary in The Post-Modern Aura can thus be turned to advan-tage. If Carvers style displays the classic conservative response toinationunderutilization of capacity, reduction of inventory, andverbal joblessness (93), then it offers a critique of and counter toReaganism in style itself. Carvers refusal of stylistic extravagance

285

Revue

canadiennedetudes

americaines

41

(2011)

which might provide a commentary on, or utopian alternative to,social conditions is not because he wanted to conrm the con-servative message that disenfranchisement is an individual ratherthan social problem, and that personal rather than political failureis responsible for want. Nor is his precisionism to suggest that realitycan be mediated by the right language, that reality is absolute ratherthan a discursive construct. As Viewnder demonstratesin whatis perhaps Carvers most radical movehis style is utopian in itsrefusal to enter into an argument with Harkers hegemonic dis-courses, because it refuses the very conditions of that debate:valorizing success over failure, connection over disconnection, self-hood over selessness. Despite the call for transcendence, Carverdoes not pursue a subject position counter to capitalism. Like Carver,the characters are looking for beauty in limitation, connement, andexactitude, as if a Polaroid might aspire to the monumental.

The View from Viewnder

I consider Carvers persistent doubleness a resistance to the tran-scendent subjectivity that capitalism and its opponents demand.Harkers concluding statementthat Carvers career offers anallegory of social mobility and class guilt where material successwas an occasion to reect on former dis-ease [working-classpoverty], and a sanctuary from it (731)marks my departure intoCarvers celebration of absent subjectivity.

In summary, Viewnder involves a man without hands (he hashooks instead) offering to take Polaroids of the narrators house,which, we are to understand, has recently been abandoned by thenarrators wife and children (11). The two men exchange anecdotesabout the failure of their respective marriages, suggesting that theloss of the photographers hands is somehow connected to hischildren. Following this, the narrator asks the photographer totake pictures of him in and around the house, nally demandingto be photographed hurling rocks from the roof into empty space.The photographer continues to snap away at the protagonist, eventhough, as he yells, his camera cant take motion shots (15). Hereis a man barely able to operate his equipment, which is already in-adequate to the task, taking pictures that will never represent theirsubject. As Amir says, the series of pictures underscores the breakin sequence inherent in the very act of representation. The possibilityof tracking movement is but an illusion; continuity is false anddelusive (39), pointing out that Viewnder is about the disjunc-

286

Can

adia

nRev

iew

ofAm

eric

anSt

udie

s41

(2011)

tion between the aesthetic and the real, between the story thatrepresents and what it represents. This is not the panoramic truthof Carver Country, but the evanescent world of Carverland.

Viewnder revisits the dilemma of realismthe conicted desireto mediate transparently and artisticallybut not in order to resolveit: Adorno, militating against the expulsion of negativity from art,which he read as a form of quietism, argued in favor of an art, suchas Raymond Carvers, that refused to defuse the contradictions andquandaries out of which it was born (Chenetier 182). As Chenetiersuggests, Carvers negativity is not the elucidation of symptomsand cures, but rather the making manifest [of what] cannot bepointed at, or the pointed use of misrepresentation.

As Arthur F. Bethea additionally reminds us, the title, Viewnder,foregrounds the importance of photography and photographicimages (270) in the story, to suggest that the story meditates onthe relationship between realism and photography (270), both ofwhich, Furst tells us, originated in the mid-1900s (True 6). Thephotograph offered competition (6) to realism in that it, too,strove to give a truthful representation of the real world [. . .]through meticulous observation, and [to do so] dispassionately, im-personally, and objectively (6). As well, the cameraa mechanicaldevicebecame emblematic of what realists didnt want to do:passively registering (9) phenomena. The camera amplied ananxiety felt by realist writers that they were only reproducingwhat was before them rather than creating art. This relationshipbetween the emerging technology of photography and the aestheticof realism connects with Betheas observations to suggest thatCarvers use of the Polaroid comments on the honesty andveracity of representation. The failure of the Polaroid to capturethe motion of the narrator at the end foregrounds the storysnonmimetic technique (Bethea 270). Encoded in the use of thePolaroid is an attentiveness to the way in which an aesthetic producesits subject. Amir likewise links the discontinuity presented byphotography with Carvers aesthetic (40). Here, a pre-emptive meansof representation emerges in place of verisimilitude. We regardViewnders narrator captured (both in the picture and in the prose)not as he is but as the lens of artistic preference and interference.

Moreover, a Polaroid produces a certain kind of picture. It is becausethe Polaroid cant do motion shots that the photos of the narratorsactions will appear unreal and extraordinary. The Polaroid is thus

287

Revue

canadiennedetudes

americaines

41

(2011)

as important to my reading as Adelmans photos to Gallaghers,not because the Polaroids mediate reality but because they cant.The artice of the Polaroid calls attention to articiality and therebyto what escapes articean image of Carverland. The language ofthe story does much the same.

Determining the Blur

The blurriness of the portrait Carver offers is marked not so muchby imprecision in language but by lapses of connection, or by alanguage documenting, as precisely as possible, the imprecision ofthe characters connections. Within the third paragraph the camera-man responds to the narrators question on how he got his hooksby saying, Thats another story [. . .] You want this picture or not(11)? The effect is twofold: rst, the response suggests that what weare getting is not that story, but this one, foregrounding, in a movereminiscent of metaction, the advent of narrative; second, thestatement this picture (emphasis mine) suggests congruence be-tween ctional and photographic texts. The characters are awarethat they are engaging in an aesthetic production like a photograph.Contextually, this picture tells us the story we are getting issimilar to the picture the man will take of the narrators homeaPolaroid. The photographer offers the narrator a picture of his lifein a medium instant, automatic, disposable. The Polaroid becomesa trope for an aesthetic sensibility Carver examines, engages in, andcritiques.

Shortly after this exchange, in the next two paragraphs, Carverpresents the rst of many non-sequiturs within the narrative: Come in, I said. I just made coffee. Id just made some Jell-O,too. But I didnt tell the man I did (11). Jello-O is a staple not onlyof the blue-collar world, but of the K-Mart realismwith its con-sumer goods and brand-name referencesthat Carver is frequentlyassociated with (Skenazy 77). The information in the non-sequiturremarks on the culture the characters inhabit, as well as weddingconsumer ephemera to motives. Why the narrator doesnt want tomention the Jell-O is unclear except in its inexplicableness. Carverlodges signicance in interpretive impasse rather than the bindingmatrix of symbolic meaningone of the many differences betweenCarverland and Carver Country.

Polaroids and Jell-O mark a rupture: the disjunction in symbolicand narrative logic offered by the pre-packaged dessert is Carvers

288

Can

adia

nRev

iew

ofAm

eric

anSt

udie

s41

(2011)

own break with an aesthetic sensibility that would make sense outof the chaos of experience and thereby transcend it. Carver countersthe claim Bell makes on the generic status of minimalism in thesame breath as he counters Gallaghers monumental vision of hiswork. The Polaroid serves not because Carver feels that his stories(or Polaroids) are necessarily throwaway, but because it is preciselyin the throwaway, the ephemeral, the misused (a Polaroid takingaction shots) that the characters have agency, that they canaestheticize their lives. They resist their generic status not whenthey aspire to transcendencethe cultural success storybutwhen they try to make a Polaroid do what it cant.

Carver is engaging with the historical moment, demonstrating thatmaterial forces and dominant institutions do delimit agency. Herecognizes the kind of world from which his aesthetic developed,and responds to this world not by presenting his writing processin heroic termsby creating monuments to the dispossessed, play-ing a messianic rolebut by dwelling in the failure of transcen-dence, including that of memorials. In this sense, the stories arelike a collection of Polaroids saved for posterity images whosebanality, generic status, and anonymity everywhere announce theimpossibility of what they are trying to do, addressing the unityof an epoch [that] abolishes all the distinctions that constitute thehappiness, even the moral substance, of individual existence(Adorno 267). Both narrator and photographer have lost theirfamilies, are traumatized, literally or guratively mutilated, yetneither can articulate his story or craft a meaning that would bridgeeach others subject positions. In the place of the panoramic, we getthe minuscule, the nonsensical, the bland, the atomized.

Non-sequiturs follow throughout. I might use your toilet (11,emphasis mine), the photographer says, the modal verb blurringour sense of an agent with denite motivation. Lets face it, ittakes a professional (12), the photographer tells the narrator, afterCarver has clearly established the dilettantish aspect of the camera.Three kids were by here wanting to paint my address on the curb.They wanted a dollar to do it. You wouldnt know anything aboutthat, would you? (13) asks the narrator out of the blue, knowingthat the attempt at connecting with the photographer is a longshot (13). Tellingly, the photographer responds, What are yousaying? to which the narrator replies, I was trying to make aconnection (13). Throughout the story, Carver reminds us of howlittle adds up, how connections, even basic communication, cannotbe established, however much the characters play at them.

289

Revue

canadiennedetudes

americaines

41

(2011)

In contrast to this desire for a mutual frame of reference stands thePolaroid. As Nesset argues: photographs [suggest] stasis, aptlyenough, in the sense of both frozen space and time and of familialunity [. . .] Slightly more self-aware if also more detached and cyni-cal than his predecessors, this [narrator] seeks himself in the view-nder, personal stability in a destabilized world (Stories 33). Thephotographs are supposed to provide a stable portrait. They shouldallow the narrator to see himself. Yet the ending of the storywhere the photographer says his equipment cannot handle motionshots (15)demonstrates not so much the inefcacy of the Polaroidas a medium for making sense, but just how appropriate it is to thesituation. The blurring of the narrator in the pictures corresponds tothe emotional blur he is at present, and perhaps has been much ofhis life (Nesset 33). The Polaroid renders the lack of focus in thecharacters life, and how inadequate his means of representation isto a desire for precise articulation of selfhood.

Thus Carvers story interrogates the operability of representationalmodes. Irony arrives in the form of a photographer who thinks ofhimself as a professional while producing photos anyone couldproduce. Ewing Campbell confronts this failure to distinguishorsuccess at depicting the indistinguishability oflives in Carversworld, writing that Carvers folks are totems, faceless, nearlynameless emblems of a class (121). There is no way to nd thecorrect word, or name, for the subjects, and the reality they inhabit,because they, and it, are nameless, elusive of representation.Carvers precisionism is about delity to a world in which ndingthe words that hit all the notes (Fires 18) is to nd a languagewhose impoverishment highlights the abundant capital (nancialor artistic) beyond his characters reach. Along the way, this impre-cisionism offers the one thing capitalism cant by its very natureprovide: pleasure in the passing instant, and, more important, thepleasures of renouncing the heroic subjectivity that is the corollaryof capitalist ambition, or the American Dream.

Sympathies, Modernist, and Otherwise

There is a positive reading in Bells criticism of Carver for not pro-viding an artistically wrought, highly individualistic product, or, asQuentin Anderson puts it, in the capacity of art to institute a civili-zation [. . .] to represent individual consciousness as triumphing over[. . .] self and society (703). While Anderson is discussing modernistaesthetics, his claims resonate with Bell and Gallaghers desire for an

290

Can

adia

nRev

iew

ofAm

eric

anSt

udie

s41

(2011)

art that transcends its moment, and triumphs over social condi-tions. But Carvers writing, rather than upholding modernist am-bition, probes the way in which mass production, consumerism,and the levelling of pop culture have become the register of a post-individualistic society. The absence of the psychic autonomy de-manded by individualisma prerequisite for the artistic heroismGallagher witnesses and Bell eulogizesrequires us to read inCarver another power altogether, one derived from the evanescent,the temporary, the disintegrated.

I had a headache, the narrator tells us, I know coffees no goodfor it, but sometimes Jell-O helps. I picked up the picture (13). TheJell-O mentioned at the outset of the story returns in a narrativenon-sequitur. The arbitrariness of forging connections is paralleledby the arbitrariness of the Jell-O as a curative for headaches:sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt. Carver depicts the mis-guided narrators belief in what Arthur Saltzman calls a manage-able range of perception via the measured outlook offered bythe stability of a picture in a camera viewnder (104), becausethe Polaroid, like the Jell-O, cannot be linked to a denite effect.Just as the Jell-O may or may not confer a cure, the Polaroid thenarrator picks up may or may not provide a view into the historyof his home, the connection between himself and the cameraman,or a means of alleviating the trauma occasioned by his familysdeparture. What is stable in the narrators world, the productsat hand, cannot serve causal connections. In the end, what thenarrator seeks, the particularities of his condition, the manifestationof elements that respond and testify to his presence in suburbia, arenot available. But there is no nostalgia here, neither on his part, noron Carvers, since subjectivity, for the former, is not consciouslymissed, and, for the latter, is impossible. The viewnder, then,rather than providing a window onto the narrator, provides a viewonto his absence.

When the cameraman tells the narrator he sympathizes withhis predicament, the narrator asks him to show how much bytaking more pictures (14). After twenty shots of the narratorposed systematically in various places around the house, thepair end up in the front again, having completed a circle (14).The cameraman remarks, Thats twenty. Thats enough (14), sug-gesting that either the home of the narrator can be encapsulated intwenty photographs, or the photographic medium is never suf-cient to its subject, no matter how many pictures are taken. The

291

Revue

canadiennedetudes

americaines

41

(2011)

equation of the sum of photographs with the sum of sympathysubtends the possibility of intersubjective relations. Not only issympathy understood by the characters in terms of a numericallimit, a production that gets no further than the cycle of a suf-ciency, but also the opposite, that sympathy is not governed by, orequal to, a single or series of representations of a subject. There cannever be enough sympathy in our attempt to achieve the other,who is always outside the limits of representational methods.Thus, the idea of subjectivity itselfunderstood as a discrete unitof representationalready forecloses on community, whether it istenable or not. What is required is always another photograph, andthat photograph will not ever produce a subject with sufciency.Community is always one more photograph, is the generosity em-bodied in a willingness to take another picture, and anothertherecognition that representation only works when it doesnt.

Viewnder thus dispenses with individualism: a discrete, con-tinuous, and objectiable selfhood. In its place is a consciousnessevanescent, shifting, irresolvable. The characters in Carvers storydo not appeal to one another, but to the camera, as if it can givethem the permanence they are lacking, and in doing so demon-strate that it is precisely this desire for permanence that is at oddswith the release they crave. As Mieke Bal puts it, The photographquestions the mastery of the subject in the same sweep as itquestions the subjection of the object (9). The photograph disclosesCarvers troubling aesthetic: where the mastery of the writingsubject (the author) is undercut by his self-consciousness regard-ing the limits of representation at the same time as the object(character) it subjects to representation falls outside those limits.Viewnder reveals a far more equivocal sense of writing, onCarvers part, vis-a`-vis the subject and object of that writing,than Gallagher claims. The characters, nally, are actions ratherthan subjects, verbs rather than nouns, and therefore the staticmedium of print, like the static medium of photography, cant dothem justice.

The lack of description provided by Carver is telling, since we learnnothing about what the narrators house looks like, only a null set:I said, The whole Kit and Kaboodle. They cleared right out (14).The writing allows what the photographs allow: questions ratherthan answers; imprecision rather than determination; equivocalnessrather than certainty. When the narrator nally mounts the roofand prepares his assault on the panorama, presumably to assert his

292

Can

adia

nRev

iew

ofAm

eric

anSt

udie

s41

(2011)

presence in relation to it, the camera cannot capture the nature ofthat presence because it is not interchangeable with a photograph.Agency cannot go on record since subjectivity is not panoramic,graspable in the sweep of an eye. Agency is motion itself, but thisis precisely what the characters cannot appreciate, since they arestriving after what theyve been told to strive after: a stable, perma-nent, heroic, transcendent subjectivity. In the failure to recordagency the most difcult, yet rewarding, of Carvers revelationscreeps in, namely, a subject-less aesthetic.

The Polaroid Moment

It is at this point that the Polaroid, its difference from the developedphotograph, takes on greatest signicance. As Tom Wolfe says inhis introduction to the photographs of Marie Cosindas, the Polaroiddispenses with the mysteries of the Darkroom, which had alwaysbeen synonymous with professionalism itself among photographers(506). As well, the nal print of the Polaroid was like a paintedportrait in that it could not be duplicated. The Polaroid negativeis destroyed in the process of instant development (507). Theseaspects of the Polaroid set it apart from traditional photography:the absence of Darkroom professionalism, and the negative (inthat each photo becomes the only example of its kind). The Polaroidis the scene of an escape: it bears less of the photographers signaturethan standard photography since it does not lend itself to darkroommanipulation; and it resists control by not permitting tampering withits uniqueness via multiple prints of the same negative. In a sense, thePolaroid is a photograph like any othercapturing an instant thatcan never be repeatedat the same time as it is singular, unrepeata-ble. It casts doubt on artistic intention: [Walker] Evans worked withthe Polaroid SX-70 system, a fully automatic method that timed thelms development inside the camera and expelled a nal print forwhich the photographer made no contribution to the color scheme[. . .] He praised the Polaroids quick payback process, saying thatit encouraged sudden inspiration (Marien 362). In Evans workthe Polaroid circumscribes not only the photographers agency,conning him to a color scheme automatically rendered by thecamera, but also his preparedness in terms of subject matter, makinghim reliant on chance. While the second of these is a positive aspectof the Polaroid for Evans, it connes the artist to the moment, to theparticularities of time and place, not permitting the space in whichto formulate an independent artistic practice. It undermines thenotion of artistic autonomy, of a will and selfhood isolable from

293

Revue

canadiennedetudes

americaines

41

(2011)

circumstance. It is not the product of transcendent individuality butof environment.

The Polaroids discrete logic in which the aesthetic exists only inthe moment when the nger presses the buttonfurther ampliesthe disconnect in Carvers work, where continuity, and thus perfect-ibility, is an impossible dream: These are stories without an else-where, stories that extend no opportunity to transcend experience.Discourses biting their own tail parallel the self-enclosed circularityof lives that can merely recycle their problems into pretences oftemporary solution (Chenetier 175). The self-enclosed circularitythat Chenetier locates in Carver manifests in the twenty Polaroidsthat constitute the circular view of the narrators home. In thecourse of taking these Polaroids the characters return to wherethey began, the initial scene of representation, rather than to whatrepresentation was supposed to offer: a view onto the worldthey inhabit (which would place them in an all-seeing positionoutside it). The circularity Chenetier describes suggests the exitless-ness of Carvers milieuto nd a space apart in which to graspthe subjects condition. Instead, the Polaroid aesthetic rejects thefrustration of asserting an impossible (transcendently individualistic)mastery of the temporal. The narrators manic rock throwing, thephotographers futility, are in this sense celebratory. Their failure toassert mastery is a negative freedom from the primary mandate ofcapitalism. By forgoing a transcendent selfhood they momentarilythwart the engine of their oppression, and immerse themselves ina world of pointless action, adopted for its own sake, just as weread the story not for instruction but for itself, the action of thestory alone. Failure marks success.

Unable to nd the meaning of the clues offered by the milieu inwhich narrator and photographer nd themselves, both reader andcharacters must battle between readings of those clues (Powell647), stalled in the act of allocating deeper signicance to eventsthat would allow the formulation of a big picture, and by that aview from outside discrete situations. The defeat of authorship isits triumph: characters cannot be pinpointed, or meanings deter-mined, and the individualistic notion of heroism gives way tothe action of perpetual uncertainty (Powell 647), in which thephotographs and writing are about whoever, whenever. The objectof our attention, like our own subjectivity, is thus never endingbecause it is not graspable, and community emerges as the atten-tion to others always in excess of how we might represent them.

294

Can

adia

nRev

iew

ofAm

eric

anSt

udie

s41

(2011)

Community is constant attentiveness. Carver suggests that object-less writing, like a targetless throwing of rocks, or the snapping ofmisrepresentative Polaroids, is the leveraging of anonymity and inter-changeability and disposability to expose a society that demands thatyou connect while denying you the very means of making connec-tions. There is power in the frivolous insofar as it brings pleasureonly in itself, in refusing the control of a purpose.

The ephemeral and chancy aesthetic of the Polaroid is also Carvers.His use of the Polaroid suggests that he is aware of the terrible free-dom exhibited by his characters. On the one hand, the articulatingof coincidencethose events produced by a total disconnect isfreedom from ideology, understood here as a conceptual apparatusthrough which one connects, or subordinates, acts to an overridingmeaning; on the other, however, such freedom makes it impossibleto regulate our actions in accordance with some goal, since we areconstantly within the given, or Walkers sudden inspiration, orthe frivolous. Rather than being subjects of will and intention weare no subjects at all, only the scene of actions that refuse to lendthemselves to myths that in the name of autonomy and individualityand heroism entice us to make subjects of ourselves so that we canbe controlled, put into predetermined places, reduced to objects.There is only the bliss of mindless activity, of trying to capturewhat cant be captured. This is Carverlandthe beauty of theimpasse, the justice of irresolution.

Note

1 The full quote from Fachard reads: Of course, Carver scholars andreaders 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 whatthe narrator of Viewnder sought from the man with the polaroid: amotion shot of the tremolo or oscillation between the two, a fuller gazeinto the moving process of its construction, a possible glimpse at thekind of material Carver was appropriating, collecting, during afourteen-year correspondence and friendship with Lish (19). Fachardis, of course, talking about the infamous expose of the relationshipbetween Carver and his early editor, Gordon Lish, by D.T. Max in a1998 article, The Carver Chronicles, published in The New York TimesMagazine of 9 August 1998. Looking through editorial revisions forCarvers rst two books, Max uncovered countless cuts and additionsto the pages; entire paragraphs [. . .] added (37). He noted that Lishsblack felt-tip markings sometimes obliterate the original text [. . .][cutting] about half the original words and [rewriting] 10 of the 13

295

Revue

canadiennedetudes

americaines

41

(2011)

endings. Carol, story ends here, he would note for the benet of histypist (37). Of less interest to me here is the relationship between anintrusive editor and writerand certainly the Lish/Carver relation-ship in this sense is not the rst of its kindthan the oscillationFachard derives from it, and which I appropriate to examine Carversinterest in process versus product (the movement of the subject alwaysin excess of determination). To some degree, my study is furtherenabled by this metacritical perspective on the provenance of Carversstories, though the oscillation is ultimately more important for what itsays about the stories representation of subjectivity than in determin-ing where Lish ends and Carver begins. Perhaps most suggestivelythe interest and in some cases outrage over this controversy drawsattention to an expectation (including on Carvers part) of singleauthorshipthe notion of a highly individualistic, even heroic, artistenacting a unique visionary artthat speaks more to the Romanticmyth that informs the capitalist art market (including the literarymarket) than it does to the history of authorship, which has more oftenthan not been characterized by collaboration, plagiarism, inuence,censorship, and compromise. This anxiety over the uniqueness andautonomy of the subject is of course manifest everywhere in Carverswork and criticism, and might be partly explained by his anxiety overLishs perceived inuence (and Lishs own anxiety over not being dulyrecognized as the presiding genius of Carvers early collections), but isnot reducible to it, or is only part of a larger anxiety over the status ofthe subject in late capitalism in general. One is tempted, here, to invokethe name of one of Carvers collections as the guiding statement on thisconcern: 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, andChange in Raymond Carvers Stories. The Raymond Carver Review 1 (2007):3352. 4 Aug. 2010.

Anderson, Quentin. The Emergence of Modernism. Columbia LiteraryHistory of the United States. Ed. Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia UP,1988. 695714.

Bal, Mieke. Light Writing: Portraiture in a Post-Traumatic Age. Mosaic: AJournal 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 theMillennium. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1995.

296

Can

adia

nRev

iew

ofAm

eric

anSt

udie

s41

(2011)

Bethea, Arthur F. Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry ofRaymond Carver. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Campbell, Ewing. Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York:Twayne, 1992.

Carver, Raymond. Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver. TessGallagher. Ed. Bob Adelman. New York: Arcade, 1990.

. Fires. New York: Vintage, 1984.

. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Vintage,1989. 1115.

Chenetier, Marc. Living On/Off the Reserve: Performance, Interrogationand Negativity in the Works of Raymond Carver. Critical Angles: EuropeanViews of Contemporary American Literature. Ed. Marc Chenetier. Carbondale:Southern Illinois UP, 1986.

Fachard, Vasiliki. Introduction. Journal of the Short Story in English 46(2006): 1930. 4 Aug 2010.

Facknitz, Mark A. One More Reason We Cant Stop Tugging OverRaymond Carvers Body. QWERTY: Arts, Litteratures, and Civilisations duMonde Anglophone 9 (1999): 14954.

Ford, Richard. Good Raymond. New Yorker (New York, N.Y.) LXXIV.30(1998): 709.

Furst, Lilian. All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction. Durham:Duke UP, 1995.

Harker, Ben. To Be There, Inside, and Not Be There: Raymond Carverand Class. Textual Practice 21.4 (2007): 71536. .

Hendin, Josephine. Fictions of Acquisition. Culture in an Age of Money:The Legacy of the 1980s in America. Ed. Nicolaus Mills. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee,1990. 21633.

Lehman, Daniel W. Symbolic Signicance in the Stories of RaymondCarver. Journal of the Short Story in English 46 (2006): 7588. 25 Oct. 2011.Web.

Marien, Mary Warner. Photography: A Cultural History. New Jersey:Prentice-Hall, 2002.

Max, D.T. The Carver Chronicles. The New York Times Magazine 9 Aug.1998: 3440, 51, 56, 57.

May, Charles E. Putting Yourself in the Shoes of Raymond Carver.Journal of the Short Story in English 46 (2006): 3142. 4 Aug. 2010.

Nesset, Kirk. Foreward. New Paths to Raymond Carver: Critical Essays onHis Life, Fiction, and Poetry. Ed. Sandra Lee Kleppe and Robert Miltner.Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2008. viixiv.

. The Stories of Raymond Carver. Athens: Ohio UP, 1994.

297

Revue

canadiennedetudes

americaines

41

(2011)

Newman, Charles. The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age ofInation. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1985.

Powell, Jon. The Stories of Raymond Carver: The Menace of PerpetualUncertainty. Studies in Short Fiction 31 (1994): 64756.

Runyon, Randolph Paul. Dreams and Other Connections AmongRaymond Carvers Recovered Stories. Journal of the Short Story in English46 (2006): 6373. 25 Oct. 2011. Web.

Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia, SC: U ofSouth Carolina P, 1988.

Schweizer, Harold. On Waiting in Raymond Carvers A Small, GoodThing. Journal of the Short Story in English 46 (2006): 13945. 25 Oct. 2011.Web.

Skenazy, Paul. Life in Limbo: Ray Carvers Fiction. Enclitic 11.1 (1988):7783.

Stull, William L. Raymond Carver. The Dictionary of Literary BiographyYearbook. Ed. J.M. Brook. Detroit: Gale, 1988. 199213.

Verley, Claudine. Errand, or Raymond Carvers Realism in a Cham-pagne Cork. Journal of the Short Story in English 46 (2006): 14763. 25 Oct.2011. Web.

Wolfe, Tom. Miss Aurora By Astral Projection. Literature & Photography.Ed. Jane M. Rabb. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1995. 50110.298

Can

adia

nRev

iew

ofAm

eric

anSt

udie

s41

(2011)

Copyright of Canadian Review of American Studies is the property of University of Toronto Press and itscontent may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder'sexpress written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.