M o d e r n A m e r i c a n L i t e r a t u r e a n d t h e N e w Tw e n t i e t h C e n t u r y

The Literary
Afterlife of
Raymond Carver
Influence and Craftsmanship
in the Neoliberal Era

Jonathan Pountney
The Literary Afterlife of
Raymond Carver
Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century
Series Editors: Martin Halliwell and Mark Whalan

Published Titles
Writing Nature in Cold War American Literature
Sarah Daw
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction and American Popular Culture: From Ragtime
to Swing Time
Jade Broughton Adams
The Labour of Laziness in Twentieth-Century American Literature
Zuzanna Ladyga
The Literature of Suburban Change: Narrating Spatial Complexity in
Metropolitan America
Martin Dines
The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver: Influence and Craftsmanship in the
Neoliberal Era
Jonathan Pountney
Living Jim Crow: The Segregated Town in Mid-Century Southern Fiction
Gavan Lennon
The Little Art Colony and US Modernism: Carmel, Provincetown, Taos
Geneva M. Gano

Forthcoming Titles
The Big Red Little Magazine: New Masses, 1926–1948
Susan Currell
The Reproductive Politics of American Literature and Film, 1959–1973
Sophie Jones
Ordinary Pursuits in American Writing after Modernism
Rachel Malkin
Sensing Willa Cather: The Writer and the Body in Transition
Guy Reynolds
The Plastic Theatre of Tennessee Williams: Expressionist Drama and the Visual
Arts
Henry I. Schvey
Class, Culture and the Making of US Modernism
Michael Collins
Black Childhood in Modern African American Fiction
Nicole King

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The Literary Afterlife of
Raymond Carver
Influence and Craftsmanship
in the Neoliberal Era

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 C O NT E NT S

Introduction: Authenticity, Craftsmanship and

Neoliberalism in Raymond Carver’s Fiction 1

1. ‘Bad Raymond’: Alcoholism, Education and Masculinity

in Chuck Kinder’s Honeymooners 27
2. ‘Carveresque Realism’: Raymond Carver and
Jay McInerney 60
3. ‘The Transpacific Partnership’: Raymond Carver and
Haruki Murakami 106
4. ‘Why Raymond Carver?’: Neoliberal Authenticity and
Culture in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman 148

Conclusion: Willy Vlautin and Diminished Class

Consciousness 182

Works Cited 193

Index 204
For Emma
 Introduction:
Authenticity, Craftsmanship
and Neoliberalism in
Raymond Carver’s Fiction

In August 1999, a decade after Raymond Carver’s death at the age

of fifty from lung cancer, The New York Review of Books published an
extended feature on Carver’s place in American letters. The article’s
author, the critic A. O. Scott, opened by arguing that while plenty
of American writers are hyped, imitated, even admired, few have
the privilege of claiming, as Carver did near the end of his life in his
poem ‘Late Fragment’, that they are ‘beloved’.1 While at the height
of his career in the 1980s, the article argues, Carver’s minimalist
publications were influential, since his death, he has become an
‘international icon of traditional American literary values’. Which
is to say, ‘His g­ enius – ­but more his honesty, his decency, his com-
mitment to the exigencies of ­craft – ­is praised by an extraordinary
diverse cross section of his peers.’2
As Scott’s generous retrospective suggests, for a writer who only
published four major story collections during his lifetime, Carver’s
cultural impact is remarkably exponential.3 While he was alive,
Carver’s influence on the American short story was widely noted,
but not so generally known is that since his death Carver’s work has
continued to have an impact on a number of significant contempo-
rary writers and artists. The list of those who attest to his influence
is as diverse as those studied in the forthcoming expository ­chapters
– ­Jay McInerney, Haruki Murakami, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Chuck
Kinder and Willy ­Vlautin – a­ s well as others like the filmmakers
Robert Altman, Ray Lawrence, Dan Rush and Andrew Kotatko,
the writers Salman Rushdie, Stuart Evers and Denis Johnson, the
 2 / The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver

­ usician Paul Kelly and the photographer Bob Adelman. The

m
admiration of such a multivalent list suggests that Carver’s writing,
despite its working-­class subject matter and its particular Pacific
Northwest setting, is not bound by its immediate geographic or
cultural context. This book argues that the fundamental reason for
Carver’s extensive afterlife is that there is a tight and intricate rela-
tionship between his texts and his perceived lifestyle and writing
practice; that underlying these ideas is the perception that Carver
broadly represents a return to what might be best understood as a
more ‘real’ form of ­literature – w
­ hat Scott calls ‘traditional American
literary values’ – one that is, Carver’s advocates would argue, more
authentic than other kinds of recent writing.
Given the aesthetic and formal differences between Carver’s
writing and those who claim to have been influenced by him, this
book argues that Carver’s literary afterlife is best viewed as being a
social phenomenon, one born out of the social relations, histori-
cal circumstances and economic forms that were produced by the
shifting paradigms of US capitalism during Carver’s lifetime. While
he may have struggled to make productive sense of this period,
and while Carver may not have directly identified the tenets of
the early neoliberal era in which he lived, they affected his life in
pointed and particular ways. This book argues that his experience,
which is communicated in his writing, becomes a model of how
to negotiate, for better or worse, the complex and shifting founda-
tions of this significant socio-­economic transition. What’s more,
while Carver experienced these events at a local level, the expansion
of n­ eoliberalism – ­or similar forms of free market c­apitalism –
­throughout the world in the last forty years has meant that his
experience, his writing and his influence has a particularly global
resonance.
Read within this socio-­historic context, this book argues that
Carver’s realist authenticity embodies a model of retreat from the
bewildering world of late capitalism, and becomes a coping mech-
anism, or a form of consolation, that offers other writers and artists
living in similar circumstances a way of navigating a world which
seems to exceed the frame of conceptual mapping. In this sense,
much of Carver’s early work inhabits a zone that explores the differ-
ences between the hegemonic narratives of late ­capitalism – ­that is,
 Introduction/ 3

the conventional American dream of equal opportunity, individual

freedom and upward socio-­economic mobility for all who work
hard ­enough – ­and the reality of lived experience in this same
period. This idea is complemented by Carver’s late fiction, which
offers a muted oppositional alternative based on the residual values
of craftsmanship, which, for those who are influenced by him,
provides a distinctive site of resistance to the hegemonic norms of
neoliberalism. The chapters that follow this introduction consider
how this is the case in relation to a number of contemporary artists
who claim to be influenced by Carver and who are also working
within countries or cultures that have recently made, or are in the
process of making, the transition to neoliberal capitalism.
Thomas Edsall illustrates the substantial changes to the socio-­
economic conditions in America that occurred during Carver’s
lifetime by recalling the defeat of the Republican presidential can-
didate Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election.4 Defeated by Lyndon
B. Johnson in the largest margin in US history, Goldwater’s cam-
paign advocated major reductions in federal spending alongside
sharp increases in military investment. Sixteen years later Ronald
Reagan was elected president on a platform that bore an uncanny
resemblance to Goldwater’s campaign. Reagan then even persuaded
Congress, including a Democratic House of Representatives, to
enact fiscal legislation that would have been inconceivable at any
time during the previous fifty years.
This significant change in economic and political t­ hought – ­what
has been called the eras of Fordism and post-­Fordism, or, now
more commonly, embedded liberalism and ­neoliberalism – ­had a
notably negative impact on the life of the American working-­class –
­those individuals that surrounded Carver for much of his early life
and who form the foundation of his ­fiction – ­and is best understood
in light of a number of important historical crises in the capitalist
structures in the 1970s. The first was the dissolution of the Bretton
Woods currency agreement in response to the increasing domes-
tic crises of overaccumulation, unemployment and inflation, and
also to the loss of control over the global free-­flow of US dollars,
which, because of their high value, had been deposited en masse
into European banks. In 1971 President Nixon announced the sus-
pension of the dollar’s convertibility into gold and international
 4 / The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver

currency and exchange rates were allowed to float. Around the same
time the effects of the OPEC Oil ­Shock – ­which tripled the price
of crude oil for OECD member c­ ountries – d ­ ramatically increased
production costs for private corporations. As a way to balance the
slow-­down in manufacturing, the US put military pressure on Saudi
Arabia to recycle its petrodollars through the New York banking
system. The banks, it was hoped, could then use their funds to help
kick-­start the domestic economy, but, precisely because of the poor
domestic economic conditions, instead sought profitable outlets in
the Global South, and, because of the liberalisation of international
credit and finance markets, were free to loan at low risk and in
favourable rates designated in US dollars.
These two historical events highlighted the increasing autonomy
in the financial services industry. Since President Roosevelt had
passed the Glass-­Steagall Act in his first hundred days in ­office – ­a
bill designed, in Roosevelt’s own words, to ‘safeguard against a
return of the evils of the old order’, that is, the intricate relationship
between business and politics that preceded the Great ­Depression
– ­federal law had demanded the separation of investment and
commercial banking. Federal insurance had also been provided on
all bank deposits, and the federal government, through Keynesian
intervention, remained in control of the private banking sector.5
But in the 1970s there began to be a power shift. This point is again
illustrated by the Bretton Woods agreement, which was signed
in 1944 with the conspicuous absence of bankers and financiers.
Giovanni Arrighi sums the situation up well when he writes that
at that moment ‘Washington rather than New York was confirmed
as the primary seat of “production” of world money.’6 But with
the introduction of the floating exchange rate and the excessive
petrodollar recycling in the 1970s, the federal government began to
lose its control over the financial sector. Sensing the opportunity,
the business community turned to lobbying and policy think tanks.
A ‘new’ kind of free market liberalism based on the ideological
principles of the Mont Pelerin Society was touted by key economic
institutions, and the static regulatory flaws of Keynesian economics
fast became unpopular. By the late 1970s, and especially in the
1980s, Washington’s corporate lobbying community had become
so infiltrated by the business community that New York banks
 Introduction/ 5

began to gain a level of influence on par with those in the 1920s.

What made this acquisition of power so remarkable is that the
business community achieved its goals without any broad public
mandate.7
While signs of neoliberalism can be traced back to the early 1970s,
it is broadly recognised that Paul Volcker’s decision as Chair of the
Federal Reserve to raise interest rates by 20 points on 6 October
1979 symbolised the beginning of the neoliberal era. The swing
to neoconservative politics and the election of Reagan in 1980
cemented its impetus. Built on a system of laissez-­faire economics,
neoliberalism holds to libertarian free market principles and Adam
Smith’s hidden hand as a guide for the demand and supply of free
market goods. Within this framework the neoliberal state has two
clear objectives. The first is to prioritise the creation of a business
climate in which capital can accumulate. The second is that when
financial crises appear, the state must favour business interests over
its citizens. Of course, there are times when political pragmatism
predominates and the state cannot follow neoliberal orthodoxy,
but the overall impact of neoliberal policy over the last forty years
has been an augmented wealth gap, a decrease in the manufactur-
ing industry, an increase in temporary service sector labour and the
retraction of social privileges such as universal health care, public
education and pension rights for the working class.
To argue that there is an important connection between this his-
torical circumstance and Carver’s writing is to position oneself in
line with critics who view Carver’s fiction as being, on some level,
a response to his working-­class experience. Many of these critics
also suggest that Carver’s writing is a class-­conscious commentary
on American life that stands in as a synecdochic example for the
socio-­ economic struggles faced by many Americans during this
same period. Irving Howe typified this opinion when, in a review
of Carver’s fourth collection Cathedral, he wrote that ‘Mr Carver is
showing us at least part of the truth about a segment of American
experience few of our writers trouble to notice.’ He continued by
writing that critics often ‘charge him with programmatic gloom
and other heresies, but at his best he is probing, as many American
writers have done before, the waste and destructiveness that prevail
beneath the affluence of American life’.8 The particular American
 6 / The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver

life that Howe refers to is the negative space behind the ideological
common sense of neoliberalism; between the American dream of
individual freedom and equal opportunity, on the one hand, and
the reality of inequality and social immobility, on the other. Carver
and his first wife, Maryann, married after they graduated from high
school and employed an orthodox American protestant work ethic
as a means to realise their ambitions, but the financial burden of
two young children, a lack of secure long-­term employment and a
marriage complicated by alcohol addiction and infidelity under-
mined any hope of social mobility. Writing about his experience in
‘Fires’, an essay published in 1982, Carver recalls when he realised
that his long-­term plans for upward socio-­economic mobility were
little more than fantasies. ‘We had great dreams, my wife and I’, he
wrote. ‘We thought we could bow our necks, work very hard, and
do all that we had set our hearts to do. But we were mistaken.’9
In the essay Carver recounts the ‘exact’ moment of ­realisation –
­while washing his children’s clothes in the laundromat, a setting of
almost uncanny Carveresque banality:

At that m
­ oment – ­I swear all of this took place there in the l­aundromat
– ­I could see nothing ahead but years of more of this kind of responsi-
bility and perplexity. Things would change some, but they were never
really going to get better. I understood this, but could I live with it? At
that moment I saw accommodations would have to be made. The sights
would have to be lowered. I’d had, I realized later, an insight. But so what?
What are insights? They don’t help any. They just make things harder.10

Carver’s resignation in the face of failed hegemonic narratives points

towards the broader affect of capitalism’s ideological efficacy. Mark
Fisher’s popular short book Capitalist Realism seeks to illustrate
the famous statement, nominally attributed to Fredric Jameson,
that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of
capitalism.11 Jodi ­Dean – ­whose work has been concerned with a
leftist retreat of oppositional alternatives to neoliberal h
­ egemony –
­draws on Fisher’s book when, in conversation with him, she argues
that Fisher’s term ‘designates a general ideological f­ormation . . .
­wherein all illusions and hopes of equality have been shed’.12 In
this sense neoliberal ideology operates in two distinct ways. The
 Introduction/ 7

first is the acceptance and propagation of the belief that neoliberal-

ism cannot be fought. And the second is the notion that adapting
to neoliberal domination is just a question of pragmatic survival.
These two ideas combine to produce a depressive resignation, an
affective dimension in which it becomes ‘common sense’ to follow
the dominant neoliberal line.
In The Enigma of Capital, David Harvey echoes this idea when
he argues that the past and future evolution of capitalism is con-
tingent on its concomitant ability to evolve what he calls ‘mental
conceptions of the world’ (that is, ‘knowledge structures and the
cultural norms and beliefs consistent with endless accumulation’)
in line with more conspicuous developments in technological pro-
duction, labour processes and institutional arrangements. Harvey
theorises seven ‘activity spheres’ within the evolutionary trajectory
of capitalism (one of which is ‘mental conceptions of world’), in
which each sphere develops on its own, but always in dynamic
relation with the other spheres.13 The effect of this idea, to use
Harvey’s own example, is that adaptions in mental conceptions
will have a consequential effect on the very social relations, labour
processes and institutional arrangements which dominate life in
neoliberalism and which, in turn, serve to uphold and support
neoliberal hegemony. Capital, Harvey postulates, cannot circulate
or accumulate without touching these ‘activity spheres’ (to the
extent that if any of these areas limits or restricts accumulation
then capital must overcome it). The result is that the formation of a
belief system in support of neoliberal capitalism (whether that be a
positive affirmation or, more likely it seems, a resigned acceptance)
is vital to capitalism’s development and survival.
Carver’s story ‘The Student’s Wife’ illustrates the fictional transpo-
sition of this kind of resignation in the face of neoliberal common
sense. Nan’s recollection of a camping trip she took with her hus-
band, Mike, just after their ­wedding – l­ike Carver and Maryann,
they too were married after high school g­ raduation – s­ ymbolises,
it seems, a time of youthful innocence. Their heavy blankets in the
tent, which are so thick ‘she could hardly turn her feet under all the
weight’, appear indicative of the protective hegemonic narrative of
hard work as a route to socio-­economic security and prosperity. But
Nan’s sentiments are countered by Mike, who reminds her, with a
 8 / The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver

definite sense of resignation, that ‘that was a long time ago’. Time
and experience in late-­capitalism has changed things for Mike.
‘What he did remember’, Carver writes, ‘was very carefully combed
hair and loud half-­baked ideas about life and art, and he did not
want to remember that.’14 Mike, then, appears to have settled for
the reality of their impoverished situation, helplessly caught, as
he is, amongst the folds of American experience, in a new society
without the support of conventional working-­class narratives of
conscious rebellion, and where state support is moving towards
neoliberal hegemony.
In an attempt to help her sleep, he asks her to make a list of her
likes and dislikes. The 200-­word monologue that ­follows – ­what
amounts to a conspicuous anomaly in Carver’s w ­ riting – e­ mbodies
her desire for social mobility. ‘Most of all’, she concludes, ‘I’d like
us both just to live a good honest life without having to worry
about money and bills and things like that.’15 Nan’s concern for
what might be pragmatically called a reasonable standard of living
overtly mirrors Carver’s own situation in the 1960s. In her mono-
logue Nan recounts her desire for a social life, a nine-­to-­five exist-
ence, a fixed residence and clothing for her children. In an interview
with Gordon Burn, Carver described his early married years in the
following way:

In those days I always worked some crap job or another, and my wife
did the s­ ame . . . ­Time and again I reached the point where I couldn’t see
or plan further ahead than the first of next month and gathering enough
money, by hook or by crook, to meet the rent and provide the children’s
school clothes.16

In ‘The Student’s Wife’ Nan’s dreams are eventually, and devastat-

ingly, undermined, when, sitting at the kitchen table later that same
night she notices the sunrise, and it dawns on h ­ er – p
­ erhaps for the
first t­ime – t­he hopelessness of her situation. In what might easily
be seen as a continuation of Edward Hopper’s artistic impressions,
Carver writes, ‘She had seen few sunrises in her ­life . . . ­and none
of them had been like that. Not in pictures she had seen nor in any
book she had read had she learned a sunrise so terrible as this.’17
The ending to Carver’s ­story – t­ he explicit way in which Nan learns
 Introduction/ 9

or realises the reality of her ­situation – ­neatly corresponds with

his own laundromat epiphany. It is a moment of shameful failure
and personal inferiority, and a moment reminiscent of Carver’­s –
­and other Americans’ – experience during that era. In short: Nan’s
insight only makes her struggle harder.18
Considering the parallel experience depicted in stories like ‘The
Student’s Wife’ and Carver’s own personal essays, it is unsurprising
that many critics see the class crises of Carver’s early life as being
the source for much of his fiction.19 It is, as Ben Harker argues, the
precise ‘creative struggle to narrate apparently inexplicable social
experiences’, along with the conjuncture of Carver’s ‘socioeconomic
disempowerment and diminished class-­consciousness’, that is the
essential component of his fiction.20 Stephen Groarke argues that
Carver’s fiction, while often linked to his nominal literary ancestors,
is better viewed as emanating from the socio-­economic situation
of his familial, relational and financial circumstances. He argues
that it was the necessary banalities of the laundromat, childcare
and low-­wage employment that impacted his writing most readily.
Martin Scofield, in two separate publications, also views Carver’s
life as being the basis for his fiction, and he praises Carver’s ability
to mix the reality of that socio-­economic context into the fiction of
his writing. While the relationship may not be as unmediated as it
seems, it does provide, Scofield argues, the foundation upon which
Carver is able to operate empathetically at close quarters with his
characters.
For many readers and reviewers, then, a large part of Carver’s
­appeal – ­and many would argue, a large part of his commercial
and literary ­success – ­is that his realism has the definite ring of
authenticity. It is this idea that denotes Carver’s right to cast a light
on a very particular type of American working-­class experience. By
the end of his life, some critics even felt he had been successful in
promoting this cause. Writing in The New York Times Book Review,
Marilynne Robinson, in a review of Where I’m Calling From, goes
as far as saying that Carver’s fiction has transformed the nation’s
perception of the rural working class. Carver, she w ­ rote – ­with a
not insignificant amount of s­ entimentality – h ­ as ‘turned banality’s
pockets out and found all their contents beautiful’.21 Mark Helprin,
in The New York Review of Books, argued that Carver’s fiction gave
 10 / The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver

dignity to the forgotten ‘working people [who] seem to be backed

up against the northwest coast, as far away from the centres of
Anglo-­American literary tradition as they can get’.22 The idea even
extended beyond the borders of America. Writing in the London
Review of Books, Michael Foley calls Carver a kind of ‘literary ­Rocky
– ­janitor, delivery man, sawmill operator, service-­station attendant,
an uneducated alcoholic no-­hoper who rises to Major Writer status’.
He adds, ‘One can tell Carver is genuine because he makes nothing
of it.’23 The obituaries and short biographies that appeared after
his death from lung cancer at the age of fifty only cemented these
perceptions. Many link the harshness of his early life (and that
of other Americans) with the content of his fiction. The New York
Times summarised Carver as the chronicler of ‘the working poor’,
before reminding readers (lest they forget) that ‘Carver came from
the hardscrabble world of the down-­and-­out blue-­collar characters
in his stories.’24 And while it is important to note that claims of
authenticity have a tendency to be ­overblown – i­n Carver’s case
his persistent self-­identification as ‘a paid-­in-­full member of the
working poor’, which the facts of his later life patently ­contradict –
­it is this rather mythic representation of Carver as an authentic artist
that seems to persist most readily in the final years of his life.25
Since my argument about Carver’s afterlife rests on the assertion
that other writers and artists find his work to be useful for making
sense of a post-­Fordist, neoliberal context, it is important to be
clear about the characteristics of Carver’s work that enable this to
happen. I want to suggest, therefore, that Carver’s influence can be
read in two ways. The first, as I have already suggested, is that later
artists find in Carver’s work a powerful way to handle the distinc-
tion between hegemonic narratives and lived experience. Examples
of this are most conspicuous in his personal essays, which explicitly
recount the travails of his socio-­economic disempowerment bought
on by his working-­class background, as well as his early fiction,
which, for many, is drawn directly from that same experience. The
second aspect that appears to resonate with others is Carver’s retreat
from the hegemonic narrative of neoliberal ­work – ­that is, as I will
argue later, short-­term, flexible, competition-­based ­work – ­towards
an artisanal form of craft and non-­alienated labour. Of course it
was Karl Marx who famously argued that the adjustment of labour
 Introduction/ 11

processes to enhance capital accumulation alienates the worker,

but in the neoliberal era, an age which has seen the systematic dis-
mantling of labour unions, the reduction of state intervention, the
mass-­migration of labour through globalisation, the de-­skilling of
workers in the name of technological automation, and the increas-
ing dominance of age-­management in corporations, there appears
to have been an intensification of its impact. The fragmentation
of these institutions in recent years has led, as the ethnographer
Richard Sennett makes clear in The Culture of New Capitalism, to
large groups of working-­class and even middle-­Americans feeling
cast adrift, or, to use Marx’s term once more, alienated. The result
is a widespread sense of personal inferiority and failure for many
Americans during the last half-­century – ­a fact accentuated by neo-
liberal hegemony which denies the very existence of the working
classes.26
Carver’s writing, then, appears to offer a muted oppositional
alternative to this dominant ideology. It is a narrative of personal
belief based on what Raymond Williams famously called residual
values, ‘experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be verified
or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, [but]
are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the ­residue –
­ f some previous social formation’.27 In
­cultural as well as s­ ocial – o
the context of late-­capitalism or, more specifically, the move from
embedded liberalism to neoliberalism, the residue operates outside
of the laissez-­faire economics linked to free market principles, and
in Carver’s work in particular, the residue is also one that is local-
ised to his Northwest setting and operates outside of the political
realm. In this sense, Carver’s writing projects an alternative, deeply
personal form of non-­incorporated culture that is distinctive from,
say, larger political oppositional solutions and y­ et – a­ nd this is,
perhaps, what makes Carver’s work so ­intriguing – i­t still provides
a distinctive, and even powerful, site of resistance to the hegemonic
norms of late capitalism.
To develop this point a little further, Carver’s anti-­ political,
ground-­level resistance might be classed as being part of a wider
trend of oppositional movements that have emerged since 1980. In
his popular history of neoliberalism, David Harvey argues that the
impact of these types of movements has been to shift the terrain of
 12 / The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver

political organisation away from traditional party politics towards

a less focused, yet powerfully broad, dynamic social action across
the whole spectrum of civil society. He concludes by writing, ‘What
such movements lose in focus they gain in terms of direct rele-
vance to particular issues and constituencies. They draw strength
from being embedded in the nitty-­gritty of daily life and struggle.’28
Carver’s fiction then, which to borrow Harvey’s term, is heavily
invested in the ‘nitty-­gritty of daily life’, lends itself to a similar
kind of ground-­level resistance. What it loses from not being tied to
political orthodoxy, it gains in relevance, applicability and imme-
diacy. I will analyse in more detail the specifics of Carver’s commit-
ment to an atypical political formation, his residual retreat from
neoliberalism, and its impact on others in my upcoming chapters,
but for now, and as a way of illustrating my point, I want to provide
a few brief examples from Carver’s work.
In ‘Kindling’, a posthumous story published in Esquire in 1999,
Myers, the story’s protagonist, finds solace from his peripatetic life
through the act of splitting logs for the couple he is lodging with.
This activity seems to be a deliberate refracted reflection of the rural
past, and the more Myers involves himself in the work the more its
significance is heightened. Carver writes, ‘He decided that he would
cut this wood and split it and stack it before sunset, and that it was
a matter of life and death that he do so.’29 Although Carver does not
explicitly state it, the emphasis placed on the importance of Myers’s
physical action suggests the notion of craftsmanship. Writing in The
Craftsman, Sennett argues that craftsmanship ‘names an enduring,
basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake’,
and this idea and principle is a notable trope of characters’ attitudes
to work in Carver’s late-­life fiction.30 It also, importantly, stands
in opposition to the neoliberal common sense and the dominant
ideology of economic-­ based, flexible labour. Elsewhere, in The
Culture of New Capitalism Sennett argues that ‘The emerging social
order militates against the ideal of craftsmanship, that is, learning
to do just one thing really well; such commitment can often prove
economically destructive.’31
Sennett’s analysis is useful to the extent that it alludes not only
to the cultural dependency of craftsmanship’s opposition to neo-
liberal economic determinism but also its continuing disposition
 Introduction/ 13

which stands in line with historic conceptions of alternative living.

In American literature, these oppositions find their source in the
notions of Emersonian self-­reliance found in Thoreau’s thought
experiments and Whitman’s poetry and continue through to the
Arts and Crafts Movement at the turn of the twentieth century
and the modernist work of Sherwood Anderson, Alfred Stieglitz
and, perhaps most applicably for Carver, in Hemingway’s mot juste.
During the modernist age in particular, the desire for therapeu-
tic, joyful and useful labour stems from the increasing rationali-
sation of economic life in the organised structures of capitalism.
As T. J. Jackson Lears points out in No Place of Grace, for white-­
collar clerks and professionals, despite the relative security that
modernist labour patterns granted, working life seemed relatively
insubstantial. Indeed, he continues to argue more particularly, ‘the
new bureaucratic world of work often fragmented their labor and
reduced their sense of autonomy: more important, it isolated them
from the hard, substantial reality of things’. The result was a ‘yearn-
ing to reintegrate selfhood by resurrecting the authentic experience
of manual labor’.32 Carver’s own retreat from neoliberal hegemony
towards residual craftsmanship echoes these sentiments and stands
in the roots of this modernist fascination. And while these tenets
find themselves to be particularly visible in Myer’s overtly physical
action in ‘Kindling’ they are equally present, if in a divergent form,
in other characters in Carver’s late-­fiction too.
In another story, ‘Menudo’, the protagonist, who has been having
an affair with a neighbour, finds solace and a peculiar satisfaction
in raking leaves. Carver writes:

It’s light ­out – ­light enough at any rate for what I have to do. And then,
without thinking about it any more, I start to rake. I rake our yard, every
inch of it. It’s important it be done right, too. I set the rake right down
into the turf and pull hard. It must feel to the grass like it does whenever
someone gives your hair a hard jerk.33

Like the work undertaken by Myers in ‘Kindling’, Carver’s protago-

nist in ‘Menudo’ places an emphasis on doing a job ‘right’, that is,
to take Sennett’s terminology, ‘to do a job well for its own sake’.
The task itself (raking leaves) seems particularly significant in that it
 14 / The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver

is the pulling up of dead matter, a not entirely pleasant process – ‘It

must feel to the grass like it does whenever someone gives your
hair a hard jerk’ – but a necessary one for providing the light and
oxygen necessary for organic growth. In this sense, the action of
raking becomes a route to personal character development. As the
mid-­twentieth-­century sociologist C. Wright Mills argued:

The craftsman’s work is thus a means of developing his skill, as well as

a means of developing himself as a man. It is not that self-­development
is an ulterior goal, but that such development is the cumulative result
obtained by devotion to and practice of his skills. As he gives it the quality
of his own mind and skill, he is further developing his own nature; in
this simple sense, he lives in and through his work, which confesses and
reveals him to the world.34

In Carver’s story, then, the action speaks more broadly towards the
protagonist’s own domestic situation, that in the act of cleaning his
lawn, he is also cleaning up his own domestic ‘mess’. After his own
yard, he moves across the road to his neighbour’s yard, a movement
that suggests that craft leads towards a muted kind of collectivism.
When the Baxters, the homeowners, come out to see what he’s
doing, he stops. ‘I’ve finished here anyway’, Carver writes. ‘There
are other yards, more important yards for that matter. I kneel, and,
taking a grip low down on the rake handle, I pull the last of the
leaves into my bag and tie off the top.’35 Having completed his task
to a gratifying level, his mind turns to ­others – ­especially, it seems,
to the neighbour he has been sleeping w ­ ith – ­which suggests the
possibility of spreading the effect of craftsmanship, that, like the
action of tidying the leaves, he might be able to ‘tie off’ the loose
ends of his extra-­marital relationship.
The idea that craftsmanship extends to the area of social collec-
tivism or personal development is reinforced in ‘Elephant’, another
late story in which the protagonist’s walk to work becomes a time
of social craftsmanship, a moment to reflect and cultivate his famil-
ial relationships, even if the reality of his social situation appears,
initially at least, far more constrained than the end of the story
actually suggests. The allusion to social craftsmanship underlines
the idea that, in Carver’s fiction, craft stretches beyond its natural
 Introduction/ 15

territory of manual labour. Craftsmanship, after all, focuses ‘on

objective standards, on the thing in itself’, as Sennett argues in The
Craftsman, and therefore the ultimate example of craftsmanship in
Carver’s work is the presentation of his own writing practice, which
becomes itself an example of sharing or providing a model for
non-­alienated labour.36 This, again, is an idea that I will develop
in more detail later when I discuss the influence of John Gardner
and Carver’s own teaching philosophy in relation to McInerney
in Chapter 2, but to briefly indicate the nature of this argument,
Carver wrote in his essay ‘On Writing’, ‘In the end the satisfaction of
having done our best, and proof of that labour, is the one thing we
can take into the grave.’37 Carver’s essay places a strong emphasis
on craft and skill over the idea of sudden inspiration or innate,
untrained talent. In his later-­life fiction and personal writing Carver
depicts work done for enjoyment and self-­worth, a space where the
ultimate aim is not the accumulation of capital or the accomplish-
ment of an arbitrary numerical target, but rather the accumulation
of dignity, personality and e­ xperience – a­ n idea that, again, stands
in sharp contrast to the transient, adaptable and ephemeral labour
processes of both embedded and neoliberal capitalism.
Carver’s poem ‘Shiftless’ reinforces this idea by emphasising
creative activity, and what might be read as his own creative expres-
sion, as being firmly outside of the sphere of economic activity.
He writes, ‘I never liked work. My goal was always to be shiftless.’
He continues later in the poem, ‘I liked the idea of sitting in a
chair in front of your house for hours, doing nothing’, perhaps
just, ‘Making things out of wood with a knife’. ‘Where’s the harm
there?’, Carver asks.38 The poem clearly places a preference on a
type of ­artisanal – ­what might be understood as pre-­Fordist or
even pre-­capitalist, and certainly ­residual – t­ype of work, where
the aim of adhering to the dominant ideological logic of work and
consumption depicted earlier in the poem (by the ‘painted houses’,
‘flush toilets’ and cars ‘whose year and make were recognizable’) is
replaced by the more simple aim of wood whittling. It is not that
Carver is against work in and of itself, but he is against a certain
type of work. In the conveniently titled poem ‘Work’, for instance,
Carver talks about the ‘Love of work. The blood singing in that.
The fine high rise of it into the work.’ And later, in reference to
 16 / The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver

Gardner’s unflagging early-­morning writing process, he alludes to

‘The fullness before work’, before concluding by writing, in a phrase
that echoes his thoughts in ‘On Writing’, ‘And w ­ ork . . . ­The going
to what lasts’.39 These poems, then, emphasise the writing process
as being one which is fulfilling and purposeful only when it resides
outside of the norms of the capitalist labour process. It is a clear
example, as Harker argues, of ‘anachronistic craftsmanship seem-
ingly outside or pre-­dating the alienating processes whereby things
and people are re-­produced’.40 And while a political analysis might
be inferred from these poems, its emphasis is subtle compared with
that placed on the craftsman-­like action, suggesting that Carver’s
residual response is rather more consolatory than it is critical.
If it is a twofold foundation of Carver’s a­fterlife – t­hat, first,
his writing represents a zone that explores the difference between
hegemonic narratives and lived experience, and second, that his
work presents a consolatory retreat towards residual c­ raftsmanship
– ­that attracts others to his writing, then, given this book’s pro-
pensity to influence, the question that follows is: does this idea
fit into a larger critical or operative framework? As a preliminary
to this discussion it is worth pointing out that, broadly speaking,
literary history is constituted by a favourable view of influence. In
this sense, writers typically seek to embed themselves amongst their
literary predecessors by calling into practice allusions, affinities and
kinships with earlier authors. This, for example, was something
that Carver was apt to do. In ‘On Writing’ he situates his own
work within a broader canon of past short story writers from Isak
Dinesen to Anton Chekov, Evan Connell, Flannery O’Connor and
V. S. Pritchett, and while Carver was sometimes rather coy about his
own ­influences – ­when one inquiring interviewer tried to pin his
work to Hemingway’s, Carver replied, ‘I don’t write fishing stories’
– generally Carver was keen to cement himself as a member of the
short story canon.41
It is worth noting that Carver’s allusion to other writers echoes
Mark McGurl’s recent formulation of post-­war influence in The
Program Era. In his account of American post-­war literature’s rela-
tionship with the rise of creative writing programmes, McGurl pre-
sents a model of influence that, in some ways, reflects Carver’s own
thoughts on the topic. In his book, McGurl argues for a twofold
 Introduction/ 17

approach to the influence of creative writing programmes. The first

is that they impart what McGurl calls a ‘traditionally textual’ influ-
ence through their teaching syllabi. ‘Consider the stylistic afterlives
of Faulkner and Hemingway’, McGurl writes, ‘who spent little time
in the classroom but have been “teachers” to so many.’ The second,
more associative with the creative writing programme itself is, ‘the
influence of the teacher at the head of the table, the professional
author who, in his or her spare time, authors marginal comments
on apprentice fictions’.42 This is an idea, McGurl makes clear, that
has its precursor in the relationship between editors and writers,
such as Stein and Hemingway, or Pound and Eliot. In many ways
Carver exemplifies something of what McGurl is arguing for. He
learnt to write, for instance, at several higher education institutions
but also claimed the influence of non-­institutionalised precursors
such as Chekov and Dinesan. What’s more, Carver reciprocated the
effect when he later taught at a plethora of universities in the 1970s
and 80s.
McGurl’s ideas on influence are reinforced by a more general
interest in the topic, and the proliferation of critical models of
literary influence in the last c­ entury – i­n the criticism of T. S. Eliot,
F. R. Leavis, Ihab Hassan, Harold Bloom and Christopher ­Ricks –
­suggests an equally broad critical interest in the topic. The most
­noteworthy – ­and certainly ­controversial – ­in this list is Bloom’s
theory of influence outlined in The Anxiety of Influence, in which
Bloom argues for an individualist reading of authorial influence
that is heavily mediated by his idealist view of literature. Bloom
relates this to literary influence by asserting that literary history is
‘indistinguishable from poetic influence’ since writers make literary
history by misreading their precursors in an attempt to ‘clear imagi-
native space for themselves’.43 This misreading, or what Bloom calls
‘poetic misprision’, is best understood as a twofold psychological
action. First the later writer falls in love with a precursor’s text with
a Longinian passion, which results, secondly, in a psychological
imprisonment. The anxiety of influence which is produced out of
this complex act of misreading draws heavily on Freud’s family
romance in which the later writer is locked in a struggle that takes
place at the level of the psyche with their precursor. Consequently,
a battle occurs between both writers, a battle which is, above all, an
 18 / The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver

individual one, independent of external circumstance, enacted in

the later writer’s own private mind against their precursor until the
precursor is eventually, if the later writer is to escape the anxiety of
influence, effaced.
It is worth dwelling on Bloom’s theory, not only because it is
perhaps the most widely recognised theory of literary influence
in the last few decades, but because Bloom, in his introductory
series for Chelsea House Publishers, applies his theory to Carver’s
writing. In it Bloom writes that he has an ‘imperfect sympathy’
for Carver’s fiction, arguing, in an allusion to Irving Howe’s book
review, that Carver is ‘a master within the limits he imposed upon
himself’. These limits are what Bloom perceives as the restrictions
of a Hemingwayean literary realism:

So overwhelming was Hemingway’s influence upon Carver’s earliest

stories that the later writer wisely fended Hemingway off by an askesis
that went well beyond the elliptical style practiced by the author of The
First Forty-Nine Stories. In his own, final phase, Carver began to develop
beyond an art so largely reliant upon leaving things out.44

To explain, just briefly, what Bloom means by this I want to first

turn to his definition of askesis in The Anxiety of Influence. The short-
ened definition given for this penultimate revisionary ratio is that
it is a ‘movement of self-­purgation which intends the attainment
of a state of solitude . . . [the later artist] yields up part of his own
human and imaginative endowment, so as to separate himself from
others, including the precursor’.45 In other words, the later artist
yields up part of their creative freedom, and in this process of
self-­sacrifice, individuates themselves. Askesis is, on a simple level,
a curtailment. The later artist makes themselves smaller than their
­precursor – ­or in Bloom’s violent lexicon, ‘wound himself without
further emptying himself of his inspiration’.46
While Bloom’s assessment of Carver is provocative, he fails to
give a single example of how or why Carver might have done this.
The only clue he provides is his reference to Carver’s ‘final phase’, in
which he proposes that Carver ‘began to develop beyond an art so
largely reliant upon leaving things out’, an idea that only reiterates
what other critics, like Ewing Campbell for example, had previously
 Introduction/ 19

argued regarding the evolution of Carver’s writing.47 Bloom’s inti-

mation seems to ­be – ­and this is reinforced by his critical focus on
Carver’s late stories in the b
­ ook – t­ hat Carver’s early fiction, specif-
ically his first two story collections, were unable to circumnavigate
the anxiety of influence posed by Hemingway’s fiction. However,
through a curtailment of his m ­ inimalism – w ­ hich in practice, per-
haps rather counter-­intuitively, means a formal ­expansion – ­Carver
was able to overcome Hemingway’s influence. Which is not to say
that Bloom necessarily counts Carver’s late fiction as being particu-
larly successful in and of itself. For Bloom closes his analysis by sug-
gesting that one of Carver’s most anthologised stories, ‘Cathedral’,
is actually indebted to D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Blind Man’, and argues
that Carver, who he suggests must have known of Lawrence’s story,
produces a weaker work of art. Bloom concludes by revealing his
Gnostic tendency, ‘There is a reverberation in Lawrence’s story that
carries us into the high madness of great art. Carver, though a very
fine artist, cannot carry us there.’48
The problem with Bloom’s formulation in relation to Carver’s
work is that his idealism fails to accept the role of any external
circumstances in the creation (and subsequent reading and inter-
pretation) of Carver’s text. From a historical point of view, it is
now widely understood that Carver’s development (which was
nominally thought of in terms of a broadening of literary style
in line with his own personal victory over alcohol addiction) has
more to do with an increased editorial independence in the 1980s
than any type of stylistic development or e­ ven – ­to indulge Bloom
just a ­little – ­ psychological battle with Hemingway’s fiction.49
Likewise Bloom’s accusation that Carver’s ‘Cathedral’ is indebted
to Lawrence’s ‘The Blind Man’ fails to take account of the broader
biographical background in the formation of Carver’s narrative,
which is now recognised as being based on a real-­life meeting
between Carver and Tess Gallagher’s blind friend Jerry Carriveau.50
Bloom’s theory then, while stimulating, appears to fall short of
providing a definitive route into analysing Carver’s influence. Alan
Sinfield provides a useful summary of the opposition when he
argues that typically literature is seen as ‘“rising above” its condi-
tions of production and reception; as transcending social and polit-
ical concerns’. The argument most often cited as evidence for this
 20 / The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver

is, Sinfield continues, ‘that great art has endured the test of time’.
But, Sinfield usefully concludes, ‘the “art” of other times and places
that we “appreciate” is, ipso facto, that upon which we can gain
some kind of purchase from our own time and place, mediated
through our particular institutions’.51 While Sinfield’s former point
highlights the type of idealism that underpins Bloom’s theory of
influence, his latter point is helpful in developing an understanding
of how Carver’s texts operate on those who are influenced by them.
Despite some admirers’ protestations, I hold that Carver’s texts, to
borrow Sinfield’s phraseology, do not transcend the social, political
or historical circumstances in which they were produced, and there-
fore must not be studied independently of those realities. Raymond
Williams summarises this position in Problems in Materialism and
Culture when he argues that literature and art cannot be separated
‘from other kinds of social practice in such a way as to make them
subject to quite special and distinct laws’.52 Likewise, my exploration
of Carver’s influence in the following chapters suggests that Carver’s
influence is most pronounced when those who are influenced by
him find in his writing a way of gaining some kind of purchase on
their own reality. I have already tried to show something of this in
the way in which the institutionalisation of Carver as an authentic
artist in the media came to be the dominant view of his writing
and persona, and the following chapters will more fully develop a
number of specific e­ xamples – s­ uch as the impact of Carver’s stylis-
tic changes in the late 1980s, which seem significant for Murakami
as he tries to respond to the twin tragedies of the Kobe earthquake
and Tokyo gas attack in 1993, and Kinder’s admiration for Carver’s
working-­class sensibilities within his own context of the academic
establishment.
While there has been useful and stimulating work surrounding
the topic of literary influence, this book is concerned with some-
thing that is more political and global than critics like Bloom or
McGurl allow; it seeks to push beyond the boundaries of the higher
education institution to suggest that while one important aspect of
Carver’s literary afterlife is the socially constructed framework in
which his writing was produced, another, which in a way precedes
this concept, is that what is of real interest is the way in which
the socio-­economic reality of those who are influenced by Carver
 Introduction/ 21

affects their reading and understanding of his work. This book

argues, therefore, that it is through this lens that Carver’s writing
becomes, to quote Sinfield one final time, ‘powerful stories work-
ing in and beyond their initial historical moment’.53 To repudiate
the idealist position in this way is not to diminish the consequence
of Carver’s texts; rather, to see them in this way frees them to mul-
tiple interpretations, none of which need be bound by geographic,
political or historical exclusivity, meaning that it is possible to read
Carver’s literary afterlife across a number of significant geographic,
cultural and historical boundaries.
The following chapters, which are presented in, broadly speak-
ing, chronological order, provide a detailed exploration of Carver’s
afterlife in the work of five distinctly individual writers and artists.
While it has been inevitable that personal preference has played a
role in my selection, it is also true that each fulfils a basic criterion.
The first is that each produced work after Carver, and the second is
that each admits to being influenced by, or at least having an affilia-
tion with, Carver’s work. Admission, of course, is not a condition of
influence, but it did help narrow down what was otherwise a long
shortlist of candidates.54 Similarly, it is worth highlighting the male
exclusivity of this selection, which does not, of course, discount
the importance of Carver’s work on recent female authorship, but
which does highlight a certain working-­class ­masculinity – ­one
founded on the authenticity of his rough early-­life experience and
the craftsmanship of his respectable later l­ife – w ­ hich seems to lie
at the heart of Carver’s literary afterlife. Perhaps the final thing to
say in justification is that these are also artists in whom I am inter-
ested and whose work raises stimulating and important questions
for the study of Raymond Carver and contemporary literature and
film more generally.
Chapter 1 is more biographical in nature and records Carver’s
early adult life, his peripatetic search for literary education and
success at institutions like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his
relationship with writers like Chuck Kinder, William Kittredge and
John Cheever. Summarised by Carver as his Bad Raymond years, the
chapter will centre its early discussion around Carver’s relationship
with higher education and will close by analysing Kinder’s 2011
novel Honeymooners, which is a fictional retelling of this period, and
 22 / The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver

argue that Kinder’s portrayal of Carver over two decades after his
death recasts Carver’s life and work through the lens of American
working-­ class masculinity, which only solidifies the notions of
authenticity and craft already connected with his work.
Chapter 2 documents the relationship between Carver and Jay
McInerney, from their initial meeting in Greenwich Village in
1980, to McInerney’s relocation to study under Carver at Syracuse
University, and his decision to publish his debut bestseller Bright
Lights, Big City (1984) alongside Carver’s own collection, Cathedral,
in Gary Fisketjon’s Vintage Contemporaries Series. The chapter
analyses Carver’s pedagogical impact on McInerney, which empha-
sised the principles of craftsmanship, and argues that many of these
residual ideas proved particularly enabling for McInerney’s early
career. The chapter closes by arguing that the pinnacle of Carver’s
influence is found in McInerney’s novel Brightness Falls (1992),
which, through parody and satire, signals a retreat from postmod-
ern experimentation towards a more Carveresque form of literary
realism.
Chapter 3 similarly chronicles Carver’s relationship with the
Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, from Murakami’s first encounter
with Carver’s fiction in 1982, to his decision to translate and pub-
lish all of Carver’s fiction in Japanese, and his visit to Carver’s home
in Port Angeles, Washington on the International Visitor Program
in 1984. For those familiar with Murakami’s longer novels, his
admiration of Carver’s short fiction may come as a surprise; this
chapter, therefore, documents the close relationship between
the two writers while arguing that Murakami’s early short fiction
published in The Elephant Vanishes (1993), like Carver’s own early
work, charts the destructive affect of failed hegemonic capitalist
narratives. The chapter moves on to explore two concomitant turn-
ing points in both writers’ lives (Carver’s newfound sobriety and
Murakami’s rise to literary celebrity) and argues that Carver’s retreat
towards residual narratives of social craftsmanship helped facilitate
Murakami’s own residual spiritual narrative in his collection After
The Quake (2002).
Chapter 4 proceeds on slightly different lines to the previous
chapters in that it considers Carver’s afterlife in the diegetic world
of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s 2014 Oscar winning film Birdman (2013).
 Introduction/ 23

The chapter charts Iñárritu’s critique of multinational capitalism in

his early trilogy before arguing that he makes Carver the focal point
of his film because Carver has come to represent a version of artistic
authenticity that can transcend the ephemerality of neoliberal cul-
ture. Through analysis of key scenes, the chapter assesses the por-
trayal of Carver’s work and persona in the film and argues that the
film’s principal characters, Riggan Thomson and Mike Shiner, hold
two radically divergent opinions on Carver’s legacy. The chapter
concludes by arguing that the film’s critical discussion of Carver’s
afterlife has deeper implications for the creation of authentic art-
work in the neoliberal era.
I will conclude my study of Carver’s literary afterlife by arguing
that thirty years after his death, Carver’s legacy is as resonant as
ever. My conclusion presents a short case study of the American
novelist Willy Vlautin, who did not have the kind of relationship
with Carver as those studied in the main chapters, but who none-
theless claims to be influenced by Carver, and whose work still
appears to have the hallmarks of Carver’s afterlife, particularly in its
propensity to chronicle the life of white working-­class individuals
in the neoliberal era. The book concludes by arguing that the recent
political spotlight on the plight of the white working-­class means
that Carver’s work is as important as ever. I will argue that Carver’s
writing reveals the negative space behind neoliberalism, and, in
his depiction of the American working class, also reveals a way of
American life that has long been overlooked by the political main-
stream. The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver closes by suggesting
that Carver’s sympathetic portrayals may hold the key to unlocking
a new view of the American working-­class that could have impor-
tant implications for contemporary American national identity.

Notes
1. Carver, All Of Us, p. 294.
2. Scott, ‘Raymond Carver’s Enigma’, p. 52.
3. I count Carver’s four major story collections as: Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?,
(McGraw-­Hill 1976), which was nominated for a National Book Award; What
We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Knopf 1981); Cathedral (Knopf 1983);
and Elephant, a six story collection published by Collins Harvill in the UK in
1988 and included in Where I’m Calling From, published by Atlantic Monthly the
 24 / The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver

same year in the US. Carver, of course, was also a prolific poet and published
a number of poetry collections, chapbooks, one screenplay and also some
non-­fiction essays, but this book is particularly interested in his story writing
because, I think it can be reasonably argued, that this is what Carver is most
known and celebrated for.
4. Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality, p. 15.
5. The Glass-­Steagall Act was eventually repealed by President Clinton in 1999
when the Financial Services Modernization Act was passed into law, although it
is worth pointing out that Roosevelt’s bill had been bypassed by loopholes and
lenient regulatory interpretations for decades. Roosevelt, ‘Inaugural Address’, 4
March 1933. Available at <https://fdrlibrary.org/inaugurations> (last accessed
19 April 2019).
6. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, p. 288.
7. Edsall, The New Politics of Inequality, p. 107.
8. Howe, ‘Stories of Our Loneliness’, p. 43.
9. Carver, Collected Stories, p. 737.
10. Carver, Collected Stories, p. 739.
11. In his introduction to The Seeds of Time, Jameson writes, ‘It seems to be easier for
us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature
than the breakdown of late-­capitalism.’ Jameson, The Seeds of Time, p. xii.
12. Dean and Fisher, ‘We Can’t Afford To Be Realists’, in Shonkwiler and La Berge
(eds), Reading Capitalist Realism, p. 26.
13. The other six are: ‘technologies and organizational forms; social relations;
institutional and administrative arrangements; production and labor processes;
relations to nature; the reproduction of daily life and of the species’. Harvey,
The Enigma of Capital, pp. 123–4.
14. Carver, Collected Stories, p. 95.
15. Carver, Collected Stories, p. 97.
16. Burn, ‘Poetry, Poverty and Realism Down in Carver Country’, in Gentry and
Stull (eds), Conversations with Raymond Carver, p. 119.
17. Carver, Collected Stories, p. 99.
18. In their study of working-­class life in Boston in the 1960s and 70s, The Hidden
Injuries of Class, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb describe an analogous
experience as ‘social failure’; the combined realisation of failed social growth
and social contribution, which leads to humiliation and a strong sense of
personal inferiority. Sennett and Cobb conclude that as long as workers are
valued for what they can do, rather than what they are, class distinctions will
persist. This will only be intensified by an increased dependency and focus on
the intellectual and technical abilities of workers rather than their worth as
individuals.
19. ‘The Student’s Wife’ is not the only story that exemplifies this point. ‘Gazebo’,
‘Night School’ and ‘What Is It?’ are three other well-­known stories that hold
similar parallels to Carver’s experience. As if to reinforce this connection, The
Library of America Collected Stories edition of Carver’s fiction even devotes a
section to his selected essays, a rather curious addition which appears to denote
the intricate relationship between fiction and non-­fiction in Carver’s oeuvre.
 Introduction/ 25

20. Harker, ‘Raymond Carver and Class’, p. 715.

21. Robinson, ‘Marriage and Other Astonishing Bonds’, p. 41.
22. Helprin, ‘Small Expectations’, p. 41.
23. Foley, ‘Dirty Realist’, p. 12.
24. Weber, ‘Raymond Carver: A Chronicler of Blue-­Collar Despair’, p. 8.
25. For more on Carver’s working-­poor claims near the end of his life see Kellerman,
‘Raymond Carver, Writer and Poet Of the Working Poor, Dies at 50’, 3 August
1988. At the time of his death Carver owned three homes, two cars, a boat and
had nearly $215,000 in savings. For a list of Carver’s assets when he died see
Sklenicka, Raymond Carver, pp. 482–3.
26. As I have already suggested, Sennett and Cobb begin to deal with this sense
of inferiority in The Hidden Injuries of Class, and Sennett continues to assess
its significance in later publications like The Corrosion of Character, Respect in
a World of Inequality and particularly in The Culture of New Capitalism. Chapter
2 of this final book deals with what Sennett calls ‘the specter of uselessness’,
a state of alienation particularly prevalent amongst Middle Americans in the
neoliberal era.
27. Williams, Culture and Materialism, p. 40.
28. Harvey refers to a number of movements to illustrate his point, such as the
Zapatista revolution in Mexico, the ‘50 Years Is Enough’ campaign, and
Greenpeace. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, pp. 200–1.
29. Carver, Collected Stories, p. 665.
30. Sennett, The Craftsman, p. 9.
31. Sennett, The Culture of New Capitalism, p. 4.
32. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 60.
33. Carver, Collected Stories, p. 581.
34. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, p. 222.
35. Carver, Collected Stories, p. 582.
36. Sennett, The Craftsman, p. 9.
37. Carver, Collected Stories, p. 731.
38. Carver, All Of Us, p. 175.
39. Carver, All Of Us, p. 84.
40. Harker, ‘Raymond Carver and Class’, p. 728.
41. Durante, ‘De Minimis: Raymond Carver and His World’, p. 125.
42. McGurl, The Program Era, pp. 321–2.
43. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 5.
44. Bloom, Raymond Carver, p. 10.
45. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 15.
46. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, p. 121.
47. Bloom, Raymond Carver, p. 11. Campbell aligns each of Carver’s major story
collections with a developmental period. Apprenticeship: Will You Please Be
Quiet, Please?; breakthrough: What We Talk About When We Talk About Love;
maturity: Cathedral; mastery and continued growth: Where I’m Calling From.
48. Bloom, Raymond Carver, p. 11. For more on the connection between Lawrence’s
story and ‘Cathedral’ see Cushman, ‘Blind, Intertextual Love’, in Cushman and
Jackson (eds), D. H. Lawrence’s Literary Inheritors, pp. 155–66.
 26 / The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver

49. It is worth saying at this point that because of Gordon Lish’s editorial role
in Carver’s seminal collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
there is a critical minority that argue that Carver’s work ought to be seen as a
composite production, and that any discussion of Carver’s influence is negated
because of this fact. But this argument can be countered in the following way:
even if some of Carver’s work involved an element of collaboration with Lish,
that does not discount a discussion based on the pragmatic premise that there
is a certain Carveresque aesthetic that exists and has been circulated that proves
resonant and influential to other writers and artists. This is especially true since
that is how, until more recently, Carver’s writing has been understood, and,
more importantly, it is how the artists that I analyse later understood it.
  For what I consider to be the most balanced and detailed account of the furore
surrounding Lish’s involvement see Sklenicka, Raymond Carver, pp. 352–75. For
a more Carver-­oriented account see Stull and Carroll, ‘The Critical Reception of
the Works of Raymond Carver’, in Plath (ed.), Critical Insights: Raymond Carver,
pp. 39–55. For a comparative analysis between Carver’s original manuscripts
and published stories see Runyon, ‘Beginners’ Luck’, in Fachard and Miltner
(eds), Not Far From Here, pp. 25–35; and Monti, ‘From “Beginners” to “What
We Talk ...”’, in Fachard and Miltner (eds), Not Far From Here, pp. 37–49. For
the original manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that
was delivered by Carver to Lish in 1980 see Carver’s Beginners. Finally, for a
report on the publication of Beginners see Rich, ‘The Real Carver’, 17 October
2007.
50. Adelman, Carver Country, pp. 104–7.
51. Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, p. 31.
52. Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, p. 44. Writing more recently,
Terry Eagleton echoes Williams’s idea when he writes that ‘we may see liter-
ature as a text, but we may also see it as a social activity, a form of social and
economic production which exists alongside, and interrelates with, other such
forms’. Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, p. 6.
53. Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, p. 41.
54. Aside from those mentioned at the beginning of my introduction, the list
included, among others: Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Jayne Anne Philips,
A. L. Kennedy, Ann Beattie, Thom Jones, Bobbie Ann Mason, John Cheever,
Richard Bausch, Elizabeth Tallent, Denis Johnson, David Vann, James Lasdun
and David Means.