This article was downloaded by:[CDL Journals Account]

On: 11 January 2008

Access Details: [subscription number 785022367]
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Textual Practice
Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713721880
'To be there, inside, and not be there': Raymond Carver
and class
Ben Harker a
a
University of Salford,

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2007

To cite this Article: Harker, Ben (2007) ''To be there, inside, and not be there':
Raymond Carver and class', Textual Practice, 21:4, 715 - 736
To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/09502360701642409
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502360701642409

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article maybe used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction,
re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly
forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be
complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be
independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,
demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or
arising out of the use of this material.
 Textual Practice 21(4), 2007, 715–736

Ben Harker
‘To be there, inside, and not be there’: Raymond Carver
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

and class

In 1983 Raymond Carver was invited to contribute to In Praise of What

Persists, a collection of essays in which prominent writers talked about
their influences.1 ‘Fires’, the essay he submitted, was conspicuous in that
it declined to talk about literary influences at all.2 Instead Carver’s essay
chronicled the hardship that had shaped his writing so decisively: ‘I’m
talking about real influence now’, he wrote, describing raising his children,
struggling to get an education, or working ‘some crap job or other’ (F, 33;
Carver’s italics). The economic pressure of working-class life, Carver
claimed, had not only provided subject matter; it had dictated the very
forms in which he worked – poems and short stories were all he had
time for as a young writer, and these were the forms with which he stuck.
This article is about Carver and class. It argues that the early stories,
aptly described by Tess Gallager as possessing an ‘honed “dis-ease” ’, are
generated from a very particular conjuncture of socio-economic disempo-
werment and diminished class-consciousness; these texts, I claim, are the
site of a creative struggle to narrate apparently inexplicable social experi-
ences.3 I also read a selection of later Carver texts – especially interviews,
poems and essays – as textual spaces negotiating the contradictory class
location of a distinguished professional writer synonymous with
working-class settings.


Famous for his precisionist, pared down-aesthetic, in his later years

Carver was surprisingly willing to talk to interviewers, and did so some-
thing like 50 times over the 7-year period of his greatest celebrity.4 In
these interviews, as in his autobiographical essays, he consistently pushed
his background into the foreground and, in so doing, played an important
role in shaping and reinforcing the reading public’s perception of him as a
chronicler of blue-collar despair.5 He was a genial interviewee, but
there was a prickly moment in one interview from 1986 when John
Alton raised the question of class to suggest that Carver actually wrote

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09502360701642409
 Textual Practice

about the lower-middle class rather than the working class. Immediately
wary of Alton’s line of questioning, Carver first responded with a bluff
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

anti-intellectualism – ‘Working class, lower-middle class, sure’ – to

signal that Alton was splitting hairs (CRC, 161). Carver then moved
onto the terra firma of the real world and insisted that he wrote about a
‘very populous substratum of American life’, before invoking his own auto-
biographical qualifications to describe it with, ‘That’s where I lived for a
very long while’ (CRC, 161). He closed the matter by invoking his father:

My father and all my father’s friends and family were working-class

people. Their dreams were very circumscribed. They were people in a
different social situation than the people you and I hang out with
today, and they didn’t seem to have the same sets of problems. Pro-
blems and worries, yes, but they were different. For the most part
they worked their jobs and took care of their property and their
families (CRC, 161).

The move here is from an ambiguous present to an apparently

simpler, more clear-cut past, from Raymond Carver’s own contested
class location to the irrefutable proletarian credentials of his father,
Raymond Carver senior. It was a move that, towards the end of his
career, Carver would make on a number of occasions. In the celebrated
essay ‘My Father’s Life’, first published in 1984 for instance, Carver com-
pares his own insecurity – living ‘between lives’, moving from place to
place, trying to raise a family – with that of his father.6 Raymond
Carver senior’s story, the essay insists, was also one of physical movement
and economic distress, but of a more easily narrated and deciphered kind.
In short, it was a recognizable story, and a set of already-coded narrative
conventions exist to tell it: Carver’s father was a victim of the Great
Depression, a farm worker from Arkansas who travelled north in search
of work. Of all the biographical data available to Carver about his
father’s life, he selects those that most resemble the scenarios of familiar
depression era representations to tell the story:7 Carver’s narration of his
father’s migration – on foot, hitching lifts, riding boxcars – reads like a
synopsis of a depression era novel or film plot. Like the characters from
Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle (1936) Raymond Carver senior worked
picking apples; like those of the Darryl Zanuck film adaptation of Stein-
beck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), he found refuge from the ravages of
the free market, in his case not with the Joads in a government camp,
but in a New Deal economic project where he was hired as a construction
worker on the Grand Coulee Dam (F, 13). Raymond Carver senior was no
activist, but his was the moment of the militant Committee of Industrial
Organizations (CIO), the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) famous victory

716
 Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

over General Motors, the pro-Trade Union Wagner Labor Relations Act,
and the high point of the Communist Party, the organization which for
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

Georg Lukács was destined to mediate between social reality and political
consciousness and enable the working class ‘to become fully aware of its
existence as a class’.8 In short it was a moment when, as Michael
Denning points out, working people found representation in a double
sense of the word: political and industrial representation and represen-
tation in cultural forms.9 Carver continues:

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

In this passage, Raymond Carver junior has his father quietly giving
voice to, or being given voice by, the class-consciousness of that
moment. Class, as E. P. Thompson noted, is something that happens
and it is happening here just as it happens in the 26 songs that dust
bowl balladeer Woody Guthrie wrote during his commissioned 3-week
residency on the dam construction project.10 Like the sharply class-
conscious songs of Guthrie, here Carver, on behalf of Raymond Carver
senior, measures the scale of the engineering feat undertaken (‘huge tur-
bines’, ‘hundred miles’); Carver’s father’s words then register the difference
between the official history (public oratory) and the unrecorded exploita-
tion and suffering: ‘he never mentioned the guys who died building that
dam’. (Guthrie’s songs do mention them: ‘men have fought the pounding
waters, and met a watery grave’.)11
Whether Carver junior is faithfully transcribing his father’s words or
making up dialogue is beside the point: Raymond Carver senior is being
simultaneously presented in terms of objective social relations – as a
working man – and in terms of his experience of that position. ‘Social
class’ writes Fredric Jameson, ‘is not merely a structural fact but also
very significantly a function of class consciousness, and the latter,
indeed, ends up producing the former just as surely as it is produced by
it’.12 ‘And class happens’, writes E P. Thompson:

when some men [sic], as a result of common experiences (inherited

or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between
themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different
from (and usually opposed to) theirs.13

717
 Textual Practice

Carver’s re-telling of the story emphasizes that the experiences of his

father’s generation were densely mediated – that a network of political insti-
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

tutions, organizations, initiatives and cultural forms represented a shared

social experience to those undergoing it, and that class was happening.
The passage is a contradictory mix of nostalgia for a clear-cut class location
and a form of ventriloquism in which Carver’s own disputed and hesitant
class feelings find voice through his father’s experiences. In ‘My Father’s
Life’ and the interview quoted above, Carver the professional writer pulls
in two directions: he insists that his father’s experiences of class are part of
his story and identity (‘all my father’s friends and family were working-
class people’); and he acknowledges that they are remote from him (‘a differ-
ent social situation than the people you and I hang out with today’).


‘Social reality’, writes Adam Przeworski:

is not given directly through our senses . . . .What people come to

believe and what they happen to do is an effect of a long-term
process of persuasion and organization by political and ideological
forces engaged in numerous struggles for the realization of their goals
. . . Social cleavages, the experience of social differentiation, are never
given directly to our consciousness. Social differences acquire
the status of cleavages as an outcome of ideological and political
struggles.14

The Fordist society that emerged in America in the post-war period –

characterized by a scientifically managed balance between the mass pro-
duction of standardized goods/working-class consumption patterns, col-
lective wage bargaining, and the social security apparatus – was in part a
response to the oppositional cultures and ideologies of the Popular
Front years.15 Rather than representing the end of class, the post-war settle-
ment was another instance of class happening, and comprised a ‘process of
persuasion and organization’ that re-defined the American Century in
terms inextricably connected to economic, social and cultural power of a
distinctive Professional Managerial Class (PMC) positioned between
labour and capital.16 Emerging in the Progressive era, the PMC differed
from the conventional American middle class in its lack of property and
its indispensable abundance of educational, technical and professional
expertise with which it came to manage and control the structures of
increasingly complex and bureaucratic corporate capitalism. As B. and
J. Enrenreich observe, the PMC historically ‘understood that their own
self-interest was bound up in reforming capitalism . . . The role of the
emerging PMC as they saw it, was to mediate the basic class conflict of

718
 Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

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

Integral in shaping and managing the corporate and institutional structures
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

of American Fordism, as a class the PMC experienced and described itself

as representing what was best for society collectively; its central ideology
was the redundancy of ideology. The discourse of professionalism –
measured primarily in terms of educational achievement, technical
know-how and organizational efficiency – is, Nick Heffernan argues, fun-
damental to ‘the class’s understanding of its social objectivity, the disinter-
ested nature or ideological “neutrality” of its expertise, and its autonomy
from both capital and labour’.18


Born on the cusp of the baby-boom in 1939, Raymond Carver had

slightly better access to education than his father. In 1956 Raymond
junior was the first Carver to graduate from high school; 7 years later he
graduated from Humboldt State College.19 But even so, Carver’s early
adulthood – he had two children by the time he was 20 – was one of
chronic insecurity (Przeworski’s ‘social difference’) with the family
caught between aspirations of social mobility and a treadmill of non-
union and unskilled service sector shift-work.
When Carver describes these years, and they were an important part of
his own working-class credentials, the emphasis is upon both the difficult
socio-economic conditions and of subjective confusion, of being without
a means to comprehend and narrate what is happening. Those oppositional
mediations which Przeworski describes – trade unions, political parties and
campaigns, modes of political analysis, cultural forms and representations
through which objective social conditions are embodied and experienced
and which shape class consciousness – are so weak as to be barely
present. The submerged population to which Carver describes belonging
lacked visibility in a double sense: they were under-represented politically
and culturally. In E. P. Thompson’s terms, class was ‘felt’ – sometimes
vaguely, sometimes sharply – but there wasn’t a functional set of mediations
through which to ‘articulate’ it. By the early 1970s anxious debate about
levels of class-consciousness was a dominant discourse on the American
left. Stanley Aronowitz’s 1973 book False Promises: The Shaping of American
Working Class Consciousness addressed the question ‘why the working class in
America remains a dependent force in society and what the conditions are
that may reverse the situation’.20 Thirteen years later, after two Reagan vic-
tories, Mike Davis put the point more strongly. ‘The American working
class’, he wrote, ‘lacking any broad array of collective institutions or any
totalizing agent of class consciousness (that is, a class party), has been
increasingly integrated into American capitalism through the negativities
of its stratification, its privatization of consumption, and its disorganization
vis-à-vis political and trade-union bureaucracies’.21

719
 Textual Practice

In ‘Fires’ Carver writes:

Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

For years my wife and I had held to a belief that if we worked hard
and tried to do the right things, the right things would happen. It’s
not such a bad thing to try to build a life on. Hard work, goals, good
intentions, loyalty, we believed these were virtues and would some
day be rewarded. . . .
The time came and went when everything my wife and I held sacred,
or considered worthy of respect, every spiritual value, crumbled away.
Something terrible had happened to us. It was something that we had
never seen occur in any other family. We couldn’t fully comprehend
what had happened. . . . We simply could not have anticipated
anything like what was happening to us (F, pp. 33–34).

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


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

. . . I was writing a short story that I’d called ‘The Neighbors’. I

finally finished it and sent it off to Lish. A letter came back almost
immediately telling me how much he liked it, that he was changing
the title to ‘Neighbors’, that he was recommending to the magazine
that the story be purchased. It was purchased, it did appear, and
nothing, it seemed to me, would ever be the same again. Esquire
soon bought another story, and then another story, and then
another story, and so on (F, p. 39).

For Carver the moment was significant in that it consolidated a

working relationship that would continue for the best part of his career.
Lish not only facilitated the publication of ‘Neighbors’ (the story appeared

720
 Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

in Esquire in June 1971) but was instrumental in Carver securing a contract

with McGraw-Hill for his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

(1976). Lish became Carver’s editor and made a significant, and now con-
troversial contribution, helping to shape the remorselessly pared-down aes-
thetic for which Carver became renowned. (A forceful and sometimes
overbearing editorial presence in Carver’s first two books, Lish took a
lesser role in the third).24 ‘Neighbors’ also marked Carver’s passage from
small literary journals into a lucrative mass readership: as Carver empha-
sizes, this alleviated financial burdens – the stories were not only accepted
and published, they were ‘purchased’ and ‘bought’. The same year, Carver
secured a foothold in the rapidly expanding structure of American aca-
demic creative writing programmes, taking up a post at the University
of Santa Cruz. His writing and reputation had become a marketable com-
modity and it is appropriate that ‘Neighbors’, the five-page story that
launched his career as professional writer and university lecturer, deals
with questions of class and social mobility. The first paragraph runs:

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

The stuttering prose of the second sentence, with its ungainly syntax
and long string of monosyllables, enacts the difficulty of constructing a
coherent story from intractable and confusing social material. The
Millers have done the right things, but the right things have not happened
for them. They feel this, but do not understand it and have no language or
narrative through which to articulate or explain it. While others have
moved up through work, the Millers are simply left doing it. Jim Stone
has made it onto the threshold of the professional-managerial class with
his career as a salesman; Bill Miller is a bookkeeper, an occupation under-
going a period of de-skilling and mechanization at the time when the story
was written.25 Jim Stone has a profession; Bill Miller has ‘duties’; Arlene
has only ‘chores’.
Although critics have tended to discuss this tale of house-sitting in
terms of voyeurism – and this is indeed a text about the otherness of
other people – Carver makes it explicit that questions of social hierarchy
play an important role in the Millers’ responses to the Stones’ apartment.26

721
 Textual Practice

Bill Miller searches the apartment, moving ‘slowly through each room con-
sidering everything that fell under his gaze, carefully, one object at a time’
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

(SRC, p. 19). Part hunt, part inventory, at these moments he seems to be

searching for the secret of the Stones’ success. Arlene conducts a search of
her own and finds some photographs (SRC, p. 21).
Like many of Carver’s characters, the Millers improvize with the avail-
able materials. Watching the Stones drive away, Arlene complains, ‘God
knows, we could use a vacation’ (SRC, p. 17) and the Millers proceed to
make the best of things by taking a vacation in the neighbouring apart-
ment. Contact with the apartment arouses a tired sex life – both Millers
masturbate in the Stones’ apartment. Bill truants from work to enjoy the
apartment; like a relaxed holidaymaker, he forgets what day it is when
he enters the place (SRC, p. 20). And like the ideal holiday destination,
the apartment provides an opportunity to explore different identities –
Bill sheds his own clothes and dresses up in Jim Stone’s holiday clothes
(Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts) before trying on Harriet’s outfits
(SRC, p. 20).
Initially the Millers’ behaviour is roughly obedient to hegemonic
mores and narratives. The couple indulge in a type of vicarious consump-
tion; they create a holiday from unpromising materials; they ease their
social frustrations by impersonating the Stones and playfully occupying
the higher social niche that the Stones’ apartment describes; they imagi-
natively perform the social promotion onto the edge of the PMC not
available in the real world. But from the outset, this consumption by
proxy exists alongside a more subversive mode of response: Bill searches
for the secret of the Stones’ success, pilfers what he can (an unofficial
remuneration for his time), and ‘steals’ back time from his own employer
in order to devote himself to pleasure in the Stones’ place. At the end of
the story, this mode becomes pronounced. Both Millers move from
‘wishing’ it was them to imagining how it might become them. They
start to think in terms of the dream home materializing into a real
home, of somehow expropriating their neighbours’ status and assuming
their identity: Bill initially ‘wondered whether they would ever return’
(SRC, p. 20); Arlene confesses to a similar fantasy (SRC, p. 20). Optimis-
tically he replies that ‘Anything could happen’; Arlene adds, ‘Or maybe
they’ll come back and . . .’. It is at this moment of muffled utopian think-
ing, hesitant confession and conspiratorial murmuring that they realize
the key is locked in the flat and that they are locked out. The story
ends with a Beckettian tableau: ‘They stayed there. They held each
other. They leaned into the door, as if against a wind, and braced them-
selves’ (SRC, p. 22).
The Millers’ momentary desire to wrest a realm of freedom from
the realm of necessity is, of course, partly comic. The joke at the heart

722
 Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

of the story is that the Millers and Stones are so similar. They live in the
same apartment block and move in the same circles. At the same time,
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

the story explores the reason why this small social difference is experienced
as being so vast. It appears vast because it is inexplicable: it is a slight differ-
ence, but as real and insurmountable as a glass ceiling. The Millers have
done the right things, but the right things have not happened. The
couple have no way to comprehend or talk about this, but nonetheless
begin to imagine making the right things happen – becoming the
Stones – by doing the wrong things – somehow expropriating their apart-
ment. This is an unusual moment in Carver’s fiction. The Millers’ mischief
in the Stones’ apartment begins to edge towards something more con-
scious. Rather than resourcefully coping with the way things are, the
Millers tentatively begin to imagine a structural reversal. It is a moment
of hesitant redistributive thought in which the vagueness of their plans
reflects the fact that they are pushing against the weight of the stories
through which they live their lives, in an attempt to hook onto other
stories, other mediations. Utopian thinking, the text implies, is like a
half-remembered dream – a depleted discourse only possible when the
imagined reversals are very slight. At the exact moment when the Millers
begin to imagine the social cleavage being overcome, in other words,
just as class begins to happen, they are punished by the story’s plot. The
logic of the story reflects the rules of society and functions as a punitive
superego. Utopian thought is slapped down by the reality principle and
the Millers are locked out of the flat. They are alert to the symbolism of
the everyday. The portentous ending suggests that they are braced to
suffer more than social embarrassment. Dissatisfied with their lot and
unable to attain any other, they are marooned in the corridor, suspended
in limbo between their apartment and the one they have dreamed of. Their
physical position reflects their social location. They realize that their desires
can neither be satisfied by doing the right things nor by not doing them.
Opaque and dense, Carver’s text allegorizes the difficulty of developing
and sustaining oppositional consciousness in the current climate.
Utopian thought exists as a trace. The text both creates a space for its
expression and, by punishing it, enacts Carver’s political pessimism.
There is apparently no outlet for utopian impulses here beyond the consu-
merist modes sanctioned by hegemonic discourses.


Published in 1976, Carver’s first book of stories presents equally com-

pressed mediations of a social world in which full time work in heavy
industry is in decline and low paid, irregular work in the service sector
takes up the slack.27 Carver found that the predominantly realist and nat-
uralist formations of earlier working-class protest fiction had no purchase

723
 Textual Practice

on his world: he did not see himself as belonging to a tradition of working-

class fiction, any more than to a tradition of working-class militancy
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

(though, he insisted, it was not the socialism of writers like Theodore

Dreiser and John Dos Passos he objected to, but their prose).28 The claus-
trophobic fables of alienation written by Kafka and Beckett were more sig-
nificant to him.
His subject matter is a particular ‘structure of feeling’, the term used
by Raymond Williams to cover ‘meanings and values as they are actively
lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic
beliefs’, ‘practical consciousness of a present kind’, ‘a social experience
which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but
taken to be private, idiosyncratic’.29 For the reasons outlined above,
Carver’s structure of feeling is ‘at the edge of semantic availability’,
in Raymond William’s terms.30 Whereas a fully functional set of already
codified narrative strategies and conventions are in place to explain and
give narrative form to his father’s experiences – including 1930s
working-class fiction – no such conventions are available to represent
Carver’s own generation (‘the new generation’, wrote Williams, ‘will
have its own structure of feeling, which will not appear to have come
“from” anywhere’).31
Shock, not solidarity, is common in Carver’s early writing. Shock –
‘immediate’ experience, or experience unmediated by narrative – occurs
when characters are confronted with events that do not feature in the hege-
monic stories through which they experience the social world. The real
world, in Carver, is often de-realized in a gap between the way things
should be (according to hegemonic stories), the way they are (unemploy-
ment, bankruptcy), and the absence of a functional language (oppositional
representation) to explain (‘articulate’) the difference. The everyday world
Carver ‘knew’ was mysterious and not available for coherent representation.
Like the slippage between hegemonic stories and real socio-economic
experience, the related struggle to represent a distinctive structure of
feeling from within a cultural and political context of under-representation
is an important source of Carver’s novel off-centre realism. As critic David
Kauffman points out, the ‘conjunction of incomprehension and inexpressi-
bility – which manifest itself in empty epiphanies brought on by an oddness
in the everyday – runs through Carver’s work’.32 And if empty epiphanies
are a recurrent experience in Carver, parataxis, as Kauffman stresses, is their
medium. The struggle to sustain a narrative, to connect events, to dis-
tinguish between the more and less important, to describe and explain, to
feel and articulate, finds its linguistic form in the fractured syntax of some
of Carver’s most disquieting sentences.33


724
 Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

Many of Carver’s early stories both address and reproduce a crisis in

narrative; they deal with situations in which nobody knows either what is
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

happening or what is going to happen next. The stories are anti-realist –

even cartoon-like – in erasing almost all oppositional mediations from
the social world, that is, in emphasizing the absence of those types of oppo-
sitional representation and consciousness that might shed some light on
what’s happening. It’s a critical commonplace to point out that in
Carver’s fiction the characters lack both historical perspectives and political
opinions.34 There are almost no dates in Carver: his characters inhabit a
perpetual present. In the entire corpus of America’s most famous blue-
collar realist, there is not a single strike, trade unionist, political party or
sustained political discussion. Set in this highly magnified context, the
texts dramatize characters confronting experiences that lie outside the hege-
monic stories through which they apprehend the social world.


Earl Ober, the unemployed salesman in ‘They’re Not Your Husband’,

is typically making it up as he goes along and improvising with the avail-
able materials. Carver’s text reproduces his perspective – the stories
through which he experiences the world – and no public, political or econ-
omic explanations are given for his situation. He copes with his unemploy-
ment – of having nothing to manage or sell – privately, domestically. His
social identity is defined by his occupation as a salesman. Denied that role
in the productive economy – there’s no work for salesmen – he reproduces
and performs it at home, aggressively managing his wife’s diet before com-
modifying and selling her, inviting other men to look at her over the
counter where she works as a waitress. He lives in a culture that commo-
difies women and, without a story or identity, uses her as his last
sample. The story’s grim humour resides in the bland unscrupulousness
with which he privileges his identity as a salesman over being his wife’s
husband. Carver’s tale dramatizes the effects of a particular type of disem-
powerment. Thrown back on his resources, and having no available oppo-
sitional narratives and no identity outside his economic function, Earl
blithely deconstructs the perceived opposition between the competitive
workings of the broader economy and the domestic sanctuary where
different values supposedly prevail. When push comes to shove, Carver’s
text suggests, home isn’t where the heart is: the market is the overpowering
story.
‘What Is It?’ covers similar ground.35 The unemployed and bankrupt
Leo also views his wife as his last commodity: her body represents the sole
remnant of a vanished era of prosperity, and he touches her ‘stretch marks’
while recalling a bygone era of easy credit and voracious consumerism
(SRC, p. 159). Again, the narrative both reproduces and thematizes the

725
 Textual Practice

shock of having no story or language to describe or explain events (it’s

never even clear who’s telling the story, or why). Mulling over his inexplic-
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

able bankruptcy, Leo thinks: ‘But bankruptcy is a company collapsing

utterly, executives cutting their wrists and throwing themselves from
windows, thousands of men on the street’ (SRC, p. 154). Leo is here
groping for a counterpoint or oppositional mediation to describe or
explain what is happening. Under-represented both culturally and politi-
cally, all he can come up with are the half forgotten cinematic clichés of
movies about the Wall Street crash and the depression (‘thousands of
men on the street’). Again, Carver’s tale dramatizes the effects of disen-
franchisement in which, in the absence of a language of class and opposi-
tional mediations, the social world is thoroughly naturalized.
Unemployment is inexplicable and the only available responses to it are
private and self-destructive. These texts are the location of a struggle to
articulate a structure of feeling on the edge of semantic availability, to
find aesthetic forms to narrate social experience that seem beyond narra-
tive. Produced from a context of weak class mediation and under-represen-
tation in political and cultural senses, they are simultaneously inhabited by
class feeling and struggle to dramatize and articulate those feelings. They’re
most suggestive politically when chronicling the consequences of the
absence of class-consciousness, and the absence of strong mediations
through which to apprehend, narrate and explain social cleavage. They
are oppositional, counter-hegemonic mediations (they tell different
stories) and knowingly symptomatic of the historically generated crisis in
class-consciousness identified by Davis and Aronowitz.


Writing provided Carver with the social promotion unavailable to his

most memorable characters, and the upward trajectory of his career is well
chronicled. He broke into further mass-circulation magazines including
Harper’s Bazaar and the New Yorker; after overcoming alcoholism in
1977 he published two more critically acclaimed story collections, What
We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) and Cathedral (1983);
he scooped increasingly prestigious awards. The 5-year Mildred and
Harold Strauss Livings Fellowship (1983) enabled him to withdraw
from his parallel career as creative writing lecturer.36 As critics have
often pointed out there is a gradual shift in his writing from the dead-
end minimalism of the early work to the more coherent narratives and
optimistic outcomes of the later.37 Aesthetic shifts are not, of course, redu-
cible to biographical facts, but there is a broad correspondence between the
more generous scope and moods of the later writing and Carver’s social
mobility.38 ‘The characters in the later stories’, Carver admitted, ‘are not

726
 Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

destitute or trapped or beaten up on by circumstances. . . . They make

decisions’ (CRC, p. 157).
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

In his comparatively affluent and sober years, Carver’s fiction often

explored different settings – many of the stories are focused through the
likes of the Stones rather than the Millers. Two of his best-known
stories, ‘Feathers’ and ‘Cathedral’, show characters moving from prejudice
to respectful decency, measuring Carver’s progress from a writer struggling
to articulate the structure of feeling of a submerged population to what
Theodor Adorno described, in another context, as a more fluent ‘friend
of mankind’.39 Other stories revisit the old life, but tell different stories,
retroactively suffusing the earlier settings with new optimism. The posthu-
mously published ‘Elephant’, for example, returns to the blue collar milieu
of the early work, but in a conservative revision, shows the protagonist
dealing with financial strain by discovering resources of inner strength.40
The ending, which seems ‘unrealistic’ in comparison to the early work’s
density, opacity and ‘dis-ease’, endorses those same hegemonic narratives
(doing the right things, pulling oneself up by the boot straps) that the
early stories figured as part of the problem.


The autobiographical poem ‘Shiftless’ (1985) revisits the sharp socio-

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

The years go by and everything and everyone

gets replaced. But this much is still true –
I never liked work. My goal was always
to be shiftless. I saw the merit in that.
I liked the idea of sitting in a chair
in front of your house for hours, doing nothing
but wearing a hat and drinking cola.
What’s wrong with that?
Drawing on a cigarette from time to time.
Spitting. Making things out of wood with a knife.41

Light-hearted and self-mocking in tone, the poem offers a wry line in

social comment. It registers, for instance, that according to society’s hege-
monic discourses, to be better off is to be better (being able to afford a flush
toilet is a measure of human worth); those worse off are sorry (in the sense

727
 Textual Practice

of pathetic, according to dominant discourses, and also apologetic: here the

text registers that, in the absence of oppositional mediations, the worse off
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

invest in the dominant stories and are compliantly sorry for their economic
inactivity). By italicizing ‘sorry’, and refusing to describe the lower socio-
economic group as ‘worse’ (rather than ‘worse off ’), the speaker declines
to repeat the dominant logic. ‘The years go by and everything and everyone
gets replaced’ then catches a glimpse of determining economic and political
structures behind the familiar social world: workers, like the cars they
produce in order to live (and consume in order to keep the economy
buoyant/describe their status), have to be reproduced if the system is to
be maintained. Fordist systems of production and consumption are
subtly invoked by the text’s association of cars, shifts, work, consumption,
people and objects being replaced.42 Written at a moment of
de-industrialization, when the Fordist post-war settlement was buckling
beneath economic and political pressure, the poem sets off a series of
puns around the meaning of ‘shiftless’: the speaker always had ambitions
to be shiftless, or without ambition; he always had ambitions to be
without a shift, without shiftwork (perhaps like a writer); shift workers
are currently being replaced, becoming shiftless, due to plant closures,
imports and automation.43 The puns on ‘shiftless’ establish an uneasy alli-
ance between those now without shifts and the poem’s perpetually shiftless
speaker: always reluctant to be part of this pattern of mechanized social
reproduction, he preferred the idea of ‘sitting in a chair’ and ‘[m]aking
things out of wood with a knife’ – a type of anachronistic craftsmanship
seemingly outside or pre-dating the alienating processes whereby things
and people are reproduced (‘the professional managerial workers exist’,
write B. and J. Ehrenreich, ‘only by virtue of the expropriation of the
skills and culture once indigenous to the working class’).44 The poem
jokily makes the case for preferring artisan-like, pre-Fordist, shiftless crea-
tive work (making things out of bits of wood). It also shies from the
implied political analysis (Fordism as mechanised expropriation of
working-class skills). Instead the poem situates shiftless creativity – such
as Carver’s writing of the poem – squarely outside the circle of real econ-
omic activity (shiftless wood-whittling/writing is not presented as an
alternative career plan). Nor is whittling/writing presented as oppositional,
insubordinate or politicized – even in the sense of a purposefully shiftless
refusal to obey dominant ideologies, rules and expectations. Removed from
the economic sphere and the practice of constructing social meaning,
writing is an innocently autonomous and idiosyncratic pastime: ‘Where’s
the harm there?’


As Carver passed beyond the pressured creative struggle of the early

work – up through text-book editor, lecturer, writer – he became at

728
 Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

once more forthcoming and contradictory about writing, class, politics and
the relationship between them, and repeatedly worried away at these issues
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

in essays, poems and interviews. It was in the period of his celebrity and
social mobility that he consistently emphasized his background, particu-
larly his father’ class profile. He also conceptualized and described his
own literary work in a variety of ways: in the section of ‘Fires’ (1982)
quoted previously, he directly addressed the economics of success –
‘Neighbors’ was ‘purchased’ by Esquire (F, p. 39); elsewhere in ‘Fires’, as
in ‘Shiftless’ and other 1980s retrospective accounts of his emergence as
a writer, financial questions are suppressed and writing is instead presented
as an activity serenely remote from the workaday world.45 Unlike his day
and night jobs, but like making things out of wood, writing was a ‘craft’,
and Carver’s commitment to both performing and describing the material
work of writing – drafting, editing, revising, polishing – was a recurrent
theme in the 1980s (F, p. 45).46 ‘I respect that kind of care for what is
being done’ he explained in ‘On Writing’ (1981):

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

Unlike the job opportunities offered by the real world, writing is

worthwhile creative work (it’s made) that promises ‘satisfaction’ if ‘made
as good as it is within us to make it’. Typically, however, Carver’s discourse
on writing is a fraught space: writing is a craft outside the alienation and
transactions of the productive economy; it’s also ‘labour’ – the word
immediately repositions writing back inside the productive economy,
and perhaps betrays an anxiety that the shiftless craft of writing is not
work at all. He wants writing to be a craft rather than a commodity, but
is loath altogether to relinquish its social function. In another essay first
published in 1983 writing is not ‘labour’ but now a ‘profession’
(F, p. 46), a ‘career’ (in the same sentence it’s also a ‘calling’) (F, p. 47).


The proliferation of competing descriptions reveal contradictions that

Carver never resolved: writing is ‘labour’ with a social function; a craft
outside alienating processes; and a reputable profession. The intrinsically
contradictory class location of the professional middle class – to which
the work of writing was always central – is at play here: historically the
PMC belongs neither to capital nor labour but anxiously mediates

729
 Textual Practice

between the two.47 The structural contradiction of the PMC is magnified

by the blue-collar social mobility of Carver’s own biography. In late inter-
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

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


Fourteen years after his breakthrough, Carver’s late poem ‘Locking

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

730
 Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

offered by the new perspective of being in two places at once, ‘To be there,
inside, and not be there’, of looking in and imagining himself at the desk
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

looking out. Carver then visualizes himself at his desk, ‘Thinking about
some other place / and some other time’, and mining the past for material,
writing about the former life he no longer leads. But being temporarily
locked out of the comfortable professional writer’s life suddenly brings
the other world dangerously close to home. From imagining himself
sitting at his writing desk and thinking about that other life, that other
life looms up before him: what if he can’t get back in? The poem then
records a jolting, visceral response to the old life: ‘a wave of grief passed
through me’, ‘I felt violently ashamed / of the injury I’d done back
then’. It’s at this point that he enacts violence on the new home. Rather
than remaining suspended outside the threshold of the PMC – like the
Millers in ‘Neighbors’ – he breaks and re-enters: ‘I bashed that beautiful
window. / And stepped back in’. And rather than re-visiting and
writing-up the old life, as in ‘Shiftless’, this poem – written when he’s
safely reinstalled at his desk – scrutinizes some of the complexities and
contradictions involved in that process. An allegory of social mobility
and class guilt, Carver presents the material comfort of the writer’s
life – consumer goods and a room in which to work – as an occasion
to reflect on former ‘dis-ease’, and a sanctuary from it.

University of Salford

Notes

1 See Stephen Berg (ed.), In Praise of What Persists (New York: Harper and Row,
1983), pp. 33 –44. Carver explains how ‘Fires’ came to be written in his essay
‘On Rewriting’, first published in Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, 1st edn (Santa
Barbara, California: Capra Press, 1983), pp. 187–189, and reprinted in
William L. Stull (ed.), Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and
Prose (London: Harvill, 2000), pp. 181–185. ‘Fires’ was first published in
Antaeus [New York], no. 47 (Autumn 1982), pp. 156–167 and then in a
slightly different form in Syracuse Scholar [Syracuse University] 3, no. 2 (Fall
1982), pp. 6–14.
2 Raymond Carver, ‘Fires’, in Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (1985; London:
Picador, 1986), p. 33. Further references are to this edition and will be cited
parenthetically as F.
3 Tess Gallagher, foreword to Raymond Carver, Call If You Need Me: The Uncol-
lected Fiction and Prose, ed. William L. Stull (London: Harvill, 2000), p. xiv.
4 Twenty-five Carver interviews are anthologized in Marshall Bruce Gentry and
William L. Stull (eds), Conversations with Raymond Carver ( Jackson and
London: University Press of Mississippi, 1990). In compiling the book, the

731
 Textual Practice

editors drew upon the 50 or so interviews Carver gave between 1977 and 1988;
Carver seems to have given no interviews between 1977 and 1979, the period
in which he finally overcame his longstanding alcoholism.
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

5 For Carver as a blue-collar writer see Bruce Weber, ‘Raymond Carver: A

Chronicler of Blue-Collar Despair’, New York Times Magazine, 24 June
1984, pp. 36–38; Gordon Burn, ‘Poetry, Poverty and Realism Down in
Carver Country’, The Times [London], 17 April 1985, p. 12. Both are rep-
rinted in Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L Stull (eds), Conversations
with Raymond Carver (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi,
1990). See also Robert Towers, ‘Low-Rent Tragedies’, New York Review
of Books, 14 May 1981, p. 38, and Jonathan Yardley, ‘Ordinary People
from an Extraordinary Writer’, Washington Post Book World, 4 September
1983, p. 3.
6 Raymond Carver, ‘My Father’s Life’, originally published in Esquire (Septem-
ber 1984) and reprinted in Raymond Carver, Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories
(1985; London: Picador, 1986), p. 13. Further references are to this edition
and will be cited parenthetically as F.
7 As Michael Denning has pointed out, the migration of 350,000 south-wester-
ners became ‘the story by which Americans narrated the depression’ and it
found almost instant iconic status through a range of texts including the photo-
graphs of Dorothea Lange (1935), documentary films such as The Plow Which
Broke The Plains (1936), political pamphlets like the Lang-Steinbeck collabor-
ation Their Blood is Strong (1938), historiography such as Carey McWilliams’
Factories in the Field (1939), and the novels of John Steinbeck and their film
adaptations. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Labouring of American
Culture in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: Verso, 1997),
p. 262. For a discussion of these texts, see pp. 260–261.
8 For the period’s industrial relations, see Denning, The Cultural Front, pp. 3–20,
Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History
of the US Working Class (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 52–73 and David
M. Gordon, Richard Edwards and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided
Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 165–228. For the
Communist Party, see Albert Fried (ed.), Communism in America: A History
in Documents (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 227–337.
The Lukács quotation is from Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness:
Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1999), p. 326. See also Georg Lukács, A Defence of History and
Class Consciousness: Talisman and Dialectic, trans. Esther Leslie (London and
New York: Verso, 2000).
9 Denning, The Cultural Front, p. 261.
10 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; London:
Penguin, 1980), p. 9. For an account of the time spent by Guthrie on the
Grand Coulee Dam project, see Ed Cray, Ramblin’ Man: The Life and
Times of Woody Guthrie (New York: Norton, 2004), pp. 207–214.

732
 Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

11 These lyrics are from Guthrie’s ‘Grand Coulee Dam’, quoted in Cray,
Ramblin’ Man, p. 212. For analysis of Guthrie’s class conscious lyrics, see
Bryan K. Garman, A Race of Singers: Whitman’s Working Class Hero from
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

Guthrie to Springstein (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina

Press), pp. 104–135.
12 Fredric Jameson, ‘Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day
Afternoon as a Political Film’ (1977) reprinted in Signatures of the Visible
(New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 35 –55 (p. 37).
13 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 8–9.
14 Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 69. I am indebted to the
work of Michael Denning for bringing Przeworski’s book to my attention.
For Denning on Przeworski, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime
Novels and Working Class Culture in America (London and New York:
Verso, 1987), pp. 77–79.
15 For a résumé of these shifts, see Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consu-
mer Society’ in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (1983; London: Pluto
Press, 1985), pp. 124–125. For the 1950s boom, see Nigel Harris, Of
Bread and Guns: The World Economy in Crisis (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1983), pp. 30–73. For the significance of credit, home and car ownership
see Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience,
trans. David Fernbach (1976; London, New Left Books, 1979), pp. 141–
160. For the emergence and consolidation of Fordism, see Nick Heffernan,
Capital, Class and Technology in Contemporary American Culture (London:
Pluto, 2000), pp. 1–28.
16 The 1950 General Motors-UAW contract or ‘Treaty of Detroit’ famously
ushered in a period in which collective wage bargaining and the quid pro
quo became the dominant paradigm of industrial relations. See Denning,
The Cultural Front, pp. 22 –24; Gordon, Edwards and Reich, Segmented
Work, pp. 165–170; Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of Amer-
ican Working Class Consciousness (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973), pp. 214–
264; and Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, pp. 102– 124.
17 B. and J. Ehrenreich, ‘The Professional-Managerial Class’ in P. Walker (ed.),
Between Labor and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979), pp. 5–45 (p. 19).
18 Heffernan, Capital, Class and Technology, p. 34.
19 For increased access to higher education between 1940 and 1970, see Table 5.1
in Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, p. 191. For Carver’s life, see Adam
Meyer, Raymond Carver (New York: Twayne, 1995), pp. 1– 18.
20 Aronowitz, False Promises, p. 6.
21 Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream, p. 8.
22 Larry McCaffrey and Sinda Gregory, ‘An Interview with Raymond Carver’, in
Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s, ed.
McCaffrey and Gregory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987),
pp. 66– 82, reprinted in Conversations with Raymond Carver, ed. Gentry and
Stull, pp. 98– 116 (p. 112).

733
 Textual Practice

23 See also Michael Schumacher, ‘After the Fire, into the Fire: An Interview with
Raymond Carver’, in Conversations with Raymond Carver, ed. Gentry and
Stull, pp. 234–235.
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

24 For the controversy over Lish’s editorial role, see D. T. Max, ‘The Carver
Chronicles’, New York Times Magazine, 9 August, 1998, p. 34. For a balanced
overview, see Arthur F. Bethea, Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and
Poetry of Raymond Carver (New York and London: Routledge, 2001).
25 For the ‘mechanization of bookkeeping’ see Aronowitz, False Promises, pp.
293–295; for the social mobility of those working in sales, see p. 307. For
the significance of the professional-managerial class in post-1945 US class
relations, see Nick Heffernan, Capital, Class and Technology in Contemporary
American Culture (London: Pluto, 2000), pp. 29 –36.
26 See David Boxer and Cassandra Phillips, ‘Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?:
Voyeurism, Dissociation, and the Art of Raymond Carver’, Iowa Review,
10.3 (summer 1979), pp. 75 –90, and Kirk Nesset, The Stories of Raymond
Carver (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995), pp. 11 –14.
27 The collections are Will You Please Be Quiet, Please (1976), What We Talk
About When We Talk About Love (1981) and Cathedral (1983). These three
books are collected in The Stories of Raymond Carver (London: Picador,
1985). References are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically as SRC.
28 John Alton, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Literature: An Inter-
view with Raymond Carver’, Chicago Review, 36 (Autumn 1988), pp. 4–21;
reprint, Conversations with Raymond Carver, ed. Gentry and Stull, p. 157.
Further references to this interview will be cited parenthetically as CRC.
29 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), p. 132.
30 Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 134.
31 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (1961: London: Hogarth, 1992),
p. 49.
32 David Kaufmann, ‘Yuppie Postmodernism’, Arizona Quarterly, 47.2 (summer
1991): pp. 93– 116 (p. 99).
33 Kaufmann, ‘Yuppie Postmodernism’, p. 99.
34 For a critical take on Carver’s lack of historical perspective, see Frank Lentric-
chia, introduction to Lentricchia (ed.), New Essays on White Noise (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
35 Carver later changed the title of this story to ‘Are These Actual Miles’.
36 See Appendix 6, ‘Chronology’ in Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected
Poems, pp. 371–375.
37 This trend is mapped by William Stull in ‘Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side
of Raymond Carver’, Philological Quarterly, 64 (1985), pp. 1–15.
38 There are inevitably significant exceptions to this trend. ‘Preservation’ from
Cathedral is a relatively late story that exceeds even the early work in exploring
how the loss of narrative converts the domestic sphere from the stuff of ready-
made realism into a site of shock and dislocation. Furthermore, the degree of
Gordon Lish’s editorial input into the early work has only recently come to
light, and paradoxically, the early stories most frequently recognized as

734
 Ben Harker ‘To be there, inside, and not be there’

quintessentially Carversque – the baffling, the ruthlessly pared-down – are

those to which Lish contributed most. Carver freely admitted the value of a
keen-eyed editor. Once, when asked about the relationship between writer
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

and editor, he quoted Ezra Pound’s observation – ‘It’s immensely important

that great poems be written, but makes not a jot of difference who writes them’
– to emphasize the collaborative relationship (CRC, p. 23).
39 The term famously used by Theodor Adorno to describe Brecht’s later work.
Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Ronald Taylor (ed.), Aesthetics and Politics (1977;
London and New York: Verso, 1992), pp. 177–196 (p. 191).
40 Raymond Carver, Elephant and Other Stories (London: Harvill, 1989), pp.
73 –91.
41 ‘Shiftless’ was first published in Poetry [Chicago, IL], 146.6 (September 1985),
p. 344. Reprinted in Raymond Carver, All of Us: The Collected Poems
(New York: Vintage, 1996), pp. 175– 176.
42 ‘Fordism refers to the way in which economic, social and even cultural life was
organized in the United States and Western Europe for the duration of the
long postwar boom between 1945 and the early 1970s. The principal
feature of this period was the establishment of a durable balance between
the mass production of standardized goods on the one hand, and the mass con-
sumption of such goods on the other’. Nick Heffernan, Capital, Class & Tech-
nology in Contemporary American Culture: Projecting Post-Fordism (London:
Pluto Pres, 2000), p. 3.
43 A process chronicled by Davis in Prisoners, p. 103.
44 B. and J. Ehrenriech, ‘The Professional-Managerial Class’, in Walker (ed.),
p. 17.
45 In one passage of ‘Fires’ he recalled the aura of the prestigious ‘little magazines’
whose existence seemed to negate society’s dominant rules: inverting the laws
of the market, these journals consistently published the best in contemporary
American writing and remained exotically obscure (F, pp. 37, 44).
46 Carver described his writing practices as follows: ‘I try to do the story once in
maybe 35 or 40 pages, in longhand, knowing I’ll have to go back, and that the
real work will begin later after I get it typed up. And then it’s not at all uncom-
mon to do 10 or 15 drafts, 20 drafts of that story’ (CRC, p. 13).
47 ‘The postwar explosion in higher education, writes Nick Heffernan, ‘the
expansion of the mass media, and the extension of the corporate bureaucratic
apparatus from the regulation of consumption into the regulation of consump-
tion and demand meant that “the material position of the [PMC during the
1950s and 1960s] was advancing rapidly’. Heffernann, Capital, Class and
Technology, p. 88. The inset quotation is from B. and J. Ehrenreich, ‘The
Professional-Managerial Class’, pp. 30 –31.
48 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 7.
49 The idea that in the context of a newly pressured post-war Fordist consensus
Carver might instead become a working-class organic intellectual in the
Gramscian sense – an organizer of masses of men, shaping and directing the
consciousness of the class to which he originally belonged – is as far-fetched
as the endings of 1930s proletarian novels, with their conversions to socialism

735
 Textual Practice

and eruptions of social solidarity, seemed to Carver. Antonio Gramsci, ‘The

Intellectuals’ in Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (trans. and ed.),
Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London: Lawrence
Downloaded By: [CDL Journals Account] At: 20:06 11 January 2008

and Wishart, 1971), pp. 3 –23. In a significant article, Bill Mullen argues
that whether he intended it or not, Carver does actually represent a late flower-
ing of ‘social realism in the tradition of working-class or proletarian writing’.
Carver, Mullen claims, is different from his forebears in that he leaves out ‘the
overt didacticism and attendant sentimentality of earlier proletarian realism’;
Carver’s pared down objectivity, for Mullen, ‘may be read as a satiric
comment on the voyeuristic restraint with which contemporary American
society – including its own diminishing traditional working class ranks –
has observed the diminution of its human resources’ (pp. 101, 102). Bill
Mullen, ‘A Subtle Spectacle: Televisual Culture in the Short Stories of
Raymond Carver’, Critique, 39.2 (Winter 1998), pp. 99 –114.
50 Raymond Carver, ‘Locking Yourself Out, Then Trying To Get Back In’,
Pequod, 18 (1985), pp. 48 –49, reprinted in Raymond Carver, All Of Us:
The Collected Poems (1996; New York: Vintage, 2000), pp. 73 –74.

736