Feature Portfolio: Part One

These articles are intended for the internet literature blog HTMLGIANT, which deals with a broad variety of literary topics and debate, in a semi-casual manner.

Why Raymond Carver Is My Elvis

Raymond Carver left his first dent on my heart while I was in my early teens. After reading So Much Water So Close To Home I spent the following couple of days burdened by an intangible, unshakeable, sense of uneasiness.
It took me a while to identify the source because I’d never felt this way before – I was a kid and any anxiety I had known was easily identifiable, and just as easily resolved – but eventually it happened upon me, quietly, slowly, in the very same manner as the story itself had built that almost unbearable sense of suspicion. I had, for the first time, been deeply affected by a writer, by another world, someone else’s story.

With Carver, it’s been that way ever since. Some stories and poems hit harder than others; but it’s his quietness, his concern with those small, seemingly insignificant moments, his exploration of the mundane, and his overwhelming celebration of everyday life, that has fuelled the love affair. I’m not sure whether it’s that very simplicity that renders me so affected by his work, but when trying to pinpoint it, all that comes to mind is that image evoked by Rilke’s caged panther, where:

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly—
An image enters in,

rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,

plunges into the heart and is gone.

I’ll admit it, some nights, laying in bed when sleep won’t have me, I’ve recited The Current in my mind, over and over, comforted by the certainty that comes from knowing somebody has felt the same, if only for a moment long enough to put pen to page. So, in light of the impending release of Beginners on October 15th, it’s hard to decide whether or not I should feel moderately disturbed by the apparent ruthlessness Carver’s editor Gordon Lish approached his manuscripts with. ‘Every notable book, they argue, is the product of a collaboration between author and publisher,’ and it would be naïve of me to confuse Carver’s published work for being as raw and immediate as it appears on the printed page. Do I feel duped? Is it like learning a lover never truly meant those sweet nothings? To be honest, I’m interested to read his un-edited drafts because I anticipate they could be more beautiful and sincere than their published counterparts. I’d always enjoyed Ray’s ‘minimalist’ style, but had heard it was due, in part, to his ongoing alcoholism and to, as Carver himself explains:

‘Life circumstances. I was very young. I got married at eighteen. My wife was seventeen; she was pregnant. I had no money at all and we had to work all the time and bring up our two children […] So I set myself to writing poems and short stories. I could sit down at a table, start and finish in one sitting .’

While, of course, it is interesting to learn that there is another factor involved in the development of his highly discussed style, personally, I don’t see it as being the crux of his work. For me, it is his knowing eye on the world, the way it would take notice of the moments most others would miss. Perhaps this is why many writers, in their attempt to emulate his work, fall so short , and why his unedited manuscripts will most likely reveal only a greater depth to his brilliance. I think that Gaby Wood summarises it nicely:
‘Carver hated to be called a "minimalist", and he was called one often. One wonders if he disliked the term because he knew that minimalism was the aspect of his writing that was least his own. If you are a Carver reader who mainly associates his work with a certain style, then you may be surprised to find that the style itself – his sentences and paragraphs, the blunt, mid-air endings of his stories – was in many cases engineered by Gordon Lish. If, however, you take Carver's world as a whole – the brutality of intimacy, the unplaceability of anxiety, the mess any and all of us can make of love – you may think that Lish saw something in Carver, rather than imposing something else on him, and helped find a form to fit the content.’


Peter Carey
TWO OF MY FAVOURITES

I know it sounds awful – really terrible – but I don’t especially like many Australian authors, and those I do like I can count on one hand. Maybe it’s because the majority of Australian literature I’ve read seems incapable of transcending its setting, too firmly rooted in its baron landscapes sprinkled with ghost gums, or the treacherous urban sprawl that is Australia’s suburbia. Or, even worse, Sydney.
Perhaps, the saying has some truth behind it, and the grass is always greener because, instead, I find myself blind sighted by some mysterious romanticism which draws me only to characters living and loving on the big, green, American continent. Give me Flannery O’Connor or William Carlos Williams over David Malouf any day; not because they are more sophisticated wordsmiths, but because for whatever reason, something is lacking in me and I just cannot empathise with, or rouse even the slightest interest in, the characters populating Australian literature. That is, apart from Peter Carey’s characters, which, in my opinion are some of the most beautifully developed, heartrendingly tragic of them all.

 Their setting is irrelevant, it could be nowhere or anywhere at all – and that’s not to say the setting itself is extraneous, on the contrary, it is often a source of persistent anguish, eliciting the darkest and most malevolent character traits – but is generally both unidentifiable and similarly inescapable, notable in stories such as A Windmill In The West, Life and Death in the South Side Pavilion and Crabs.
As a direct result of these often nameless settings, and, at times, nameless characters, what shines through in all of its purity is the awkward beauty of human life, as ugly and meaningless as it often is.

In my opinion, the following stories are two outstanding examples of Peter Carey's knack for forcing the reader to both connect and empathise with some pretty repulsive and seemingly inhumane characters. We're all capable of evil, disgusting behavior; he knows that and doesn’t want us to forget it any time soon.  

Life and Death in the South Side Pavilion
Futility is a common theme of Carey’s, especially futility in the face of impossible circumstances, but, in my opinion, it is nowhere more eloquently explored than in this particular story. How heartbreaking it all is: the well-meaning, love-sick protagonist, in the process of being slowly strangled by the meaningless of a life he just can’t seem to escape. It’s almost like Carey set out to elucidate the most startlingly haunting metaphor for absurdism when he wrote this story, the whole time you just want to scream, “just leave, it doesn’t matter, why can’t you just leave?” And then you realise, he just can’t – it’s like asking why the bank doesn’t just print more money – and neither can you.

The Chance
The Chance is one of my favourites because I feel like it’s a pretty honest assessment of what people are actually like. Obviously, it represents what seems, at least, to be an alien dystopia, a place we’ll never know, although I can’t help but feel that maybe this is how the world ends. It’s not a new scenario: a person, despite recognising the depths of ugliness in their own character, goes to fanatical extremes to – both literally and metaphysically – keep the ugliness of their lover concealed. Carey does a pretty good job of tying two volatile social myths into big, untidy knots. In his world, love can easily be forgotten and does not conquer all, and the desire of man to control his own fate is entirely futile. As a consolation he offers a reminder to his reader, symbolised by a pair of discarded underwear, that love in all of its glory is enough to neutralise all of the ugliness in the world.