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The Edited and Unedited Raymond Carver

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The Edited and Unedited Raymond Carver EVERYDAY OTHERNESS: THE EDITED AND UNEDITED RAYMOND CARVER By Catherine Humble Student no. 22097227 Goldsmiths College PhD English 1 DECLARATION I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Catherine Humble 2 Abstract This thesis is a reading of Raymond Carver’s edited and unedited writing with respect to unsymbolised mental spaces. Carver’s edited writing is characterized by clipped sentences and solid silences and is often defined as ‘minimalist’. His unedited writing is more garrulous and sprawling, which has led critics to label it ‘realist’. I consider how these different forms of language present different kinds of resistances to clear meaning. I read these resistances in terms of different mentally unsymbolised spaces: unconscious spaces that resist symbolisation. In doing so, I consider the psychoanalytic thought of Lacan, along with Laplanche and Green, as well as Blanchot and Attridge on literary otherness. In the curt sentences juxtaposed with hard silences of Carver’s edited, so- called minimalist writing, I consider how highly fixed meanings are split from radically unsymbolised spaces. Here I find a theoretical echo in my reading of Lacan’s originary linguistic castration: his account of the first traumatic linguistic cut that is inflicted on the young infant, splitting the infant between a pre-linguistic state and a state of meaning. I suggest that Carver’s edited, minimalist language stages this original cutting into being. His prose stages the very way in which everyday language inflicts a certain cut and his writing takes this cut to an extreme. In the more sprawling so-called ‘realist’ language of the unedited Carver, the unsymbolised and meaning entwine rather than bifurcate. Bringing together Carver, Lacan, and Blanchot, in the unedited realist prose I conceive the unsymbolised as held, sheltered, even quietly hidden but not annulled by linguistic meaning. Carver’s unedited writing stages psychical alterity as quietly imbricated in the texture of language, fostering a more bodily expression of the unsymbolised. 3 Everyday Otherness: The Edited and Unedited 1 Raymond Carver Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction: Reading Carver 7 Carver and the literary other 7 Carver, literature and the mind 17 Bordering literature and psychoanalysis 27 Chapters 33 1. Literary Historical Context 37 Cut to the linguistic bone: the Carver-Lish controversy 37 The author-editor question 41 The minimalist other: Carver’s edited work 45 The unedited prose: Carver the realist? 51 2. Talking About Love in Carver and Lacan 61 Lacan: language, otherness, love 63 Beginners at love 68 Pleasure of the edit 73 The space of otherness 77 Bodily text: feminine and masculine others 80 In the midst of love 87 Holding otherness: rethinking Lacan 90 4 3. The Mad Outside of ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’ 95 Theorising minimalist madness 97 The minimalist split 104 Carver’s minimalist space 111 Mad desirousness: the unedited prose 118 A paranoiac cut 130 Metaphoric connections 136 Minimalist affect 142 4. Speaking from the Heart: The Carver Lish Correspondence 146 Transference, literature, letters 147 1971-1977: ‘an ideal reader’ 154 1980: ‘liable to croak’ 160 1982 to 1983: ‘limbs and heads of hair’ 174 5. Dwelling with the Other: Hospitality 189 and Visuality in ‘Cathedral’ The ethical other: Carver, Lévinas, Lacan 191 The real other: solitary dwelling 195 The imaginary other: outside fantasies 204 The symbolic other: thresholds of hospitality 213 Conclusion 226 Bibliography 234 5 Acknowledgements The following have all enabled this project in various ways, and so I wish to extend my immense gratitude to: my supervisor, Prof. Josh Cohen, for his careful, sensitive reading and always constructive criticism; the English and Comparative Literature Department, for providing funding and gainful employment; colleagues at the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, for employment and inspiration; colleagues at the Telegraph, for past work and support; Adi Drori-Avraham, Stewart Motha, and Alex Pearce, for invigorating discussions and persistent encouragement; Richard Alleyne, for our shared passion for Carver; Saven Morris, for casting a keen eye over my writing. I would like to thank the following for their encouragement, patience and determined support over the years: Madeleine Brettingham, Paul Willis, Edward Tull, Elaine Moore, Emma Farquharson, Sarah Wheeler, Naomi Blume, Bernadette McNulty, Francis Booth, Rebecca Davies, Rachel Chaplin and Bruce Eadie and family, Hanya Chlala and family, Sue Rolph, Peter Sweetman, and William Humble. Finally, this thesis is written in memory of Deborah Katz, for her always staunch encouragement and for our shared reading of Carver. 6 Introduction: Reading Carver Carver and the literary other The ‘other’ can be an overworked term in academic discourse, used in a general way to refer to a variety of phenomena: the culturally excluded, the inexplicable, that which resists conventional rules, defies ideological models, or is outside reason. In the field of literary studies, ‘the other’ is predominantly used to refer to a form of linguistic expression that disrupts finite meaning, disturbing clear semantic reference. My examination of literary otherness in the edited and unedited Carver is informed by significant incursions in this field in the last 50 years, primarily by Maurice Blanchot and Derek Attridge. In order to do justice to the uniqueness of Carver’s writing it is not my intention to map theory onto his work. Instead, I try to show how theoretical writing brings out the alterity in Carver’s writing, and also how Carver’s literary prose brings out the otherness in the theory. In accordance with Paul de Man, who rebukes parasitic relations between theory and literature where ‘we have a creative part’ that is other and ‘a reflective or critical part that feeds on this’ (de Man 1983: 143), I see reading Carver’s literature as productive of reading of the theory and the theory as immanent to the literature. When describing the effect of his own writing, or of writing he admires, Carver is often drawn to terms that resound with otherness, with what is outside of clear meaning: the ‘something else’, the ‘whatness’, the ‘heft’ of writing (2001: 223-224). 7 Citing Joyce, Carver refers to an ambiguous ‘whatness’ of writing, which ‘leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance’ (2001: 223; my italics). He says, ‘The best of fiction ought to have, for want of a better word, heft to it . But whatever one wants to call it (it doesn’t even need naming), everyone recognises it when it declares itself’ (2001: 223). This indeterminate ‘heft’ of writing, which ‘declares itself’ (suggesting a performative dimension) is outside clear meaning – it doesn’t even need naming, says Carver.1 Indeed, Carver’s widow Tess Gallagher speaks of the ‘transcendent’ quality of his writing, where this transcendence stems ‘from the whole, but also from the small things: phrasing and syntax, the recognition or surprise of characters, the- line-by-line play of the telling’ (Carver 2001: ix). For Carver himself, the power of his writing arises from ‘the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story’, but also from the unsaid, ‘the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things’ (Carver 2001: 92). Thus, in Carver’s own words, his writing works according to meaning and the other, with the two mobilised in tandem. Maurice Blanchot In thinking about the literary other in Carver this thesis draws on a number of Blanchot’s texts, such as The Writing of the Disaster, ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’ and ‘Everyday speech’ (Blanchot 1995b; Blanchot 1999; Blanchot; 1987). But my exploration of ‘realist’ otherness in the edited and unedited Carver is primarily a 1 The term ‘heft’ has a particular meaning in American English that Raymond Carver used to connote the weight or gravity of writing (2001: 223). But the weight or gravity of writing suggests more than simply its linguistic content, something more indistinct. ‘Heft’ also has the etymology of ‘heave’, ‘force’, ‘stress’, and ‘pressure’ (OED online), again alluding to the indeterminate power of writing. 8 sustained response to Blanchot’s provocative essay ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ (Blanchot 1995a), which I will outline here. Literature is ‘what I cannot grasp’, writes Blanchot, ‘in the face of which I shall be unable to remain the same, for this reason: in the presence of something other, I become other’ (Blanchot 1995a: 314). In ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ Blanchot distinguishes between two slopes of literature (1995a: 300-349). The ‘first slope is meaningful prose’, what Blanchot calls ‘common language’ (1995a: 333): the type of language that conceals the gap between the word and thing. The second slope is ‘literature [that] refuses to name anything, when it turns a name into something obscure and meaningless, witness to the primordial obscurity’ (1995a: 329) – this indeterminacy of literature captures something of primordial being prior to its relation with symbolic meaning. Blanchot’s conception of these slopes is based on the premise that ‘common language’ operates according to the Hegelian dialectical negation, where the word negates the ‘real’ thing to accede to meaning (1995a: 302-304). It is also based on the conception of a primordial otherness of existence (‘primordial obscurity’) that ‘common’ language negates and which certain forms of ‘ambiguous’ language (‘literature is language turning into ambiguity’; 1995a: 314) can indicate. This thesis will situate the prose of the edited and unedited Carver in relation to Blanchot’s two slopes. Reading Blanchot alongside Carver’s edited and unedited prose, I will go on to suggest that the distinction between the two slopes is more muddied than Blanchot, and dominant readings of Blanchot, explicitly suggest (Hill 1997; Critchley 2004: 57-71).
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