Modern American Literature and the New Twentieth Century Twentieth American Literature and the New Modern F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Short Fiction Short Scott Fitzgerald’s F. ‘Jade Broughton Adams’ book opens new and important territory in F. Scott Fitzgerald studies. This is an investigation of Fitzgerald’s The Literary understanding of the popular culture of his time. Adams identifies the influences of music, dance, theatre and film on his short fiction, still the Afterlife of most neglected part of his oeuvre. The writing in this book is sprightly and the research impeccable.’ James L. W. West III, General Editor, Cambridge Fitzgerald Edition Raymond Carver A revisionist reading of Fitzgerald’s short stories Influence and Craftsmanship through the lens of interwar popular culture in the Neoliberal Era F. Scott Fitzgerald’s two hundred some short stories are vividly infused with the new popular culture of the early twentieth century, from jazz to motion pictures. By exploring Fitzgerald’s fascination with the intertwined Jonathan Pountney spheres of dance, music, theatre and film, this book demonstrates how Fitzgerald innovatively imported practices from other popular cultural media into his short stories, showing how jazz age culture served as more than mere period detail in his work. Jade Broughton Adams is an independent scholar, specialising in Jade Broughton Adams Jade American fiction and popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s. Cover image: couple dancing the Charleston, 1927 © akg-images / ullstein bild ISBN 978-1-4744-2468-4 Cover design: www.hayesdesign.co.uk edinburghuniversitypress.com 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 Visit our website at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/MALTNTC The Literary Afterlife of Raymond Carver Influence and Craftsmanship in the Neoliberal Era JONATHAN POUNTNEY Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting- edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Jonathan Pountney, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 10/13 ITC Giovanni Std Book by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 5550 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 5552 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 5553 4 (epub) The right of Jonathan Pountney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). CONTENTS 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 genius – 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 – as 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 musician Paul Kelly and the photographer Bob Adelman. The 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 – what 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 neoliberalism – 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.