The Poetry of Raymond Carver

Against the Current

Sandra Lee Kleppe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317020943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Best known as one of the great short story writers of the twentieth century, Raymond Carver also published several volumes of poetry and considered himself as much a poet as a fiction writer. Sandra Lee Kleppe combines comparative analysis with an in-depth examination of Carver's poems, making a case for the quality of Carver's poetic output and showing the central role Carver's pursuit of poetry played in his career as a writer. Carver constructed his own organic literary system of 'autopoetics, ' a concept connected to a paradigm shift in our understanding of the inter-relatedness of biological and cultural systems. This idea is seen as informing Carver's entire production, and a distinguishing feature of Kleppe's book is its contextualization of Carver's poetry within the complex literary and scientific systems that influenced his development as a writer. Kleppe addresses the common themes and intertextual links between Carver's poetry and short story careers, situates Carver's poetry within the love poem tradition, explores the connections between neurology and poetic memories, and examines Carver's use of the elegy genre within the context of his terminal illness. Tellingly, Carver's poetry, which has aroused slight interest among literary scholars, is frequently taught to medical students. This testimony to the interdisciplinary implications of Carver's work suggests the appropriateness of Kleppe's culminating discussion of Carver's work as a bridge between the fields of literature and medicine.

PART I The Autopoetics of Outside and Inside

Section Preface: A Brief History of Intertextuality

Intertextuality is inherently autopoetic, as it refers to how a system reproduces by reusing already existing elements to create something new. Part I of this book explores issues of mutual relevance for Carver’s fiction and poetry careers and implicitly and explicitly makes use of the concepts of intra- and intertextuality, referring to internal and external borrowing, respectively. Intertextuality has been around as long as humans have produced texts and refers to how they incorporate or recycle parts of others. In the twentieth century, the idea of text came to mean virtually anything that can be considered a sign to be decoded; thus intertextuality has now become almost a universal term that can be applied to the study of everything from films and paintings to food and patients. This section (and this book) is mainly concerned with how literature as a system reproduces elements, though these elements can come from anywhere inside or outside of literature itself. When Carver reuses a motif from his own works, the process can be referred to as intratextual, i.e. he takes something from inside his own oeuvre to create another text. When he incorporates an element from outside, whether from someone else’s text or from the topoi of literary history, or from pop culture, the process is intertextual.

The concept of intertextuality as developed by European literary scholars in the twentieth century can be traced back to Julia Kristeva’s translations of Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s cultural and literary studies. In The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin notes that

Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated—overpopulated—with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. (294)

One aspect that complicates intertextual reproduction across works and periods is that the “intentions” noted by Bakhtin can be conscious or unconscious, deliberate or accidental. Autopoetic systems, however, do not place special importance on whether an element is recycled spontaneously or on purpose, since the main drive of the system is to reproduce. However, poems are complex systems that are not completely random, since the creativity of the writer is responsible for choice and composition, yet the poet chooses and constructs from a multitude of possibilities that are simultaneously available.

One current term to describe how particular items have a higher chance of reproducing in culture is meme. Coined by zoologist Richard Dawkins in 1976, the term meme refers to cultural artifacts that behave like genes to replicate:

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. (Dawkins, The Selfish Gene 192)

If we consider imitation in a broad sense, as Dawkins suggests, we can see how Carver’s emblematic poem “The Current” not only imitates literary traditions—e.g. the meme of blind prophesy passed down from antiquity (the “fish have no eyes”)—but he also imitates the very movement of propagation by describing how the fish impregnate the brain of the speaker with their sperm and eggs: “scattering their roe and milt/ in the pockets of my brain” (lines 3–4).

The new study of memetics is gaining momentum in the twenty-first century. It differs from intertextuality as the focus has shifted from semiotics to interdisciplinarity, i.e. to an emphasis on how different networks replicate the same elements. ¹ An influential study in the field of memetics is Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (1999) in which she makes the claim that our human evolution is driven by our ability to imitate then reproduce, biologically through genes and culturally through memes. In short, a “meme is a unit of cultural transmission” (Dakwins in Blackmore 1999, 6). However, scholars disagree on whether conscious choice is a factor in creative transmission of the cultural type represented by the meme. While Blackmore argues in The Meme Machine that “the creative achievements of human culture are the products of memetic evolution” and “not a magical, out-of-nowhere power such as consciousness” (240), Kate Distin, in The Selfish Meme, makes a strong case that “memetic evolution is quite consistent with a world of intentional, conscious and responsible free agents” (5). In other words, it is compatible with human creativity.

¹ See also http://users.ipfw.edu/waldschg/whatis.htm for an account of memetics (accessed February 20, 2012).

This discussion is relevant for a study of Carver’s poetry career because it can help explain the rich texture of classical and other literary devices that appear in his poems as he weaves them into his own idiosyncratic system. In the system of literature, topoi or motifs that have passed down through the centuries are types of memes, and it may be difficult or impossible to determine the degree to which a writer is conscious of his or her appropriation of these. There is, however, always a formal intention in a literary meme; it contains all the baggage carried by the population of intentions cited by Bakhtin, and this has been to a large extent overlooked in the postmodern eagerness to disavow the notion of authorial intention. The use of memes activates a number of latent historical meanings and allows for genre renewal the way genes store latent information that can become active in a human body. The argument for employing the term meme in this book, then, is that it directs particular attention to how the poet does not create in a vacuum, but activates specific formal intentions in his choices, especially those he fishes out of the vast meme pool of available poetic traditions. This is particularly relevant for Chapter 1, which traces Carver’s use of the meme of voyeurism through several centuries of poetry and art.

Though it is not the main argument of this study, the individual artist’s idiosyncratic choices among the chaos of available materials for ‘imitation’ are indeed a crucial factor in human creativity. Claudia Schlee makes a strong case precisely for the importance of the formal intentions unleashed by the poet’s creativity in her article “Poetry as Compass: Chaos, Complexity, and the Creative Voice.” “The author, part of the organic process of life himself,” she comments, “essentially imposes order on chaos by creating another organism, an autopoetic system, in the form of a poem” (2006). This study endorses the phenomenon that in “language,” as Kate Distin points out, “the possibilities of innovation due to recombination are much greater than they could ever be with DNA.” ² And Carver was a great innovator of poetry as well as fiction.

² Kate Distin is referring to Steven Pinker’s ideas of language in this discussion (Distin 56).

When Carver employs the meme of voyeurism, as he does so frequently in poems and stories (the topic of Chapter 1), he is activating and imposing his own order on the chaos of historical and contemporary meanings associated with sight and vision. Memetic studies tend to employ the example of sound memes like pop tunes to illustrate how such memes quickly multiply regardless of the human carrier. Sounds are especially adept at reproducing as they travel like wildfire from brain to brain with little resistance and thus maximum chances of replication. To use an example relevant for Carver, the instrumental group The Brass Ring was enormously popular in the 1960s, their band name picking up on a current term or meme that was quite trendy at the time. Carver’s choice of title for the first poem he published, “The Brass Ring” from 1967 (originally published in a magazine in 1962), was also a timely one, reflecting, as mentioned, the move from literal (the carousel) to figurative (success) connotations of the term. The Brass Ring band had a billboard hit in 1966, “The Phoenix Love Song,” that was used in the soundtrack of the film The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), which was in turn adapted from the 1964 novel of the same name by Elleston Trevor. The group The Brass Ring had another hit in 1967, “The Dis-Advantages of You,” used as a jingle for a Benson & Hedges cigarette commercial. Thus one meme or intertext, such as the brass ring concept, uses the human brain to circulate among different types of networks, from radio to film to television advertisement to poem, having originated in the literal American carousel that had its golden age in the early twentieth century.

As we will see in Chapter 2 below, Carver uses the idea of the network, specifically of telephone lines and electric cables, to create dynamic connections between the inside and outside worlds of his poetry and fiction. And as we will see in Chapter 1, he employs the voyeur as a figure who can be simultaneously external and internal to a situation through the use of mirrors and windows. Connecting both chapters in this section is thus an autopoetics of outside and inside where traffic between the two in both poems and stories is characterized by intertextual crossings, in which an element from one realm seeps into and is resurrected in another. Chapter 1 focuses on the intertextual, on how Carver has appropriated the literary meme of voyeurism for use in his works, with special focus on one story and a handful of poems. Chapter 2 is mainly (though not exclusively) concerned with the intratextual, with the ways in which three sets of Carver stories and poems borrow internally from each other.

However, there is no clear-cut distinction between the two types of borrowings (intra/inter), as the boundaries between inside and outside of texts are permeable and fluid. The reason for retaining both is to emphasize a salient aspect of Carver’s autopoetics, namely the constant movement between interior and exterior that is almost ubiquitous in his works, from the microlevel of the line to the macrolevel of his whole production. Examples are the “closing and opening” of the fish’s mouth in the line from our emblematic the poem “The Current,” allowing the water to stop or flow from outside to inside the fish, or the macrolevel of Carver’s collection titles that metaphorically imitate an inside(r)/outside(r) poetics. Consider, for example, two seemingly completely different titles: his story collection Where I’m Calling From (1988) and the poetry collection At Night the Salmon Move (1976). The title story of Where I’m Calling From features a man outside of regular life in a rehab center, but the telephone he uses to call home links him back to the inside of that world. The title poem of At Night the Salmon Move features fish moving from their natural habitat in water to human homes, “bumping against Cable TV lines” on their journey (34, line 9). As we will see in Chapter 2, such networks of cables, especially the network of the telephone, are repeatedly employed by Carver to enable such trafficking between outside and inside worlds. And in Chapter 1 the figure of the voyeur as an outsider wanting in—not unlike the short story writer wanting to make his mark as a poet—is an aesthetic meme Carver employed specifically as a mediating device between public and private spheres.

Chapter 1 The Autopoetics of Observation¹

¹ An abridged version of this chapter appears as “Raymond Carver’s Poet-Voyeur as Involved Spectator” in Kleppe, Sandra, and Robert Miltner, New Paths to Raymond Carver: Critical Essays on His Life, Fiction, and Poetry (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008: 62–74). However, this chapter provides a substantial revision and expansion of that essay.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315554549-1

Likely the most persistent crossover motif in Carver’s oeuvre is what commentators have previously identified as voyeurism in his works. As we will see in this chapter, the meme of voyeurism is part of larger aesthetic and autopoetic phenomena that both precede and postdate Carver’s era. The meaning of voyeurism had become reduced in the twentieth century to a narrower set of associations than its historical precedents indicate. However, the act of observation is currently being reevaluated in scientific communities as a crucial element in our understanding of natural and other laws. The idea that we participate in what we see has been documented in both neuroscience and quantum physics and is related to, but goes beyond, the theoretical constructivism of the late twentieth century. This introductory section will provide examples of Carver’s excessive use of the faculty of observation in both poems and stories, and then establish a link to recent research in mathematics and sociology where the case has been made for the central role of observation across autopoetic systems. The chapter then turns to an overview of the historical development of the voyeurism meme in literature and art as a background for two sections that each provide close readings of two Carver poems. The chapter conclusion returns to a contemporary perspective by considering how Carver’s use of observation in conjunction with mirrors and windows across his production anticipates significant finds in neuroscience that were not documented until after his death in 1988, but have had a significant impact on the science community...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright Permissions
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I The Autopoetics of Outside and Inside
• Section Preface: A Brief History of Intertextuality
• 1 The Autopoetics of Observation
• 2 Crossover Between Poems and Stories
• Part II Self-Referential Poems
• Section Preface: A Brief History of Self-referential Literature
• 3 “All Poems Are Love Poems”
• 4 Water and Fish
• Part III De/Composition
• Section Preface: A Brief History of Literature and Medicine
• 5 Carver's Baudelaire Sandwich
• 6 What Doctors and Poets Say
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index