Starcher-Blog(Talk I delivered at AWP-Austin this past weekend as part of the panel, "Why Do Some People Hate Experimental Fiction.)
I got a magazine in the mail last Fall without having requested it, as a freebie. That in itself might have been nice enough, perhaps if it had come to someone else, but I’m sadly of a cynical, indeed suspicious bent, so my inclination quickly turned to interrogating this gift. Evidently, my name appeared on a mailing list somewhere, which is not surprising. As a teacher, a member of AWP, a subscriber to various magazines, etc., my information is traded left and right out there, as is yours. This is the way of the world: one receives such so-called gifts frequently, free, unbidden, at random, received as one receives mainstream culture, as one of many subjects, perhaps hundreds, perhaps a thousand to choose a random number, perhaps more, perhaps many more, but no, this being still evidently literary fiction, so let’s keep it a thousand. Anyway, all these factors created in me the feeling that this magazine had been delivered to me by a certain authority, if not the magazine’s own, then partaking in and/or being issued from some place relatively established.
I say relatively because I direct a small press, whose name in fact is a joke on the fact that we started out with nothing. Starcherone Books. I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth. Sending out 1,000 copies? We may print 1,000. Mailing list? Something we put together ourselves. Postage, envelopes, printing – how many more copies are printed to sell if 1,000 are sent out free? Oh, but let’s not forget I made up that 1,000 number.
Anyway, here is the magazine. It’s called Carve, and at the bottom bears the legend, “Honest Fiction.” I don’t know that anything I have said about it is indeed true, but I have kept the magazine all these months simply because of that phrase. Honest fiction.
The rest of the cover is also interesting. A legend across the top designates this “The Best of Carve Magazine.” Carve Magazine has evidently published so many examples of Honest Fiction that a selection had to be culled from a much larger body of work – and there was evidently demand for such a volume, else why do such work, why publish these selected pieces again, although then giving them away suggests either that the demand wasn’t so great as one might otherwise suppose or, alternately, that the demand is growing so enormous that it is worthy of priming the pump.
But that’s not all. This is Volume Five of The Best of Carve Magazine. What author or genre or period can one think of where a “best of” collection would require so many volumes? Why would someone edit down to the best examples only then to proliferate volumes? Or, as it seems the volumes come out annually, why would someone create “greatest hit” collections each year? Evidently someone must believe there is that much good honest fiction out there, and that the tap keeps flowing.
Let me go that much further in judging this book by its cover. The remainder of its presentation is comprised of photographs. There is a supposed nature scene – a tiger, though shot at such close range one suspects the animal is/was likely in captivity, a conclusion reinforced by a blurred but rigid shape in the right foreground; there’s a sunset on an ocean; the snowy peaks of distant mountains, taken at a great distance – all three of these would appear to be tourist shots of one or another sort. Three more: a man who at least in this pixelated photo rather resembles Michel Foucault, whose profession it would seem is selling vegetables, here posing with varieties of what appear to be potatoes; beneath him a flower with some of the same tell-tale edge serrations that indicate not so much genes as bytes; finally, lower left, closest to the word honest, a barbershop scene in some darkened, even subterranean, public place, reminiscent of though not necessarily one of those New York City quick-in-out commuter storefronts, maybe Penn Station, maybe from what used to be the World Trade Center basement, maybe these pixelated people all dead, but maybe instead somewhere else where they have such ugly architecture, a mall, could be anywhere: Columbus, Ohio; Boise, Idaho; Los Angeles; Buffalo; Austin.
OK, my initial assumptions of Carve were wrong, to at least this extent: this document does not issue from a place that oozes money. These are evidently found photos. But I don’t mind picking on Carve anyway. I still assert that they represent an authority. And they started it – imposing this vision received, I say again, as one receives mainstream culture – upon me unbidden. Honest Fiction. I, too, am a fiction writer. And even the briefest of glances inside Carve shows me that my work would not be welcome here, even in regular Carve, let alone of volume of the “Best of.”
I read some of the stories. I read parts of all of the stories. But I don’t need to. Everything is told me by the subscribed legend, Honest Fiction.
Reconstructing intention is a tricky business, but here are some propositions that I think the editors of Carve are trying to present:
1. That “honest fiction” is a window on life, like a photograph might be innocently supposed to be, that does not interfere or mediate but allows access, and I speak here of the supposed operations of fiction to life as lived, condensed into its deepest, most meaningful truths.
2. That such a condensation does not partake in artifice (which would be dishonest), so that, while narrative is acknowledged by all to be a process of selection and invention, the processes by which these fictions do this are the opposite of that which might be called artificial – let’s call it natural selection.
3. That fictions constructed in such ways that highlight the roles of language in producing the artwork, or producing the so-called experiences reflected in the artwork, or acknowledging a mediating apparatus of any kind, are by the standard established by the cover legend, dishonest, though indeed they may seem more truthful at face value.
I am being bitchy toward Carve Magazine, there’s no doubt. But let us not forget, it is they who first insulted me. My fiction, which openly reflects on its own processes of composition; which acknowledges itself as partaking in the traditions of an art form, thus acknowledging predecessors, filters through which my work apprehends the world; which exists in the belief that, as a Frenchman of some renown once put it (though here it appears in my own paraphrase), that it is as correct or incorrect to say that we are possessed by language as to say its opposite; my fiction, which also partakes in many other such acts or propositions that strike me as truthfulness, was labelled by inference by these Carve editors dishonest, or not-so-honest, or maybe intellectual, high-falutin, detached, or any one of a number of euphemisms that suggest that what I do is less important, essential, and/or meaningful than the work done by these author employing traditional strategies of verisimilitude, filters of their own experience that their definitions of fiction don’t admit exist.
I say back to them, echoing what Laertes once said to his sister Ophelia, what Laertes always says to his sister Ophelia, in reference to Hamlet, they do not carve for themselves. Like the melancholic Dane, they do not necessarily possess, but are also as well possessed by.
Yes, but they endeavor to be Carvers, and not only in the sense of selecting experiences, discursive strategies, and the like. For these are the editors that sponsor the annual Raymond Carver Short Story Award.
Beware of entrance to a quarrel, says Polonius, But being in, bear it that the opposed may beware of thee.
I have always despised Raymond Carver. I don’t care how hard he worked on his stories, how many drafts he wrote, how frustrated he was by Gordon Lish’s editorial intrusions, or how often he stayed up in a car all night long drinking whiskey with John Cheever or whomever. I have always despised him in the same way I continue to despise Ronald Reagan even through his latter-day Renaissance in popular opinion, and the two are always linked in my imagination as regressive 1980s phenomena. I will always think of Reagan as the doddering old man who on the verge of his Alzheimers authorized the overturning of a popular revolution in one country and secretly sponsored death-squads in another. Reagan slipped fairly unnoticeably in the latter half of his term as world’s most powerful human from homespun to blithering, but his abdication of what was serious and at stake in the human community forgives me any charge of cruelty that may be levelled at me for cursing the dead. Raymond Carver never killed anybody that I know of, save himself perhaps (& of course we writers often go in for this sort of thing), but similarly reduced the complexities of experience, the relativities of truth, and the nobility of our living being in the wide universe into art that strikes me and has always struck me as glib, disrespectful, coy, false, trite, and belittling. That the reputation he gained for himself and his work is one of piercing honesty and crucial insight strikes me as every bit as ironic as Reagan being called “The Great Communicator” or our greatest post-Holocaust President. Reagan once spoke of having himself helped liberate the death camps, and believed it, even though it was subsequently pointed out to him that he had not left California during this period. That this was fiction, and yet it struck him with the force of actual fact, seems almost a parable of several of the points I make in this talk about the complexities of experience and representation and the lies those who purport to tell a simple story are actually telling themselves.
It may surprise and even anger a listener to this talk who is committed to traditional realist technique to hear it conflated with conservative politics of the late 20th century that, make no mistake, have in new fashion bled into our current century. But for surprisingly many practitioners of what is called “experimental” fiction – that is, that practice of fiction for which the processes of fiction and the roles of language are foregrounded – the work has a political dimension. It certainly always has for me. The lie of traditional verisimilitude’s strategies also seems to me What’s Wrong with Kansas: an over-reliance on illusory, traditionalist narrative assumptions, the stories one accepts about one’s life or one’s stories that prevent a vision of one’s own condition. Interestingly, the two sides in the debate other fictive representation each call the other dishonest and each claim themselves to be telling the truth. But, at present, one is not received as one receives mainstream culture, and so can call itself the oppositional discourse. Perhaps this is why the politics of representation seem to me truly a politics, and indicative of other political oppositions, which also makes it easier to explain, to come around to the title of this panel, why some people don’t like experimental fiction. One of the writers on our side of the equation, the fabulous Salman Rushdie, whose work has deconstructed both the Koran and colonialist impulses, has returned again and again in his work of recent years to the movie The Wizard of Oz as a source of inspiration. Perhaps this is a metafictive impulse inspired by how that movie breaks from black and white into the garish colors of an exaggerated world. Perhaps the impulse is inspired, at least part, by that emblematic line, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”
Coda:
At the opening night AWP reception, trying to decide whether or not to stand on line for my free drink, I ran into someone I knew from the conference I'd been to in Tallahassee in January. I got a glance at the name tag. It was the Editor-in-Chief of Carve Magazine. He seemed to me to be a very warm-hearted man. There is nothing personal here -- and nothing more to add to the above.
