Re: new yorker
Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Sat, 28 Aug 1999 15:34:03 -0400
On Fri, Aug 27, 1999 at 01:38:24AM -0700, John Smith wrote:
> I didn't feel the melancholy or regret. Of course,
> I'm only 22. Maybe he's got his eyes on the older
> suburban public that can relate to losing everything.
Maybe ... I tended to be a bit of a depressive since the first time I
opened my eyes, so bleak outlooks are not unusual to me. I related to
his work when I was 18. I hungrily followed each collection and crumb.
So, my point of view is a bit skewed, I guess.
> Unrelated note: that tends to be the way with most of
> the people I've met. The progression from birth to
> death follows an upward optimistic, hopeful curve and
> then falls after 16 when kids start to talk about
> being disenfranchised proletarians after reading 1984
> and convincing themselves that they are the only one
> left on the planet with the proper advice (\*like
> me*/) for the rest of their dreary lives,
I think that the exception is this: there is bleak, as you describe it,
and there is Carver bleak, which is unlike any other bleakness I know.
The closest I can come to characterizing it is to say that it would be
like getting dropped in an unknown city on a hot, sunny day, with $5 in
my pocket, no ID, a bad credit rating, and standing on the sidewalk in
front of a used-car lot, where it would be my task to try to buy a car
on credit. And knowing, even before I walk through the gate, what the
outcome will be. That, to me, is Carver bleak.
> > It's not like Kafka, who impregnated his work with
> > menace and dread.
> > Carver's dread always seems to take place in the
> > unforgiving sunshine
> > of parking lots or the overcase days or the sad
> > hours of the evening.
> > Kafka, at absolute bottom, is hilarious; his friends
> > said that as he
> > read his work aloud, he could barely keep from
> > laughing at what he
> > had written, at the underlying perversity of it.
...
>
> Wow. I had always thought that Kafka was a very
> serious artist. Hunger Artist comes to mind, maybe he
> was making fun of the caged man. Maybe he's another
> jackass. I wish I hadn't read that but I'm sort of
> glad I did. Everyone seems to be analyzing him for
> his relationship with his father and they often forget
> to describe the author. That's dissapointing, but I
> will still read him.
No, don't be discouraged by psychoanalysis of his relations with his
father. He is serious. But perversely so. I mean, consider the
opening of "The Trial" -- what could be more terrifying than having the
authorities show up at your door to arrest you, and you don't know why,
and you know no way of stopping it? It's compelling, but it's also dark
comedy. And the notion of making an art out of starving yourself, that
too fairly drips with humor AND tragedy. No, the man in the cage is not
an object of humor. But the notion of what he's doing is insane. And
consider "The Metamorphosis" -- Gregor Samsa awaking one morning to find
himself transformed into a gigantic insect. [NOTE: I acknowledge in
advance that for years there has been fierce debate over whether he's
turned into a cockroach, a beetle, or something else. I'm not talking
about that. I'm talking about the idea of waking up, inexplicably, as a
human-sized insect.] It's tragic, sure, but it's darkly hilarious as
the family tries to shift to Gregor's reality. Not unlike a character
in Woody Allen's CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS who one day becomes fuzzy.
Everything else is clear, but he is just ... out of focus. So his
family, to adapt to "normalcy," has to wear special (and ugly) glasses
in order to see him "normally."
> So what's he going to do? Blast himself away? How
> does Carver hint to that? I mean, the imagination can
> go anywhere or nowhere without direction. How could I
> think if I were popped out of the womb into a white
> room and fed intravenously without any other stimuli
> (and they novacained my body and plugged my noise and
> waxed my ears and shut the lights out and cut my
> tongue off). If the guy did blow himself away, then I
> think the story is lesser for it. It explains things,
> but it is too easy to do (not that I could do it, but
> he could have done more).
I would say that in general, Carver's characters are not the type to
blow their heads off. They may think about it. But they don't have the
drive to do it. Again to make a cross-reference to Woody Allen, in one
of his movies, he says of growing up, "Nobody in my neighborhood
committed suicide. They were all too depressed."
> His writing style is great,
> generously terse, he said, she said, few yadas or
> etceteras. But, I'll retain my reservations until I
> read Cathedral. Until then!
The only tiny caution is that there is a collection of stories called
CATHEDRAL, but the last story in the collection is also called
"Cathedral." A bit of ambiguity that might throw you for a moment. The
whole collection is worth reading, though.
--tim o'connor