Write Blog

This is the concluding part of my piece on Raymond Carver and Hyperrealism.  I hope you've enjoyed reading my thoughts.  If you have any comments about this or you'd like more information on Carver then please email me at your convenience.

Towards a Definition.

Minimalist vs. Hyperrealist

In order to posit the label I choose to attach to Carver’s fiction it becomes important to examine other less credible ones, and whilst discrediting them we can verify our own. In their drive to pigeonhole writers, critics have made Carver synonymous with the minimalist short story. Under the grasp of Kim Herzinger, The Mississippi Review dedicated an entire issue to the alleged phenomenon in 1985 (Nesset, Kirk. The Stories of Raymond Carver. 1995: 4). So let us agree for the time being with the term minimalist and judge Carver and his contemporaries with that definition. We can begin by Robert Rebein’s observation of Madison Smartt Bell, writing in Harper’s in 1986, that way we can get an idea of the negative critical approach to the so called minimalists:

Minimalism, Bell wrote, “may fairly be described as a school because of its representative work contains as if by prescription, a number of specific elements”: “a trim, ‘minimal’ style, and obsessive concern for surface detail, a tendency to ignore or eliminate distinctions among the people it renders, and a studiedly deterministic, at times nihilistic, vision of the world.” For Bell, minimalism’s accomplishments were purely technical; beneath its cool surfaces and lean prose style lurked a subtle and terrible estimation of human possibility

Carver himself had very little time for such a label, as we can see here:

Carver’s style has earned him the label “minimalist” in some American literary circles, a term which makes him less than happy. “That word brings up associations with narrow vision and limited ability,” he says. “It’s true that I try to eliminate every unnecessary detail in my stories and try to cut words to the bone. But that doesn’t make me a minimalist. If I were, I’d really cut them to the bone. But I don’t do that; I leave a few slivers of meat on them

We cannot really decipher what is achieved in Carver’s fiction until we destroy this label and in many respects appreciate that the short story, regardless of its practitioner, is primarily minimal by virtue of form. What is also identified in Roland Sodowsky’s study ‘The minimalist short story: its definition, writers, and (small) heyday’, is Mark A. R. Facknitz’ declaration of two distinct types of minimalism: formal and social. This is only problematic, particularly when writers of such different qualities fall into the same group, or more importantly, like Carver, fall into both. His brevity of form can be equated to minimalism, but then so can many others. If for example we were to neatly package Carver like this we would also have to include others who are less than synonymous with the Carver school of writing. For example, when packaged with minimalism as a label we would include writers like Donald Barthelme, a contemporary of Carver and a great practitioner of the minimalist short story. However, Barthelme was notably as surreal and overall experimental as he could be minimalist; he is perhaps captured best by John Barth in his tribute to Barthelme as the ‘Thinking Man’s Minimalist’ (Barth, J. 1989). This title does cast a shadow on the form practiced by Raymond Carver, but Barth’s article is a tribute. However, there is a reiteration to be made from this. Raymond Carver’s short stories, in minimalist terms, seem in the first instance to only attract negative criticism as we have seen, criticism that we could fairly say has everything to do with Lyotard’s disruption of language games as we examined in chapter one. But minimalism cannot be the primary virtue of Carver’s new statement, and the cause of all this criticism.

Formal groupings like minimalist are problematic. They can only serve to identify a form that is shared by many writers of greater diversity. Specific content cannot be overly useful either, particularly as many of the writers in the Carver school do differ, both thematically and in content. Tobias Wolff’s stories for example consider different themes and content, his collection The Night in Question (1996) contain soldier stories (characteristic of Wolff), like ‘Casualty’ (1993) and ‘The Other Miller’ (1987). But Wolff is very much a hyperrealist too:

For two days now Miller has been standing in the rain with the rest of Bravo Company, waiting for some men from another company to blunder down the logging road where Bravo waits in ambush. When this happens, if this happens, Miller will stick his head out of the hole he’s hiding in and shoot off all his blank ammunition in the direction of the road. So will everyone else in Bravo company. Then they will climb out of their holes and get on some trucks and go home, back to the base.

This is the plan.

Miller has no faith in it. He has never seen a plan that worked, and this one won’t work either. His foxhole has about a foot of water in it. He has to stand on little shelves he’s been digging out of walls, but the soil is sandy and the shelves keep collapsing. That means his boots are wet. Plus his cigarettes are wet.

(‘The Other Miller’ 1987)

Just as we examined the openings of three Carver stories earlier, we can identify that this opening to Wolff’s is very similar. It continues throughout the story just as it does in the opening, no playing with language or heavy use of irony, it is terse and colloquial, and it doesn’t assume any literary knowledge from the reader. There is no real traditional characterisation or conventional plot; again, as with Carver, it is what is said beneath the hyperreal situations that count.

So, to equate them all to minimalism is at best unhelpful. In his article ‘Now You See Him, Now You Don't, Now You Do Again: The Evolution of Raymond Carver's Minimalism’, literary critic Adam Meyer identifies Carver’s career with minimalism as analogous to an “hourglass”, using the often cited story ‘A Small Good Thing’ (240). This identification is important because it underlines that Raymond Carver is not dedicated to minimalism. The “hourglass” Meyer refers to shows the centre as the most minimal he has been, and for the shortest time. More than anything this period of so called minimalism was inadequately labelled, yet the identification of it as something new is enough to verify a need in American literature to overthrow what had become the rather stale conventions of Postmodern literature. Again turning to one who was around at the time, Frederick Barthelme in The New York Times Book Review:

Some people were thinking, “Well, so much for irony.” Because once you’d been to the big “all over” irony of the post-modern, you couldn’t very well go back to the periodic. This was around 1972, 1974...even though the big guys had said irony was all the way of it…

[writers began to see that]

a plain sentence, drab as it may seem, might be more powerful by and large than the then standard issue clever sentence.

This change in direction, the new statement, was not made by the principle characteristics of the minimalist short story. Outlined by Adam Meyer’s study, the difference between two of the stories he discusses in his essay will serve as an excellent example to demonstrate Carver’s use of, and subsequent rejection of, minimalism.

Starting with ‘The Bath’, published in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), we will examine only the basic prose structure and syntax to begin with:

The mother decided on the spaceship cake, and then she gave the baker her name and her telephone number. The cake would be ready Monday morning, in plenty of time for the party Monday afternoon. This was all the baker was willing to say. No pleasantries, just this small exchange, the barest information, nothing that was not necessary.

Monday morning, the boy was walking to school.

[then in ‘A Small Good Thing’, published in its final form in Cathedral (1983) and included in Where I’m Calling From (1988), we see another version all together]

She gave the baker her name, Ann Weiss, and her telephone number. The cake would be ready on Monday morning, just out of the oven, in plenty of time for the child’s party that afternoon. The baker was not jolly. There were no pleasantries between them, just the minimum exchange of words, the necessary information. He made her feel uncomfortable, and she didn’t like that. While he was bent over the counter with the pencil in his hand, she studied his coarse features and wondered if he’d ever done anything else with his life besides be a baker. She was a mother and thirty-three years old, and it seemed to her that everyone, especially someone the baker’s age - a man old enough to be her father - must have children who’d gone through this special time of cakes…

This second extract continues a little further before beginning the paragraph where the boy (Scotty) gets knocked over by a car on “Monday morning”. This latter piece is by no means minimal when compared with its predecessor. Carver was a notorious rewriter of stories, yet whether ‘A Small Good Thing’ is an extension of the first, or ‘The Bath’ is a stripped down version on the former is not clear. Kirk Nesset, in The Stories of Raymond Carver, claims that ‘A Small Good Thing’ is “revised from its original form as “The Bath”. However, there are others who claim that ‘A Small Good Thing’ is the original story. It is no secret that whilst writing for What We Talk About… Gordon Lish was Carver’s editor, and a notorious one at that:

"I've wondered in my head why Lish did what he did," comments the poet Donald Hall, a friend of Carver's who objected strongly to Lish's edit of one story, "The Bath," and republished the original version as "A Small, Good Thing." "Was it unconscious jealousy?"

Carver never admitted to being Lish's creation, but he chafed and finally rebelled, forbidding Lish to edit heavily or rewrite anymore.

(Shulevitz, Judith. ‘Culturebox Rules: Lish vs. Carver’. 1998)

 If we are to attribute Carver’s minimalism to editorial amputations then we really ought to disregard it in favour of those features we can apply to all his work, no matter who was editor or how minimal it was. The minimalist debate is no longer a significant way of identifying a shift in style, thus clearly defining the difference between Carver and other Postmodernist practitioners of the short story. When Carver is at his most minimal we can see that the attributes of hyperrealism we identified earlier are as present in his later work as they were at the beginning; it is the only constant throughout his career. This would signify the change (the new statement) in the American literary short story far more than minimalism’s brief popularity.

Narrating the Hyperreal

Carver’s assertion that he “[tries] to eliminate every unnecessary detail in [his] stories and try to cut words to the bone”, can certainly lend itself to the notion of hyperreality (In, Gentry and Stull, 1990: 80). Making use of the debate, we can clearly identify that the details of his stories have been carefully chosen to concentrate on the ordinary, and by endowing it with this precision, making it more real than the real thing. We can equate this to Jean Baudrillard’s ‘The Precession of Simulacra’. Referring to “the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly”, Jean Baudrillard sets out the basic principle of simulacra (In. Simulacra and Simulation. 1994:1). He goes on using the allegory of the map to detail the current state of simulation:

Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory Ύ precession of simulacra Ύ that engenders the territory…

This is the idea of a simulation without an original, the original has ceased to exist. In order to continue our examination of this it would be helpful to cite Carver himself, from Bruce Weber’s interview for The New York Times in 1984 :

All of my stories have in some way to do with my life,” Carver says. But he is firm in his assertion that he doesn’t engage in outright autobiography. The germ of a story is a single sentence…that offers a million possibilities. “It’s a process of connections,” he says. “Things begin to connect up. A line here. A word there. Stuff I heard or saw when I was 16 years old or 40 years old. There’s no way I could ever write a story about my neighbor Art. But I may someday write a story and use him wandering onto his porch and saying, ‘I’m doing my spring cleaning.’

“That picture may appear in my head later with yet another character, who is half his age. ‘I’m doing my spring cleaning. What a beautiful day.’ That may get into the story. It may have to do with a black man who is 30 years old, doing just that. Or the fact that I heard not so long ago that Art was urinating blood. There was something wrong with his bladder. I won’t forget that. And some character in my story, one I’m very close to, he may be urinating blood.”

So we have a simulation in Carver’s fiction that is built from fragments of an original, forming hyperreal characters within a hyperreal narrative. Here we can see an interesting application of Baudrillard’s theory, the original has certainly ceased to exist. We cannot say this of many preceding fictions, even if they were based on ‘true’ events or characters, primarily because, as we have identified with the metafictionalists, they are constructed with the playfulness of language in mind. We cannot even say this of earlier realist fiction because it was more concerned with representation, having traditional conventions to consider, like we identified earlier in Patricia Waugh’s study : “well-made plot, chronological sequence, the authoritative omniscient author, the rational connection between what characters 'do' and what they 'are'…”. What becomes the most fundamental factor here is the lack of conventional narrative devices and metafiction that force the story to push dialogue, and thus characters (modelled upon the real) to the forefront of the narrative; they become a strange hybrid form of realist stories; hyperreal. If, as Umberto Eco says in 1986 on his travels throughout the U.S.A, observing art in its various hyperreal guises, America is “an America of furious hyperreality, which is not that of pop art, of Mickey Mouse, or of Hollywood movies”, then why should it be unusual to make hyperreal, accurate simulations of the people as well as everything else?

What we have learnt is that Carver’s neo-realist aspirations confirm (or prove) his anti-realism; his hyperrealism. We can easily verify this by reminding ourselves of the un-refuted comment made in Patricia Waugh’s study earlier: “it is impossible to describe an objective world because the observer always changes the observed” (Waugh. 1984). Richard Ford, novelist and short story writer, and friend of Carver, fondly remembers a Carver reading at in 1977:

…the effect of voice and the story upon the listener was of actual life being unscrolled in a form so distilled, so intense, so chosen, so affecting in its urgencies as to leave you breathless and limp when he was finished…Life was this way Ύ yes, we already new that. But this life, these otherwise unnoticeable people’s suitability for literary expression seemed new. One also felt that a consequence of the story was seemingly to intensify life, even dignify it…And yet the story itself, in its spare, self-conscious intensity, was such a made thing, not like life at all; it was a piece of nearly abstract artistic construction calculated to produce almost giddy pleasure…This was highly stylised, artistic writing with life, not art, as its subject. And to be exposed to it was to be bowled over.

Here we have a tributary, yet accurate description of Carver’s fiction. It certainly dispels all those criticisms about the “willingness of these authors to mirror social and cultural structures without probing towards a sense of the human spirit”, as outlined by Dan Pope, noted earlier. Ford puts much more emphasis on the fact that these stories are constructions, again silencing those who would confuse Carver’s fiction with a lack of literary skill. The fact that Carver chooses “life, not art” as his subject is one of the primary differences between his writing and what had been offered by metafiction in all its guises. Essentially what Ford expresses is that Carver could expose artifice without alienating the reader, in fact exposing it by drawing the reader into a hyperreal construction of the reader’s own world.

Another aspect of hyperrealism is seen in the characters. Carver’s characters are almost always inarticulate in some degree. Bruce Weber details the communication between Carver and the reader:

They [the characters] don’t share his wide perspective, and they don’t often go in for analysis or philosophical speculation. The intelligence of the stories is communicated over their heads, so to speak, from author to reader, and it is this quality that has led more than one critic to observe a note of condescension in some of the stories.

Carver’s characters usually have one of two choices, they can retreat into silence or, particularly at moments of high drama, they can borrow their reactions from popular culture, giving a simulated response. A story we examined in brief earlier can be extremely useful here. In ‘A Small Good Thing’ Ann Weiss’ son, Scotty, is knocked over by a car on his birthday, and later dies in hospital. The following is Ann Weiss’ reaction in a moment of high drama:

She gazed out into the parking lot and then turned around and looked back at the front of the hospital. She began shaking her head. “No, no,” she said. “I can’t leave him here, no.” She heard herself say that and thought how unfair it was that the only words that came out were the sort of words used on TV shows where people were stunned by violent or sudden deaths.”

 Of course the words she is able to muster, that remind her of words she has heard on the T.V are probably accurate, otherwise the T.V shows would not be aspiring to realist representations. This is significant of an original without origin, since the T.V shows are simulating from what we can assume is an original, yet is probably only another representation from another T.V show. Since she recognises them in the way she does, Ann Weiss’ words are thus only a simulation.

This can be connected to the larger hyperrealist school by looking at another one of its members: Bobbie Ann Mason. Mason is a good example of the first type of hyperreal narrative, where emphasis is placed on terse syntax, banal situations, and the dominance of dialogue, as we have already discussed, but perhaps her greatest attribute is her fiction’s abundance of popular culture that act as a hyperreal touchstone for reality. Some of the best examples of this appear in her collection Shiloh and Other Stories, and the title story to this collection will serve as an example. The two central characters, Norma Jean and Leroy, experienced the death of their baby. They have been separated since the traumatic event by Leroy’s job as a long distance truck driver, but having suffered an accident he can no longer drive and is thus forced to spend more time at home with Norma Jean. This stirs up memories and leads to the inevitable dissolution of their marriage. What is interesting is that Leroy’s memories are explicitly linked to popular culture:

Norma Jean and Leroy were at the drive-in, watching a double feature (Dr. Strangelove and Lover Come Back), and the baby was sleeping in the back seat. When the first movie ended, the baby was dead… Leroy can hardly remember the child anymore, but he still sees vividly a scene from Dr. Strangelove in which the president of the United States was talking in a folksy voice on the hot line to the Soviet Premier about the bomber accidentally headed toward Russia

Popular culture becomes more real than any other signifier these characters can come up with. In this way popular culture and hyperrealism are very closely linked. This dominates Mason’s collection of stories, there are many examples:

He remembered the feeling of looking out over that expanse at the sight of the big battleship and its family of destroyers. He had seen a kamikaze dive into a destroyer. The explosion was like a silent movie that played in his head endlessly like reruns of McHale’s Navy.

(‘The Ocean’)

He feels terrible, remembering his wives by their food, and remembering the war as a TV series.

(‘A New-Wave Format’)

In Mason the T.V is the primary hyperreal touchstone for reality. Characters from television are continually heralded as a representation of what they are not, they are more real on the television than they perhaps really are. However, popular culture in general, no matter what its medium, distorts the hyperreal protagonist’s perception of reality, thus substituting reality for a simulation;

“Christians are such beautiful people,” says a fat woman. “And we have such nice-looking young people. We’re not dowdy at all.”

“People just get that idea,” someone says.

A tall woman with curly hair stands up and says, “The world has become so filled with the false, the artificial Ύ we have gotten so phoney that we think the First Lady doesn’t have smelly feet. Or the Pope doesn’t go to the bathroom.”

(‘The Retreat’)

Unlike the metafictionalists, who’s primary reliance is that their audience is well read, the hyperrealist writer relies more on the reader’s ability to dispel their illusions of reality. They make no judgements, they leave that up to the reader. The deadpan narratives do not aspire to greatness and universal truths, all they achieve is an awakening of our senses to the ordinary, and more importantly, what is perceived as the ordinary, and what lies behind it.

Problematic Reproduction

The late twentieth century gave birth to the age of simulation, and perhaps John Barth was more correct than he new in the sixties when he wrote ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’. The wave of writers that followed Carver, indeed those who wrote alongside him, leave us in little doubt as to why they have evolved, this is not purely a literary reaction, there are many factors to consider. Today our lives are bombarded by what has become known as ‘reality television’. This kind of entertainment lures the viewer into a omniscient position where they can observe, and assume that their privileged position allows them to pass judgement. The hyperreal has become a matter of taste, it is what the public want. Jean Baudrillard comments on the American fascination with lived experience:

It is still to this ideology of lived experience Ύ exhumation of the real in its fundamental banality, in its radical authenticity Ύ that the American TV verité experiment attempted on the Loud family in 1971 refers: seven months of uninterrupted shooting, three hundred hours of non-stop broadcasting, without a script or a screenplay, the odyssey of a family, its dramas, its joys, its unexpected events, non-stop Ύ in short, a “raw” historical document, and the “greatest television performance, comparable, on the scale of our day-to-day life, to the footage of our landing on the moon.”

[he goes on to give us what can be used as an excellent definitions of Carver’s fiction in terms of hyperrealism]

The producers triumph was to say: “They lived as if we were not there.” An absurd, paradoxical formula Ύ neither true nor false: utopian. The “as if we were not there” being equated to “as if you were there.” It is this utopia, this paradox that fascinated the twenty million viewers…In the “verité ” experience it is not a question of secrecy or perversion, but of a sort of frisson of the real, or an aesthetics of hyperreal, a frisson of vertiginous and phony exactitude, a frisson of simultaneous distancing and magnification, of distortion of scale, of an excessive transparency.

 

It can be fairly said that it is this “utopia” that also fascinates Carver readers. It is Carver’s pen that points at the “nonsignifier [that] is exalted by the camera angle”, as Baudrillard would have, actually taking the place of the “camera lens that, like a laser, comes to pierce lived reality in order to put it to death” (28).

There is a certain amount of enjoyment in the voyeuristic qualities of this also, and Carver’s is essentially voyeurism. He deals with this issue in his story ‘The Idea’ from Will You Please… The characters are Vern, and his wife (unnamed) who narrates the story. The story’s narrator sits in her kitchen at night with the light out, watching her neighbour, who watches his wife through their bedroom window outside:

We’d finished supper and I’d been at the kitchen table with the light out for the last hour, watching. If he was going to do it tonight, it was time, past time.

When she sees him arrive at the window she becomes excited and calls to Vern, who is more than happy to join in. The story continues to develop and the hyperreal precision of it draws us into its reality. The narrator becomes sanctimonious and hypocritical:

“Someday I’m going to tell that trash what I think of her,” I said and looked at Vern.

Vern laughed sort of.

“I mean it,” I said. “I’ll see her in the market someday and I’ll tell her to her face.

Similar to ‘What’s in Alaska?’, this story’s aim is to allow the reader to see through the “excessive transparency” and pass judgement with the aid of Carver’s “camera angle”, just as the narrator passes judgement on her neighbours (Baudrillard. 1994:28). This transparency encourages us to view the lives of the narrator and her husband. Their evening’s voyeuristic show leaves the narrator hungry, but this is significantly not for sex:

I followed him into the living room. We were jumpy. It gets us like that.

“You wait,” I said.

Vern ground his cigarette out in the big ashtray. He stood beside his leather chair and looked at the TV a minute.

“There’s never anything on,” he said. Then he said something else. He said, “Maybe he has something there.” Vern lighted another cigarette. “You don’t know.”

“Anybody comes looking in my window,” I said, “they’ll have the cops on them. Except maybe Cary Grant,” I said.

Vern shrugged. “You don’t know,” he said.

I had an appetite. I went to the kitchen cupboard and looked, and then I opened the fridge.

The two of them go on to have a night time feast, which is clearly a substitute for sex. Vern was obviously interested in the idea, but has contented himself with “apple pie topped with melted cheese” (14). The story ends with the narrator, firm in her judgemental state, plagued by real and imaginary ants. The ants are symbolically placed here to signify her wish to destroy “That trash”, meaning her neighbour across the street. The problem for the narrator is that she cannot see the symbolic significance like the reader. Due to her ignorance of the bizarre sexual preferences she needs “Vern to explain [to her]”, she is unable to see her own hypocrisy, and blind moral judgements, just as she is blind to the fact that “[turning] on every light in the house until [it was] blazing” is in actual fact an overwhelming urge to be watched herself. What is perhaps the most significant point to this story is Carver’s awareness of the implications of hyperrealism. He identifies that we are viewing the narrator, who is viewing her neighbour, who is viewing his wife. Because of this, the story leaves the astute reader rather wary of passing their omniscient judgement.

When we come to identify where this fiction stems from, why it is has become popular? and what judgements can we offer? in a wider context there are two other attributes to consider. One is the amount of University writing programmes that evolved around Carver’s heyday, and the other is the change in the legitimation of fiction in general. John Aldridge assigns blame to both of these. In ‘The New American Assembly-Line Fiction: An Empty Blue Collar’, he details how criticism has shifted since the nineteen sixties:

…the business affiliations writers have with publishers and agents have assumed much greater importance than they were seen to have twenty-four years before [1963], while other formerly important adjuncts of the creative process - literary magazines and critics - have become quite irrelevant…

[the new critics are from another breed altogether, as Aldridge points out]

…the only critics named…are daily or weekly reviewers for such large-circulation publications as the New York Times, Publisher’s Weekly, Time, Newsweek, and the Washington Post…In 1963, such reviewers were contemptuously banished to a Siberian exile colony designated on the map as “Squaresville”…These are the people whose function it is to report regularly on newly published books, but who, because of limitations of time and space, are nearly always forced to treat them superficially and, for the most part, favourably that is, with emphasis on those qualities that will be attractive to an avid group of book buyers.

So with literary criticism in the hands of writers, literary agents and publishers, there is very little wonder why Carver’s brand of fiction legitimates itself, and those followers, or “crank-turners” as David Foster Wallace tells us, are allowed to produce literature of an arguably sub standard. Aldridge says:

Such a situation makes it possible for literary products to be touted and sold on the market without having to pass more than minimal critical inspection…Where in 1950, for example, there may have been ten or fifteen new young writers of some evident promise competing for critical and public attention, there now appear to be hundreds, mass-produced as if by machine…so many of them seem to be interchangeable in their manner of writing, as if the machine that produced them specialized in turning out carbon copies.

There seemed to be little else to do, when we are beset by a surge in writers there must inevitably be a surge in critics, even if it necessitates handing the job over to the writers. These “interchangeable” writers lead to hyperreal production gone mad, and this is explicitly linked to the rise in University writing programmes. Aldridge goes on to talk about the older American writer being “highly individualistic” because of their relationship with the culture they inhabit, their estrangement being the primary quality of their writing. But what remains now, Aldridge argues, are writers who are no longer estranged from their culture. The University writing programmes that Carver and many of his contemporary hyperrealists undertook and taught on, have evolved into something else altogether. These writing programmes are not dependent on knowledge, and what has occurred is that successful writers like Carver have endorsed a system where they can teach their craft in Universities, arguably with the result of churning out a bunch of clones, although we obviously only hear about those who are successful:

…the younger generation of university-trained American writers [resemble] the British more closely than they do their literary predecessors in this country, for they too seem not to be estranged from their culture, if only for the reason they belong to a culture of their own, a professional aristocracy or guild made up of young writers like themselves and their instructors. This culture has very little, if any, connection with American society in general.

 Raymond Carver did, along with a few others, regardless of his affiliations with University writing programmes, instigate a distinct literary change, a “new statement” as Lyotard would have it (Lyotard, J. F. The Postmodern Condition. 2004). So it would appear that he is the exception to the rule because he came along at the beginning, and indeed Aldridge appears to agree, although he does not celebrate the consequences, complaining that:

the academic writer is allowed to remain aloof from that struggle [literary marketplace] for as long as he continues to function within the benevolent precincts of the fraternity…In fact his academic training as a writer will undoubtedly have taught him early on that the taking of risks is decidedly not the gateway to literary success…A piece of writing that is marked by originality of style or point of view or that does not conform to what is considered fashionable as measured by its resemblance to the work of certain admired mentors, such as Raymond Carver and Anne Beattie, will undoubtedly be disturbing to many members of the class, and so will not be deemed acceptable.

 The hyperreal, as Baudrillard explains it to us, and as our evidence shows, is a concerning factor and it is explicitly linked with the Postmodern theories of Lyotard. Raymond Carver has left in his wake an entourage of succinctness seekers, arguably following the wrong pattern, those writers David Foster Wallace refers to as “crank-turners” who believe that Carver was creating a “rigid aesthetic program” for them to follow:

 I think the crank-turner's replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets, and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They're like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child.

(McCaffery, Larry. “An Interview with David Foster Wallace”, 1993).

 The disruption of language games, as Lyotard tells us, is indeed important and essential in order to make any new statement. But there is a point at which the next set of language games needs to come along and disrupt what has become, not only fashionable excess, but a process that has directly become involved with the service of a capitalist machine. The university programmes justify themselves by producing a new writer every so often, but they are very rarely innovative, and what about all the others who are unsuccessful; left to teach, read and write for the guild of other paying members? And is there anything new left to say?

Conclusion

One thing must be considered. Even if reading a story by Raymond Carver allows us to easily place the writer alongside his work, and not many writers achieve this, we also have to admit that this kind of fiction can be as easy to forget as an episode of our favourite T.V show. Does this signify the importance of such literature, even if its only purpose is to deflate the claims that high art still propose to have above low art? Its importance goes a little further than this. It has to be said that the average reader who is brought up on a staple diet of television and literary fiction, is perfectly well equipped in the twenty first century to use Carver’s fiction in order to amuse themselves with, and educate themselves against false representations of reality. Mason’s narratives are so full of characters affected by popular culture, false, idealistic visions of reality, that we as readers mock them. If anything this brand of fiction, in the creation of hyperreal stories, mocks both the strategies of realism and metafiction. It is correct, as one of Mason’s characters tells us, that “The twentieth century’s taking all the mysteries out of life”, and nothing much has changed in the twenty first (Shiloh and Other Stories.). We are however, “no longer in the society of the spectacle”, as Jean Baudrillard tells us, and since our culture is a fully assimilated hyperreal one, in a nihilistic sense there seems little point in lamenting the issue. On a more lamentable note, in many respects the new set of language games is still on its way, yet when it arrives it can only change the rules in minor ways, and it will not be too long until these rules are fully assimilated into literary fashion and put to good use by the hyperreal “crank-turners” in the service of capital. There appears to be very little left other than perhaps another revival of metafiction that will perhaps breed an intertextual relationship with, or parody Carver’s innovations.

Judging Carver only, there is a sense of optimism in his work, and it does not derive from the familiar modernist belief that art offers the possibility of escape from the disorders of the modern world, or that it can change conditions. Carver mocks these beliefs along with most others. Instead, Carver posits a less elevated function for art with his suggestion that it is valuable simply because it gives us a chance to create a space where the effects of ordinary living can be momentarily defied; no solutions are offered. There may well be much to be learnt from setting the mirror of art up to its own linguistic or representational structures, but I posit that it is more bountiful to set it up to an accurate model of human nature in order to illuminate the transparencies in the reflection; even if it can only “approximate the outlines of our own lives” (Carver, Raymond. American Short Story Masterpieces. 1987)