What the Story Is About: Carver, Lish, and The Editorial Process

Abstract

A close reading of Raymond Carver's stories, interviews, essays, and letters explores aspects of his relationships with his father, his teacher John Gardner, and in particular his influential editor, Gordon Lish, as they relate to his writing and to his development as a writer. It is proposed that the internalization of aspects of these relationships, along with the collaborative and symbolizing process of authorship--providing both self-exposition and screen--helped Carver move beyond his need for subjugated masochistic attachment and forge a path toward greater creative autonomy.

Set This House on Fire: the Self-Analysis of Raymond Carver

“…Within the proposition that his stories collectively comprise a composite portrait of his psychic landscape, Carver's characters may be considered, to a greater or lesser extent, as containing representations of parts of himself-projected facets of his inner world, his attributes, conflicts, and internal objects and object relations. Thus, while "fictional," Carver's stories may nevertheless be about him (Tutter 2009). 7 This conjecture, widely applied in the psychoanalytic study of literature (e.g., La-Farge 2009), dates from at least as early as 1908, when Freud presciently wrote that:…”

“…[p. 150] Specific identifications that Carver may have had with certain characters will be discussed in Part II. The point I wish to stress here is that in the process of identifying and empathizing with the characters he created, Carver may well have nourished a reciprocal discovery, akin to how 7 See the author's previous study of Carver for a further discussion of the autobiographical nature of his fiction (Tutter 2009). Margulies (1993) describes his experience as a psychoanalyst: "In the circularity of empathy .…”

“…And yet while Carver usually framed his preference for short fiction as a failing, this form may have been better suited to the particular needs of his self-exegesis. I have previously suggested (Tutter 2009) that in their rapid construction of intimacy in the face of their frustrating brevity, the very form of Carver's short stories served to represent and illustrate his experience of fleeting connection to his father, with whom he identified as a storyteller. Here I will go further and posit that, by refracting a spectrum of split-off representations through the prism of fiction and distributing them amongst characters set in discrete, abbreviated scenarios, Carver could better regulate what and how much he exposed and examined in any given story, titrating it to what he could afford at any given time.…”

“…In contrast to the relative anonymity of a writer's readership, Carver's work was also conceived with actual readers firmly in mind, in parallel to the self-analysis that prefigured psychoanalysis-Freud's. Carver always placed great stock in the influence of his early editors and readers, especially his fortuitous first teacher, the author John Gardner (Tutter 2009), but it was the editor Gordon Lish who had the greatest impact on the form of his published work (Max 1998). I have previously discussed the history of Carver's relationship to Lish in some detail (Tutter 2009); here I will focus on its transferential aspect as compared with Freud's relationship to Wilhelm Fliess.…”

“…[The New Yorker 2007, p. 98] Still, Lish had been more than just a passive transference object, as Fliess seems to have been for Freud. While as an editor he at times obliterated what was for Carver the very core of the story (Tutter 2009), at other times he clarified it, distilled it, and laid it bare. Like an analyst making brutal id-interpretations, Lish stripped away literary equivalents of ego and superego defenses, excising from Carver's texts softening, mitigating distractions from central conceits (e.g., flights into sentimental, moralizing, or idealized fantasy, and subplot interventions meant to repair or undo aggression), and condensing attention around action and impulse (or lack thereof).…”