Jim Baen's Universe

From The Heart's Basement

Columns

The Prince of Stasis

Written by Barry N. Malzberg

Raymond Carver's complete collected short stories, just published by the Library of America, are an interesting and disturbing concatenation; quality lit at its cusp in the late twentieth century. Carver (1938-1988), like most literary writers of the century's final two thirds, works toward stasis, "slice-of-life" stories with suspended endings, with deliberately failed resolution. "He was at the end of a story." "He could hear his own breath." "It was a sound he had never heard before." "He listened to the enormous changes going on within him." That kind of thing. Jean Stafford's second husband described how to write a story for The New Yorker: "Write the story. Throw out the first third. Discard the last third. Publish the remainder." As one close to a source, his advice can be trusted.

Carver perfected paralysis and ambiguity, to the degree of course that these wry imperfect qualities can reach that state. In so doing, in becoming the leader if not the founder of a so-called "minimalist" fiction, Carver also had the help and often ruthless intervention of Gordon Lish, his editor at Esquire and later Knopf, whose obsessions with fiction were two: voice and reduction. As time has unearthed Carver's original drafts and records of his anguish at Lish's intervention, that time has spurred controversy. Was Carver's famed minimalism only the result of Lish's brutal cutting? (Carver's most famous story, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," was cut by more than half in its original appearance and the title is Lish's.) Was the "most influential short story writer of the century," according to Stephen King's New York Times Review, an essential fraud? The graduate students of the second half of the century will be furiously recycling this argument with no clear resolution.

Of course the quality lit critics, editors and writers have—as Carter Scholz observed to me some years ago when the degree of Lish's intervention was revealed by collected evidence in the Indiana University Library—no real comprehension of the nature of literary collaboration. They simply don't understand how it is done, and examples are so rare that it is seen as a phantom. Science fiction writers (and mystery writers as well) have no trouble understanding collaboration; we've done it by the hundreds from the virtual inception of the category and some of our greatest works (Kuttner & Moore, Pohl & Kornbluth) are collaborative. This is something we do reflexively and we find no mystery in the process. I've published four collaborative novels and well over a hundred short stories. Why not give a dual byline to the collections and most of the short stories—“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," by Gordon Lish and Raymond Cariver—and be done with it? (Even though this simplicity would disappoint the graduate students.)

But that's another column (and with only a valedictory essay to follow this, I'm doubtful that it will appear in Jim Baen's Universe or for that matter anywhere else); it is the question of Carver's avid pursuit of stasis (call him the Prince of Ambiguity or Irresolution) which is to hand and relevant here. In his technique and obsession (one which he shares with most of the literary writers of the last two thirds of a century), Carver can be seen as embodying values which are in direct opposition to genre fiction. A mystery by definition cannot be irresolute (unless it is written by a hater of mysteries like Paul Auster or Patricia Highsmith), and science fiction similarly . . . the protocols of the genre insist upon some clear resolution. It is a literature founded upon inquiry-and-response.

Of course the so-called New Wave school of the 1960's (led by Ballard and Moorcock and essentially British in origin) came just in time to subvert these protocols and for a few risky years work of formless or mocking ambiguity, while never popular, seemed to function as the cutting edge of the category. Damon Knight founded his original anthology Orbit and was determined to Americanize that literature of stasis, the first dozen volumes of his series were perhaps numerically tilted toward stories of the "Then he heard again the indeterminate voices of the stars" variety. But no USA writer in that decade was a more furious or sophisticated practitioner of the literature of stasis than Thomas M. Disch (1940-2008), who in novels like Camp Concentration and The Genocides used startlingly accomplished technique to celebrate nihilism.

In no novel did Disch manage this better than The Genocides (1965), an early novel which left A.J. Budrys, the Galaxy reviewer, in a state of numbed resentment. “The most characteristic Disch statement,” he wrote, “would be ‘it ran down.’” Everything in this novel ran through paralysis toward distinction, and it left Budrys feeling as numb and helpless as Disch's hapless human survivors as they were overcome by vegetation. Budrys took the novel as a conceptual opposite of the spirit of science fiction and as personal affront.

Disch never forgave Budrys for that review. Budrys died in the middle of June 2008, less than three weeks before Disch committed suicide, and in one of his final public postings, Disch, recalling the review and the way in which it had made him hate the reviewer for over four decades, wrote "The wicked witch is dead!" The pleasure Disch took in this posting seemed to mirror—here I am now working to bring to accord the disparate elements in this essay—was that of a Carver or Richard Yates character being caught in a personal trap, somehow absolutely confirming his own self-hatred. "He ran down," Disch did not quite have the wit to write of Budrys' passing at 77, but that was certainly the message of his posting.

That stasis, that human passivity and irresolution which Budrys in 1965 hated and saw as the antithesis of science fiction, was at the core of Carver's work and similarly at the core of almost every writer who influenced him or on which he had influence. "Only the sound of his breath." "He was at the end of a story." Science fiction before and after the New Wave has marginalized paralysis; modern quality lit with very few exceptions has embraced that stasis. It is worth noting that in an interview for a 1990's Carver memorial book aggregated from friends, colleagues, and family, Mary Ann Carver, his first wife, remembered, "Ray started out writing science fiction. But little green men really weren't for him."

Of course they might have been. It is not too much of a stretch to imagine Raymond Carver's "What Was That?" in Orbit 12. "He didn't know. It was either an alien or it wasn't. It was close to him or as far away as the Moon. He looked at the thing in the corner, that thing which might have been himself, and listened to the scrape of his mechanical heart."

Clarion!

—New Jersey: 4 January 2010