Appunti Letteratura Anglo Americana - short stories

PRESENTATION

Born: 25 May 1938 in Clatskanie, Oregon.

Letteratura Anglo-Americana – Francesco Rognoni

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Death: 2 August 1988 in Port Angeles, Washington.

Simple jobs of his parents. Correspondence course in writing. He liked reading magasines,

westerns and science fiction.

1957: marriage. Child.

They moved to California. He entered a college. Child.

Lot of pressure to support his family. So he wanted to become a professional writer also

because of this.

Early influences:

- Creative writing class – John Gardner

He transferred to Humboldt State University – Richard Day.

Lots of minor jobs to gain money.

Literary prize.

Success. He started publishing in magazines, such as the «Esquire».

«Esquire»: man’s magazine founded in 1932 and published by the Hearst Corporation.

Alcoholism. Then he stopped and his career started again.

He separated from his wife and married another woman.

Carver’s writing style

PRESENTATION

Minimalism school. Details. Simple and short sentences giving a lot of infos. Lots of

dialogues. Simple words, simple sentence structures.

He never accepted to be referred as a minimalist.

Negative space. The missing element becomes a centerpiece of the short story.

Dirty-realism and slices of life. Direct description, few adjectives.

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Raymond Carter

«Esquire» was the same magazine in which Fitzgerald and Hemingway published.

Carver went to writing classes: this makes the difference. Traditionally, writers had to

learn the tricks of their profession themselves.

He came from a proletarian background. He went to state college, so that he had to learn.

He felt the need to become a writer.

In the late 60s, there were already writing classes.

He learnt a lot from John Gardner, who realized that Carver was much better than him.

Not a great writer.

Minimalism

Opposed to writers who wrote big things.

Meta-fiction: fiction about fiction. John Barth.

Importance of irony at that time.

Literature had to be pastiche at that time (like Calvino).

People wanted to be told realistic stories, they couldn’t understand fiction anymore.

In the late 80s, before he died, Carver became very popular in Italy. His first books were

not successful at all. His works were published by very minor publishers. Suddenly he

was successful, thanks to the translator Duranti and to a little publishing house from

Rome.

So much water so close to home

The story is narrated by Stuart’s wife Claire.

Four men go fishing and find a dead girl there. They don’t tell about it. Stuart tells the wife

only the day after and she becomes very suspicious.

Lots of repetition of words. He often repeats words. The plot is very intense, typical of a

short story. Makes the reader feel he is going to reveal something very shocking in the end

of the story.

Cathedral

Title story of Carver’s third collection.

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The story is told by a cynical man, who resents the visit of his wife’s blind friend.

Most of the conversation is about the blind man dispelling many of the narrator’s

prejudice about the blind.

Alcohol, tension, relation.

Communication and communication problems.

What we talk about when we talk about love

Published in 1981.

Dirty-realism.

The «Esquire» wrote that Carver had “reinvented the short story”.

Four people sit around a kitchen table, two couples. They discuss about love and drink

gin.

They debate about the nature of love. They seem to talk about jealousy, misunderstanding

and pain.

Comparison to Hemingway

Carver liked Hemingway’s stories, because of how he wrote them.

Individuality.

Carver and Hemingway wrote both in a minimalist style, with an accessible language,

“iceberg” technique, autobiographical writer.

Carver: minimalist technique entirely by choice: pure artistic reason.

Difference in settings and characters.

Carver: suburban, simpler settings. Hemingway: bars, bullrings, boats, “fancy” settings.

Carver: a bit helpless, disorientated, unstable. Hemingway: strong characters, prize

fighters, hunters, fishermen, sometimes a sensitive female.

Minimalist technique thrust upon him: censorship, because of societal conventions.

Gordon Lynch was Carver’s editor. His intervention was enormous. Gordon Lynch took

away 70% of a story. This is really a lot. He did a lot of taking out.

Carver published a self-anthology, putting his version of So much told…, the one published

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after, not the original one. This way, he said that that was the real version of the story.

The minimalism of Carver was very much an invention of Lynch.

So much water so close to home

They see the body and don’t call the police until the end of their fishing party. So they fish

with this naked body in the water. Crude scene.

The wife figures out that something is going on. He tells it only in the morning. She is

suspicious.

The story is about the uneasiness of the woman with her man, who pretends that

everything is ok.

He has done a bad thing, but not the worst.

She goes to the funeral of the girl. She identifies with the person. This is very minimal.

Minimalist story.

Perspective of someone who accepts her husband’s approach.

In the longer version, the wife refuses much more the man. More moral indignation.

Altman makes a movie version. It is made even worst. You have to sympathize with the

man. The story is told by the man.

Banality of evil.

Vedere Short Cuts – Altman

Three versions: Carver-Lynch, Lynch, Altman.

Why don’t you dance?

Emptying the house: emptying oneself.

In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard.

The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the

chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom—

nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side.

His side, her side.

He considered this as he sipped the whiskey.

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In the life of this man there was a she, but now there is a she anymore.

There is an inventory of the house.

Hemingway’s style.

He sat down on the sofa to watch. He lit a cigarette, looked around, flipped the match into

the grass.

The girl sat on the bed. She pushed off her shoes and lay back. She thought she could see a

star.

"Come here, Jack. Try this bed. Bring one of those pillows," she said.

"How is it?" he said.

"Try it,"

He looked around. The house was dark.

"I feel funny," he said. "Better see if anybody's home."

She bounced on the bed.

"Try it first," she said.

He lay down on the bed and put the pillow under his head.

"How does it feel?" she said.

"It feels firm," he said.

She turned on her side and put her hand to his face.

"Kiss me," she said.

"Let's get up," he said.

"Kiss me," she said.

She closed her eyes. She held him.

He said, "I'll see if anybody's home."

But he just sat up and stayed where he was, making believe he was watching the television.

Lights came on in the houses up and down the street.

"Wouldn't it be funny if," the girl said and grinned and didn't finish.

The boy laughed, but for no good reason. For no good reason, he switched the reading lamp

on.

The girl brushed away a mosquito, whereupon the boy stood up and tucked in his shirt.

"I'll see if anybody's home," he said. "I don't think anybody's home. But if anybody is, I'll see

what things are going for."

Letteratura Anglo-Americana – Francesco Rognoni

19 "Whatever they ask, offer ten dollars less. It's always a good idea," she said.

"And, besides, they must be desperate or something."

"It's a pretty good TV," the boy said.

"Ask them how much," the girl said.

The girl is kind of flirting.

She is a good business woman.

There is something cruel.

They must be desperate of something.

There are some longer spaces between paragraphs.

The man came down the sidewalk with a sack from the market. He had sandwiches, beer,

whiskey. He saw the car in the driveway and the girl on the bed. He saw the television set

going and the boy on the porch.

"Hello," the man said to the girl. "You found the bed. That's good."

"Hello," the girl said, and got up. "I was just trying it out." She patted the bed.

"It's a pretty good bed."

"It's a good bed," the man said, and put down the sack and took out the beer and the

whiskey.

"We thought nobody was here," the boy said. "We're interested in the bed and maybe in the

TV. Also maybe the desk. How much do you want for the bed?"

"I was thinking fifty dollars for the bed," the man said.

"Would you take forty?" the girl asked.

"I'll take forty," the man said.

Well, he is desperate.

He took a glass out of the carton. He took the newspaper off the glass. He broke the seal on

the whiskey.

"How about the TV?" the boy said.

"Twenty-five."

Letteratura Anglo-Americana – Francesco Rognoni

20 "Would you take fifteen?" the girl said.

"Fifteen's okay. I could take fifteen," the man said.

The girl looked at the boy.

"You kids, you'll want a drink," the man said. "Glasses in that box. I'm going to sit down. I'm

going to sit down on the sofa."

The man sat on the sofa, leaned back, and stared at the boy and the girl.

There is a space again.

He is being drinking from the morning.

The boy found two glasses and poured whiskey.

"That's enough," the girl said. "I think I want water in mine."

She pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table.

"There's water in that spigot over there," the man said. "Turn on that spigot."

The boy came back with the watered whiskey. He cleared his throat and sat down at the

kitchen table. He grinned. But he didn't drink anything from his glass.

The man gazed at the television. He finished his drink and started another. He reached to

turn on the floor lamp. It was then that his cigarette dropped from his fingers and fell

between the cushions.

The girl got up to help him find it.

"So what do you want?" the boy said to the girl.

The boy took out the checkbook and held it to his lips as if thinking.

"I want the desk," the girl said