Raymond Carver in

the Viewfinder
Tamas Dobozy

Abstract: This paper examines the use of photography in Raymond Carver,

both in the short story, Viewnder, and in the biographical photo-essay,
Carver Country, as a metaphor for the political implications of the authors
aesthetic. Beginning with a consideration of the claims made in Carver
Country, the essay examines the scholarship on Carvers politics, especially
class politics, and then brings this discussion to bear on photography in
general, and the Polaroid photograph in particular, in Viewnder, to
argue that Carvers work offers a utopian subjectivity in deance of the
capitalist norms that oppress his characters.
Keywords: Raymond Carver, photography, aesthetics, Reaganism,
subjectivity, capitalism, short story, American literature
Resume : Le present article evalue lutilisation de la photographie dans la
nouvelle Viewnder de Raymond Carver, ainsi que dans son diaporama
biographique, Carver Country, a` titre de metaphore des repercussions de
lesthetique de lauteur sur le plan politique. Lessai, qui commence par
une etude des allegations presentees dans Carver Country, examine la
mission professorale des politiques de Carver, et en particulier la politique
des classes, puis ame`ne cette discussion vers la photographie en general,
et la photographie polaroid en particulier, dans Viewnder , et fait valoir
que luvre de Carver offre une subjectivite utopique qui dee les normes
capitalistiques qui oppressent ses personnages.
Mots cles : Raymond Carver, photographie, esthetique, Reaganisme,
subjectivite, capitalisme, nouvelle, litterature americaine

Carver Country
Late in Raymond Carvers career, his widow, Tess Gallagher, bought
him a leather jacket prior to a trip to Paris (Country 18). Her reason,
she joked to Carver, was because she wanted him to look like
Camus (18). Three years later, Carver critic William L. Stull com6 Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne detudes americaines 41, no. 3, 2011
doi: 10.3138/cras.41.3.279

Canadian Review of American Studies 41 (2011)

mented on such a jacket as an icon in one of two late photographs

of Carver:

280

[Carver] and Gallagher both lived in Port Angeles, but they

shuttled between [. . .] his [house] in a blue-collar neighbourhood,
hers in an upscale development. The doubleness appeared as well
in the faces Carver showed the world. In the jacket photo on
Ultramarine, he sports a shiny suit and looks every inch the
famous writer. On Where Im Calling From, he hunches in a wellworn leather jacket. (5)

Such photographs suggest a problematic that occupies much scholarship on Carver and realism as a whole: the doubleness of a writing
that is at once artistic and artless. Examining the photo-essay, Carver
Countryan important biographical and aesthetic document for
Carver scholarsand Carvers story, Viewnder, I will discuss
the use of photography as a metaphor for the politics of Carvers
aesthetic, especially in regard to his representation of the loss of subjectivity in late capitalism, a loss in which Carver nds possibility
even a utopian possibilityrather than limitation.
Critical/Political Contexts
In Carver Country, Gallaghers interpretations of Bob Adelmans
photographs (of the milieu from which Carver emerged) are critical
interventions into Carvers stories, most often to evade the contradictions they present:
One of his [Carvers] French translators, Francois Lascan, had
originally mis-apprehended Rays stance in the stories as ironic.
Then I happened to see a photograph of Raymond Carver and I
had to revise my whole idea of his tone and attitude, he told me
in Paris. I knew the man I was looking at in the photograph
could never condescend to his characters. (10)

This is, in short, the primary argument of Carver Country: that

because photographs of Carver (and of his world) can be read unproblematically, so can Carvers writing, especially its politics. This
does a disservice to both mediumsphotography and writing
whose bearing on the issue of artistic mediation has a long critical
history, as suggested by Ayala Amir, who probes Carvers use of
photography to suggest the failed correspondence between text
and story, representation and reality (39). Amir argues that the
failure of such correspondence is precisely the mental condition

of Carvers characters (45), so that photography serves, in stories

such as Viewnder, to remind us of the limitstechnological
and aestheticof artistic representation, and a society in which
subjectivity is marked by a disjunction between experience and
understanding.

Other contemporary critics similarly relate Carvers work to sociopolitical contexts, including its relevance to social class; authenticity;
political, historical, and cultural determinism; and aesthetic and
ontological theory. In 2006 the Journal of the Short Story in English
devoted a special issue to Carver, in which Vasiliki Fachard writes

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Gallagher further presents Carvers work as a protest against that

society: what was happening in America during the Reagan era
and what continues under the Bush administration (10), especially
the abdication of governmental concern for the lower and middle
classes. Her argument contrasts with early detractors of Carver,
such as Madison Smartt Bell, who regards the short stories as both
products and producers of a relentless sameness, in which characters
resemble one another interchangeably, where settings are identical
to the point of placelessnes, and a uniformity of language erases
distinctions between character and author. Instead of a clear-eyed
portrait of working-class conditions in America in the 1970s and
1980s, Bell nds a dime-store determinism in which Carver
abuses his characters, presenting them as utterly unconscious one
moment and turning them into mouthpieces for his own notions
the next. The characters come to resemble rats negotiating a maze
that the reader can see and they cannot (67). Such characters
cannot envision an alternative subjectivity that might allow for the
alleviation of the social illsdivorce, alcoholism, domestic violence,
joblessnessthat oppress them. Similarly, Mark A. Facknitz speaks
of Carver back during the dismal Reagan administration (149),
while Joe David Bellamy and Charles Newman both charge him
with literary Republicanism (Bellamy 80). Josephine Hendin, by
contrast, sees in Carvers work a critique of the commercial culture
of the 1980s, with its collisions between emotion and materialism,
individualism and commercial culture (233). Recently, Ben Harker
has taken a nuanced stand between such positions, suggesting that
Carvers world is one in which there is apparently no outlet for
utopian impulses [. . .] beyond the consumerist modes sanctioned
by hegemonic discourses (723); in other words, the work is implicated in the politics of its time yet also critical of the social ills
effected by those politics.

Canadian Review of American Studies 41 (2011)

282

of the doubleness that continues to confront scholars, and confound

dualistic discourse. For Fachard, the stories are more about oscillation (19)1 itself, about aesthetic process, than about what they
move toward. The articles oscillate between a view of Carver as an
exponent of referential realism and a self-referential postmodernist,
ranging from considerations of intrinsic doubleness (May); intertextuality (Runyon); symbolic and factual control (Lehman); referentiality versus metactional self-regard (Bethea); a focus on human
subjects within a social framework and reality (Kleppe); a grappling
with a temporality that escapes words (Schweizer); and explorations of narrative performance (Verley). The articles indicate that
Carver managed to accommodate both the self-referentiality of
metaction, and the topicality of realism. The issue is not choosing
sides, but on grappling with this movement within his textsa
challenge to confront without reconciling the disparity between the
aesthetic and the real.
Sandra Lee Kleppe and Robert Miltners 2008 anthology, New Paths
to Raymond Carver, also includes politically inected scholarship
on Carver. Kirk Nesset foregrounds social issues in his foreword,
citing contemporary instances of corporate greed, failed politics,
ecological disasters, and then following with,
Carvers gures are more relevant now than in the 1980s because
a larger swath of the population feels bewildered and helpless
and numbers continue to rise. Yet [. . .] decency and compassion
are key. They arise in Carver [. . .] from useful acts of the
imagination, from the transmission and reception of stories and
poemsgestures that activate empathy, then recognition, and
then further acts of imagination, ideally, beyond reading and
texts, where restoratives lie. (xii)

Nesset suggests that the aestheticacts of imagination embodied

in stories and poemscan effect activism, so that acting upon
Carvers politics involves considering exactly those acts of imagination from which his work springs, how they are usefully embodied
in the works, and the possibilities they raise for political subjectivity.
In his own way, Nesset, like Harker, asks us to consider the utopian
impulse within Carvers work, the degree to which that work is not
just symptomatic but resistant.
Fiction about Fiction versus Fiction about Life
This critical legacy is complicated by Carvers rejection of the textual
trickery of metaction (Fires 14). For Gallagher, overt intellectualism

(such as that of metaction) is at odds with Carvers desire to depict

underclass conditions. She recalls an episode in which Carver was
attacked by a woman for not being intellectually stimulating, to
which Gallagher imagines the response: Hey Toots, why dont you
just pop a Valium and get with the Wittgenstein (16). Wittgenstein
gures as the over-intellectual, hyper-theoretical world she denes
Carvers aesthetic against. Richard Ford, while suggesting that the
immediate reaction to Carvers stories is an aesthetic onean awareness of Carvers stylistics (72)nonetheless writes that the stories
have life, not art, as [their] subject (72), suggesting that selfconscious artistry was secondary to Carvers work.
Gallagher links this refusal of aesthetic self-consciousness, and
Carvers precisionism (18), with the plainspokenness of Adelmans
photography:

Here, the photographed landscapes of Yakima County are homologous to Carvers aesthetic. The lack of cover in the surroundings is
one with the oodlight intensity of the writing. The landscape
evinces qualitiessimplicity over ornamentation, economy as the
most telling sign of veracityshe associates with Carver. Carvers
aesthetic is one with the earth from which it sprang, and thus has
a fundamental truth-value. The most telling aspect of Gallaghers
description is that she makes no mention of Adelmans photographs
mediating the landscapeoffering an aesthetic performancejust as
Carvers writing mediated the lives of the underclass. Instead, that
photography, like Carvers writing, captures landscape exactly.
Thus, for Gallagher, Carvers work is not a representation but one
with the thing represented. With this notion, she negotiates the
contradiction between an artist who is not an artist because all he
does is provide what is already there, and an artist who is an artist

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Landscape [was] crucial to the way Bob was able to suggest a

forsaken quality in the lives of Rays characters. There is nothing,
for instance, to give cover in the photograph of Wenas Ridge and,
in this, it is like the oodlight intensity of Rays own writing,
which put honesty of emotion and truth-telling above all, even to
the point of laying his characters lives open and vulnerable at
moments when they were most shamed and overwhelmed. Rays
proclivity for scorning tricks in his writing, for choosing simplicity
over ornamentation, for choosing economy as the most telling
sign of veracitythese seem present in elements of the Yakima
landscape. (9)

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284

because his aesthetic lets us see in ways weve never seen before.
As Lilian Furst indicates in All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of
Realist Fiction, this dilemmabetween artlessness and artfulness
had long occupied realism, charged with representing both faithfully and artistically (67). Gallagher reconciles this paradox by
conating style of representation with subject of representation. Her
dictum, that economy is the most telling sign of veracity, makes
one wonder, however, as to which is more unmediated: a writing
that masks the work of artice behind a myth of unmediated immanence, or a writing that foregrounds artice in order to alert us
to it? Charles May responds to exactly this by reminding us of
Carvers doubleness, in which reality seems both real and unreal
at once. For May, stories such as Put Yourself in My Shoes ask
the reader to identify with the [. . .] process by which a story is
created, rather than [. . .] identifying with [. . .] as-if-real characters
(34). I would extend this observation to Viewnder also, which
considers the role of artistic mediation vis-a`-vis subjectivity, especially working-class subjectivity. What we must never forgetbut
which arguments such as Gallaghers make it easy to forgetis
the difference between Carvers representation of poverty and poverty
itself. However his subjects might have described their lives, they
would not have described them as art. In conating precisionism
with non-mediation, and this with political validity, Gallagher
argues for what her introduction is written against: namely, that
the subject of Carvers stories is in fact Carver: For Ray had been
one of these people (10). The writers legitimacy rests on the fact
that his experience, his background, his aesthetic form the contours
of the stories. We are thinking of Carver when we think were
thinking of the working class.
Working the Underclass
For all of Carvers working-class associations and precisionism, he
was, as Stull and Harker point out, a nancially successful writer, so
that what we seein the monumentalizing of Carver in Adelmans
black and white photosis a transition similar to that undergone by
his subject matter: where lives that are ephemeral, transient, below
the radar become immortalized in canonical stories and, ultimately,
under the banner of Carver Country. But Carvers precisionism
does not provide a portrait of the working class with delity;
rather, it provides a portrait of what we are told is the way to represent the working class with delity. What is culturally invisible
becomes a photograph; what is transient becomes xed text; what
is ephemeral becomes set in the literary canon.

Harker describes Carvers stories as textual spaces negotiating the

contradictory class location of a distinguished professional writer
synonymous with working-class settings (715), and, further, that
the later stories reinforce the very American Dream (720) that
torments the protagonists of earlier stories with its demand for a
heroic subjectivitytranscending class barriers to achieve success
which obscures other kinds of subjectivity that might offer more
communal solutions to social ills:
When Carver describes [his impoverished early 20s], and they
were an important part of his own working-class credentials, the
emphasis is upon both the difcult socio-economic conditions and
of subjective confusion, of being without a means to comprehend
and narrate what is happening. Those oppositional mediations
[. . .]trade unions, political parties and campaigns, modes of
political analysis, cultural forms and representations through
which objective social conditions are embodied and experienced
and which shape class consciousnessare so weak as to be barely
present. The submerged population to which Carver describes
belonging lacked visibility in a double sense: they were underrepresented politically and culturally. [. . .] class was felt [. . .]
but there wasnt a functional set of mediations through which to
articulate it. (719)

Revue canadienne detudes americaines 41 (2011)

Harkers argument is crucial to mine in suggesting that Polaroids

non-functional and underrepresentationaloffer a better aesthetic analogy for Carver than Adelmans black and whites. While
Bell and Gallagher (however much they supercially disagree) xate
on the idea of the individual artist as autonomous, transcendent
visionary, Harker suggests that Carvers aesthetic is conned and
compromised precisely because he himself was self-consciously
conned and compromised. The disposable, instant, non-technical,
expertise-less Polaroid locates the story amidst the same absence of
authenticity, sense of uniqueness, means of forging a connection
with the real that Carver faced. I would further suggest that Carver
permitted standing contradictions in his work because impasse was
precisely what he wrote about. His stylistics invoke not only, in
Gallaghers words, economy as the most telling sign of veracity,
but economy as the most telling sign of the economy. Newmans
commentary in The Post-Modern Aura can thus be turned to advantage. If Carvers style displays the classic conservative response to
inationunderutilization of capacity, reduction of inventory, and
verbal joblessness (93), then it offers a critique of and counter to
Reaganism in style itself. Carvers refusal of stylistic extravagance

285

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286

which might provide a commentary on, or utopian alternative to,

social conditionsis not because he wanted to conrm the conservative message that disenfranchisement is an individual rather
than social problem, and that personal rather than political failure
is responsible for want. Nor is his precisionism to suggest that reality
can be mediated by the right language, that reality is absolute rather
than a discursive construct. As Viewnder demonstratesin what
is perhaps Carvers most radical movehis style is utopian in its
refusal to enter into an argument with Harkers hegemonic discourses, because it refuses the very conditions of that debate:
valorizing success over failure, connection over disconnection, selfhood over selessness. Despite the call for transcendence, Carver
does not pursue a subject position counter to capitalism. Like Carver,
the characters are looking for beauty in limitation, connement, and
exactitude, as if a Polaroid might aspire to the monumental.
The View from Viewnder
I consider Carvers persistent doubleness a resistance to the transcendent subjectivity that capitalism and its opponents demand.
Harkers concluding statementthat Carvers career offers an
allegory of social mobility and class guilt where material success
was an occasion to reect on former dis-ease [working-class
poverty], and a sanctuary from it (731)marks my departure into
Carvers celebration of absent subjectivity.
In summary, Viewnder involves a man without hands (he has
hooks instead) offering to take Polaroids of the narrators house,
which, we are to understand, has recently been abandoned by the
narrators wife and children (11). The two men exchange anecdotes
about the failure of their respective marriages, suggesting that the
loss of the photographers hands is somehow connected to his
children. Following this, the narrator asks the photographer to
take pictures of him in and around the house, nally demanding
to be photographed hurling rocks from the roof into empty space.
The photographer continues to snap away at the protagonist, even
though, as he yells, his camera cant take motion shots (15). Here
is a man barely able to operate his equipment, which is already inadequate to the task, taking pictures that will never represent their
subject. As Amir says, the series of pictures underscores the break
in sequence inherent in the very act of representation. The possibility
of tracking movement is but an illusion; continuity is false and
delusive (39), pointing out that Viewnder is about the disjunc-

tion between the aesthetic and the real, between the story that
represents and what it represents. This is not the panoramic truth
of Carver Country, but the evanescent world of Carverland.
Viewnder revisits the dilemma of realismthe conicted desire
to mediate transparently and artisticallybut not in order to resolve
it: Adorno, militating against the expulsion of negativity from art,
which he read as a form of quietism, argued in favor of an art, such
as Raymond Carvers, that refused to defuse the contradictions and
quandaries out of which it was born (Chenetier 182). As Chenetier
suggests, Carvers negativity is not the elucidation of symptoms
and cures, but rather the making manifest [of what] cannot be
pointed at, or the pointed use of misrepresentation.

Moreover, a Polaroid produces a certain kind of picture. It is because

the Polaroid cant do motion shots that the photos of the narrators
actions will appear unreal and extraordinary. The Polaroid is thus

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As Arthur F. Bethea additionally reminds us, the title, Viewnder,

foregrounds the importance of photography and photographic
images (270) in the story, to suggest that the story meditates on
the relationship between realism and photography (270), both of
which, Furst tells us, originated in the mid-1900s (True 6). The
photograph offered competition (6) to realism in that it, too,
strove to give a truthful representation of the real world [. . .]
through meticulous observation, and [to do so] dispassionately, impersonally, and objectively (6). As well, the cameraa mechanical
devicebecame emblematic of what realists didnt want to do:
passively registering (9) phenomena. The camera amplied an
anxiety felt by realist writers that they were only reproducing
what was before them rather than creating art. This relationship
between the emerging technology of photography and the aesthetic
of realism connects with Betheas observations to suggest that
Carvers use of the Polaroid comments on the honesty and
veracity of representation. The failure of the Polaroid to capture
the motion of the narrator at the end foregrounds the storys
nonmimetic technique (Bethea 270). Encoded in the use of the
Polaroid is an attentiveness to the way in which an aesthetic produces
its subject. Amir likewise links the discontinuity presented by
photography with Carvers aesthetic (40). Here, a pre-emptive means
of representation emerges in place of verisimilitude. We regard
Viewnders narrator captured (both in the picture and in the prose)
not as he is but as the lens of artistic preference and interference.

Canadian Review of American Studies 41 (2011)

as important to my reading as Adelmans photos to Gallaghers,

not because the Polaroids mediate reality but because they cant.
The artice of the Polaroid calls attention to articiality and thereby
to what escapes articean image of Carverland. The language of
the story does much the same.

288

Determining the Blur

The blurriness of the portrait Carver offers is marked not so much
by imprecision in language but by lapses of connection, or by a
language documenting, as precisely as possible, the imprecision of
the characters connections. Within the third paragraph the cameraman responds to the narrators question on how he got his hooks
by saying, Thats another story [. . .] You want this picture or not
(11)? The effect is twofold: rst, the response suggests that what we
are getting is not that story, but this one, foregrounding, in a move
reminiscent of metaction, the advent of narrative; second, the
statement this picture (emphasis mine) suggests congruence between ctional and photographic texts. The characters are aware
that they are engaging in an aesthetic production like a photograph.
Contextually, this picture tells us the story we are getting is
similar to the picture the man will take of the narrators homea
Polaroid. The photographer offers the narrator a picture of his life
in a medium instant, automatic, disposable. The Polaroid becomes
a trope for an aesthetic sensibility Carver examines, engages in, and
critiques.
Shortly after this exchange, in the next two paragraphs, Carver
presents the rst of many non-sequiturs within the narrative:
Come in, I said. I just made coffee. Id just made some Jell-O,
too. But I didnt tell the man I did (11). Jello-O is a staple not only
of the blue-collar world, but of the K-Mart realismwith its consumer goods and brand-name referencesthat Carver is frequently
associated with (Skenazy 77). The information in the non-sequitur
remarks on the culture the characters inhabit, as well as wedding
consumer ephemera to motives. Why the narrator doesnt want to
mention the Jell-O is unclear except in its inexplicableness. Carver
lodges signicance in interpretive impasse rather than the binding
matrix of symbolic meaningone of the many differences between
Carverland and Carver Country.
Polaroids and Jell-O mark a rupture: the disjunction in symbolic
and narrative logic offered by the pre-packaged dessert is Carvers

own break with an aesthetic sensibility that would make sense out
of the chaos of experience and thereby transcend it. Carver counters
the claim Bell makes on the generic status of minimalism in the
same breath as he counters Gallaghers monumental vision of his
work. The Polaroid serves not because Carver feels that his stories
(or Polaroids) are necessarily throwaway, but because it is precisely
in the throwaway, the ephemeral, the misused (a Polaroid taking
action shots) that the characters have agency, that they can
aestheticize their lives. They resist their generic status not when
they aspire to transcendencethe cultural success storybut
when they try to make a Polaroid do what it cant.

Non-sequiturs follow throughout. I might use your toilet (11,

emphasis mine), the photographer says, the modal verb blurring
our sense of an agent with denite motivation. Lets face it, it
takes a professional (12), the photographer tells the narrator, after
Carver has clearly established the dilettantish aspect of the camera.
Three kids were by here wanting to paint my address on the curb.
They wanted a dollar to do it. You wouldnt know anything about
that, would you? (13) asks the narrator out of the blue, knowing
that the attempt at connecting with the photographer is a long
shot (13). Tellingly, the photographer responds, What are you
saying? to which the narrator replies, I was trying to make a
connection (13). Throughout the story, Carver reminds us of how
little adds up, how connections, even basic communication, cannot
be established, however much the characters play at them.

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Carver is engaging with the historical moment, demonstrating that

material forces and dominant institutions do delimit agency. He
recognizes the kind of world from which his aesthetic developed,
and responds to this world not by presenting his writing process
in heroic termsby creating monuments to the dispossessed, playing a messianic rolebut by dwelling in the failure of transcendence, including that of memorials. In this sense, the stories are
like a collection of Polaroids saved for posterityimages whose
banality, generic status, and anonymity everywhere announce the
impossibility of what they are trying to do, addressing the unity
of an epoch [that] abolishes all the distinctions that constitute the
happiness, even the moral substance, of individual existence
(Adorno 267). Both narrator and photographer have lost their
families, are traumatized, literally or guratively mutilated, yet
neither can articulate his story or craft a meaning that would bridge
each others subject positions. In the place of the panoramic, we get
the minuscule, the nonsensical, the bland, the atomized.

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290

In contrast to this desire for a mutual frame of reference stands the

Polaroid. As Nesset argues: photographs [suggest] stasis, aptly
enough, in the sense of both frozen space and time and of familial
unity [. . .] Slightly more self-aware if also more detached and cynical than his predecessors, this [narrator] seeks himself in the viewnder, personal stability in a destabilized world (Stories 33). The
photographs are supposed to provide a stable portrait. They should
allow the narrator to see himself. Yet the ending of the story
where the photographer says his equipment cannot handle motion
shots (15)demonstrates not so much the inefcacy of the Polaroid
as a medium for making sense, but just how appropriate it is to the
situation. The blurring of the narrator in the pictures corresponds to
the emotional blur he is at present, and perhaps has been much of
his life (Nesset 33). The Polaroid renders the lack of focus in the
characters life, and how inadequate his means of representation is
to a desire for precise articulation of selfhood.
Thus Carvers story interrogates the operability of representational
modes. Irony arrives in the form of a photographer who thinks of
himself as a professional while producing photos anyone could
produce. Ewing Campbell confronts this failure to distinguishor
success at depicting the indistinguishability oflives in Carvers
world, writing that Carvers folks are totems, faceless, nearly
nameless emblems of a class (121). There is no way to nd the
correct word, or name, for the subjects, and the reality they inhabit,
because they, and it, are nameless, elusive of representation.
Carvers precisionism is about delity to a world in which nding
the words that hit all the notes (Fires 18) is to nd a language
whose impoverishment highlights the abundant capital (nancial
or artistic) beyond his characters reach. Along the way, this imprecisionism offers the one thing capitalism cant by its very nature
provide: pleasure in the passing instant, and, more important, the
pleasures of renouncing the heroic subjectivity that is the corollary
of capitalist ambition, or the American Dream.
Sympathies, Modernist, and Otherwise
There is a positive reading in Bells criticism of Carver for not providing an artistically wrought, highly individualistic product, or, as
Quentin Anderson puts it, in the capacity of art to institute a civilization [. . .] to represent individual consciousness as triumphing over
[. . .] self and society (703). While Anderson is discussing modernist
aesthetics, his claims resonate with Bell and Gallaghers desire for an

art that transcends its moment, and triumphs over social conditions. But Carvers writing, rather than upholding modernist ambition, probes the way in which mass production, consumerism,
and the levelling of pop culture have become the register of a postindividualistic society. The absence of the psychic autonomy demanded by individualisma prerequisite for the artistic heroism
Gallagher witnesses and Bell eulogizesrequires us to read in
Carver another power altogether, one derived from the evanescent,
the temporary, the disintegrated.

When the cameraman tells the narrator he sympathizes with

his predicament, the narrator asks him to show how much by
taking more pictures (14). After twenty shots of the narrator
posed systematically in various places around the house, the
pair end up in the front again, having completed a circle (14).
The cameraman remarks, Thats twenty. Thats enough (14), suggesting that either the home of the narrator can be encapsulated in
twenty photographs, or the photographic medium is never sufcient to its subject, no matter how many pictures are taken. The

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I had a headache, the narrator tells us, I know coffees no good

for it, but sometimes Jell-O helps. I picked up the picture (13). The
Jell-O mentioned at the outset of the story returns in a narrative
non-sequitur. The arbitrariness of forging connections is paralleled
by the arbitrariness of the Jell-O as a curative for headaches:
sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt. Carver depicts the misguided narrators belief in what Arthur Saltzman calls a manageable range of perception via the measured outlook offered by
the stability of a picture in a camera viewnder (104), because
the Polaroid, like the Jell-O, cannot be linked to a denite effect.
Just as the Jell-O may or may not confer a cure, the Polaroid the
narrator picks up may or may not provide a view into the history
of his home, the connection between himself and the cameraman,
or a means of alleviating the trauma occasioned by his familys
departure. What is stable in the narrators world, the products
at hand, cannot serve causal connections. In the end, what the
narrator seeks, the particularities of his condition, the manifestation
of elements that respond and testify to his presence in suburbia, are
not available. But there is no nostalgia here, neither on his part, nor
on Carvers, since subjectivity, for the former, is not consciously
missed, and, for the latter, is impossible. The viewnder, then,
rather than providing a window onto the narrator, provides a view
onto his absence.

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292

equation of the sum of photographs with the sum of sympathy

subtends the possibility of intersubjective relations. Not only is
sympathy understood by the characters in terms of a numerical
limit, a production that gets no further than the cycle of a sufciency, but also the opposite, that sympathy is not governed by, or
equal to, a single or series of representations of a subject. There can
never be enough sympathy in our attempt to achieve the other,
who is always outside the limits of representational methods.
Thus, the idea of subjectivity itselfunderstood as a discrete unit
of representationalready forecloses on community, whether it is
tenable or not. What is required is always another photograph, and
that photograph will not ever produce a subject with sufciency.
Community is always one more photograph, is the generosity embodied in a willingness to take another picture, and anotherthe
recognition that representation only works when it doesnt.
Viewnder thus dispenses with individualism: a discrete, continuous, and objectiable selfhood. In its place is a consciousness
evanescent, shifting, irresolvable. The characters in Carvers story
do not appeal to one another, but to the camera, as if it can give
them the permanence they are lacking, and in doing so demonstrate that it is precisely this desire for permanence that is at odds
with the release they crave. As Mieke Bal puts it, The photograph
questions the mastery of the subject in the same sweep as it
questions the subjection of the object (9). The photograph discloses
Carvers troubling aesthetic: where the mastery of the writing
subject (the author) is undercut by his self-consciousness regarding the limits of representation at the same time as the object
(character) it subjects to representation falls outside those limits.
Viewnder reveals a far more equivocal sense of writing, on
Carvers part, vis-a`-vis the subject and object of that writing,
than Gallagher claims. The characters, nally, are actions rather
than subjects, verbs rather than nouns, and therefore the static
medium of print, like the static medium of photography, cant do
them justice.
The lack of description provided by Carver is telling, since we learn
nothing about what the narrators house looks like, only a null set:
I said, The whole Kit and Kaboodle. They cleared right out (14).
The writing allows what the photographs allow: questions rather
than answers; imprecision rather than determination; equivocalness
rather than certainty. When the narrator nally mounts the roof
and prepares his assault on the panorama, presumably to assert his

presence in relation to it, the camera cannot capture the nature of

that presence because it is not interchangeable with a photograph.
Agency cannot go on record since subjectivity is not panoramic,
graspable in the sweep of an eye. Agency is motion itself, but this
is precisely what the characters cannot appreciate, since they are
striving after what theyve been told to strive after: a stable, permanent, heroic, transcendent subjectivity. In the failure to record
agency the most difcult, yet rewarding, of Carvers revelations
creeps in, namely, a subject-less aesthetic.
The Polaroid Moment

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Revue canadienne detudes americaines 41 (2011)

It is at this point that the Polaroid, its difference from the developed
photograph, takes on greatest signicance. As Tom Wolfe says in
his introduction to the photographs of Marie Cosindas, the Polaroid
dispenses with the mysteries of the Darkroom, which had always
been synonymous with professionalism itself among photographers
(506). As well, the nal print of the Polaroid was like a painted
portrait in that it could not be duplicated. The Polaroid negative
is destroyed in the process of instant development (507). These
aspects of the Polaroid set it apart from traditional photography:
the absence of Darkroom professionalism, and the negative (in
that each photo becomes the only example of its kind). The Polaroid
is the scene of an escape: it bears less of the photographers signature
than standard photography since it does not lend itself to darkroom
manipulation; and it resists control by not permitting tampering with
its uniqueness via multiple prints of the same negative. In a sense, the
Polaroid is a photograph like any othercapturing an instant that
can never be repeatedat the same time as it is singular, unrepeatable. It casts doubt on artistic intention: [Walker] Evans worked with
the Polaroid SX-70 system, a fully automatic method that timed the
lms development inside the camera and expelled a nal print for
which the photographer made no contribution to the color scheme
[. . .] He praised the Polaroids quick payback process, saying that
it encouraged sudden inspiration (Marien 362). In Evans work
the Polaroid circumscribes not only the photographers agency,
conning him to a color scheme automatically rendered by the
camera, but also his preparedness in terms of subject matter, making
him reliant on chance. While the second of these is a positive aspect
of the Polaroid for Evans, it connes the artist to the moment, to the
particularities of time and place, not permitting the space in which
to formulate an independent artistic practice. It undermines the
notion of artistic autonomy, of a will and selfhood isolable from

Canadian Review of American Studies 41 (2011)

circumstance. It is not the product of transcendent individuality but

of environment.

294

The Polaroids discrete logicin which the aesthetic exists only in

the moment when the nger presses the buttonfurther amplies
the disconnect in Carvers work, where continuity, and thus perfectibility, is an impossible dream: These are stories without an elsewhere, stories that extend no opportunity to transcend experience.
Discourses biting their own tail parallel the self-enclosed circularity
of lives that can merely recycle their problems into pretences of
temporary solution (Chenetier 175). The self-enclosed circularity
that Chenetier locates in Carver manifests in the twenty Polaroids
that constitute the circular view of the narrators home. In the
course of taking these Polaroids the characters return to where
they began, the initial scene of representation, rather than to what
representation was supposed to offer: a view onto the world
they inhabit (which would place them in an all-seeing position
outside it). The circularity Chenetier describes suggests the exitlessness of Carvers milieuto nd a space apart in which to grasp
the subjects condition. Instead, the Polaroid aesthetic rejects the
frustration of asserting an impossible (transcendently individualistic)
mastery of the temporal. The narrators manic rock throwing, the
photographers futility, are in this sense celebratory. Their failure to
assert mastery is a negative freedom from the primary mandate of
capitalism. By forgoing a transcendent selfhood they momentarily
thwart the engine of their oppression, and immerse themselves in
a world of pointless action, adopted for its own sake, just as we
read the story not for instruction but for itself, the action of the
story alone. Failure marks success.
Unable to nd the meaning of the clues offered by the milieu in
which narrator and photographer nd themselves, both reader and
characters must battle between readings of those clues (Powell
647), stalled in the act of allocating deeper signicance to events
that would allow the formulation of a big picture, and by that a
view from outside discrete situations. The defeat of authorship is
its triumph: characters cannot be pinpointed, or meanings determined, and the individualistic notion of heroism gives way to
the action of perpetual uncertainty (Powell 647), in which the
photographs and writing are about whoever, whenever. The object
of our attention, like our own subjectivity, is thus never ending
because it is not graspable, and community emerges as the attention to others always in excess of how we might represent them.

Community is constant attentiveness. Carver suggests that objectless writing, like a targetless throwing of rocks, or the snapping of
misrepresentative Polaroids, is the leveraging of anonymity and interchangeability and disposability to expose a society that demands that
you connect while denying you the very means of making connections. There is power in the frivolous insofar as it brings pleasure
only in itself, in refusing the control of a purpose.

Note
1 The full quote from Fachard reads: Of course, Carver scholars and
readers can only pray that the uncut stories will soon see the light.
Juxtaposed to the Carver we now have, the two may yield to us what
the narrator of Viewnder sought from the man with the polaroid: a
motion shot of the tremolo or oscillation between the two, a fuller gaze
into the moving process of its construction, a possible glimpse at the
kind of material Carver was appropriating, collecting, during a
fourteen-year correspondence and friendship with Lish (19). Fachard
is, of course, talking about the infamous expose of the relationship
between Carver and his early editor, Gordon Lish, by D.T. Max in a
1998 article, The Carver Chronicles, published in The New York Times
Magazine of 9 August 1998. Looking through editorial revisions for
Carvers rst two books, Max uncovered countless cuts and additions
to the pages; entire paragraphs [. . .] added (37). He noted that Lishs
black felt-tip markings sometimes obliterate the original text [. . .]
[cutting] about half the original words and [rewriting] 10 of the 13

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Revue canadienne detudes americaines 41 (2011)

The ephemeral and chancy aesthetic of the Polaroid is also Carvers.

His use of the Polaroid suggests that he is aware of the terrible freedom exhibited by his characters. On the one hand, the articulating
of coincidencethose events produced by a total disconnectis
freedom from ideology, understood here as a conceptual apparatus
through which one connects, or subordinates, acts to an overriding
meaning; on the other, however, such freedom makes it impossible
to regulate our actions in accordance with some goal, since we are
constantly within the given, or Walkers sudden inspiration, or
the frivolous. Rather than being subjects of will and intention we
are no subjects at all, only the scene of actions that refuse to lend
themselves to myths that in the name of autonomy and individuality
and heroism entice us to make subjects of ourselves so that we can
be controlled, put into predetermined places, reduced to objects.
There is only the bliss of mindless activity, of trying to capture
what cant be captured. This is Carverlandthe beauty of the
impasse, the justice of irresolution.

Canadian Review of American Studies 41 (2011)

296

endings. Carol, story ends here, he would note for the benet of his
typist (37). Of less interest to me here is the relationship between an
intrusive editor and writerand certainly the Lish/Carver relationship in this sense is not the rst of its kindthan the oscillation
Fachard derives from it, and which I appropriate to examine Carvers
interest in process versus product (the movement of the subject always
in excess of determination). To some degree, my study is further
enabled by this metacritical perspective on the provenance of Carvers
stories, though the oscillation is ultimately more important for what it
says about the stories representation of subjectivity than in determining where Lish ends and Carver begins. Perhaps most suggestively
the interest and in some cases outrage over this controversy draws
attention to an expectation (including on Carvers part) of single
authorshipthe notion of a highly individualistic, even heroic, artist
enacting a unique visionary artthat speaks more to the Romantic
myth that informs the capitalist art market (including the literary
market) than it does to the history of authorship, which has more often
than not been characterized by collaboration, plagiarism, inuence,
censorship, and compromise. This anxiety over the uniqueness and
autonomy of the subject is of course manifest everywhere in Carvers
work and criticism, and might be partly explained by his anxiety over
Lishs perceived inuence (and Lishs own anxiety over not being duly
recognized as the presiding genius of Carvers early collections), but is
not reducible to it, or is only part of a larger anxiety over the status of
the subject in late capitalism in general. One is tempted, here, to invoke
the name of one of Carvers collections as the guiding statement on this
concern: No Heroics, Please.

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