Specialization, Snobbery, and the School of Carver

A couple years ago, just as I was making the seemingly momentous transition from undergrad to grad student, I decided to become a more “specialized” reader. After all, I was becoming a real academic, and it seemed like the thing to do. But what would I specialize in?

I had read Ulysses, a fact which I liked to sneak into class discussions, apropos of nothing, as if summoning the fictional ghost of Leopold Bloom into any English class would somehow certify my realness, my seriousness, as a reader. But despite all my bragging, I really did love Joyce, and as far as specialties went, the Modernists seemed like the school for me: Woolf, Pound, Hemingway, Eliot, Faulkner, Stein, the whole glorious, convention-busting gang. They were eternally hip.

But then I took a class on Woolf and was introduced to the vast and intimidating body of Modernist criticism. While researching for papers on Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, I got the impression of being late to a feast where the banquet table, once a glorious spread, had been pecked down to its grim and final scraps. If I wanted to say or write anything truly new, I would have to move on.  

This brought me to the Post-Modernists, specifically the Americans of the 50s and 60s. These were the writers that had taken the formal innovations of the Modernists as a challenge: how could they move an exhausted Literature forward? How could they write shock into the complacent, stupefying systems of post-war America?

Taking these questions head-on, the Post-Modernists engaged in a lot of bracing, brainy formal experimentation, which is exactly the sort of thing that “turns me on” as a reader. The other thing that drew me to these writers - and this is probably the most important point - is that they were currently unfashionable just about everywhere. No one I knew was reading these books, and by reading them, I was entering into an exclusive, one-man literary club defined by experimentation, intellectual gamesmanship, and a certain hip attachment to irony and the darker side of human affairs.

As I tend to do with my favorite writers or musicians, I became a fan-boy, savoring the cloistered exclusivity of my affections. My Post-Modernists of choice were John Barth, William H. Gass, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Coover. Their books became (and remain) some of my favorites, including Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Barthelme’s Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, and Coover’s Pricksongs and Descants. Above all others, Pynchon became a sort of god to me.

All-American Badass Robert Coover

Meanwhile, my graduate English program turned out not to encourage “specialized” reading or research at all, instead opting for a widely-ranged and heavily-politicized curriculum that I found more confusing than anything else. By this time, however, my self-imposed specialization had taken hold: I was a Po-Mo junkie with a bad case of the Holier-Than-Thou Blues.

The problem was that I was turning into a smug, elitist douche. In my mind, there was a stark division between my own rarefied tastes and those of the readers and writers around me, who seemed stuck in the mire of Dirty Realism. I saw this “Dirty Realism” as a literary regression, a muck of heavily workshopped sentimentality and phony working-class formalism that was terminally sincere and, worst of all, easy to read. This was the world of Raymond Carver, a writer I had once loved in high school and my early college years, before I’d “wised up” and discovered the aloof, ironical contraptions of Coover and Barthelme.  

My resistance to the School of Carver wasn’t intended as elitism, though. It began as devotion and defense, a stern and unswerving loyalty to the Post-Modernists who were overshadowed by Carver’s 1980s coronation as The Master of the American Short Story. Carver’s novelist counterpart (and a great story writer in his own right) was Richard Ford. I came to resent both men as retrograde artists who had duped a gullible reading public, a whole nation of philistines too slow for the sophistications of a Barth or a Gass.

But then, fairly recently, I went back and actually read Carver and Ford. First came Carver’s story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, which not only blew me away, but also reminded me of why I had loved Carver in the first place. There was the spare intensity of the prose; the broken dreams exposed and poked at in glistening, illuminating shards of everyday life; the hilarious and tragic whiz-bang endings; the true, crackling dialog.

All-American Badass Raymond Carver

Shortly after What We Talk About, I found a similar but totally different set of rewards in Ford’s A Multitude of Sins, a story collection that borrows just as much from Gass as it does from Chekhov. Both books were revelations.

What I discovered after reading them was that I had been ridiculous. Why shut out entire “sections” of literature if they differ from your favorite stuff? Why became a cheerleader for writers when their work can speak for itself? Why police literature or be a snob at all?

In the process, I came to think of Carver (and, to a lesser degree, Ford) as part of a never-ending avant-garde, a lineage of great fiction writers that never stops in one place, never actually settles into one school. The fact of the matter is that even envelope-pushers like John Barth and John Hawkes become Old Unfashionable Dogs at one point or another. This has no bearing on their ultimate value as artists, and it isn’t up to me to dictate their value to the American public. This thing we call “literary fiction” is doomed and blessed never to stay the same, and it certainly hasn’t since Carver’s time. This is a good thing.

I guess my point here is that “specialization,” while healthy in small doses, can also become limiting. It’s alright to play favorites, and Lord knows I’ll continue to do so, but why do it at the expense of other, potentially life-changing writers?

The funny thing about all this is that I’ve spent this entire post splitting hairs about white American men. What the hell kind of specialization is that? Moving forward, I’m trying to generalize my reading, with the one stipulation that I only read “da good shit.”

Because what other specialization does a reader need?