A Working Marriage of Necessity and Convenience: Submersion and Epiphany in Carver, Ford, and Wolff’s Dirty Realism (Thesis Intro)

Cornell English Honors Program » Senior Thesis Introduction

2010

By Dan Freedman

In the summer of 1983 Bill Buford, editor of the British literary magazine Granta, declared that a new brand of American short fiction had emerged. He called it “Dirty Realism,” a “fiction of a peculiar and haunting kind” that occupied a previously unexplored chasm of American life. This specialized form of post-modern realism, according to Buford, signaled “a new generation of American authors,” primarily concerned with “the belly-side of contemporary life – a deserted husband, an unwed mother, a car thief, a pickpocket, a drug addict.” For Buford, these themes invoked an emotionally handicapped, economically subdued population whose spiritual malaise defined the working-class martyrdom of America’s downtrodden. But despite the fictional lethargy of the characters contained within, Buford recognized Dirty Realism’s catalytic potential to reinvigorate the American short story as an art form. “Understated, ironic, sometimes savage, but insistently compassionate, these stories constitute a new voice in fiction,” said Buford. And of the authors: they “have single-handedly revitalized the short story.”

Buford’s characterization of Dirty realism located and categorized a newly formed aesthetic, one that evolved out of the American realism of years past. Authors like William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, Ernest Hemingway and Jack London had, for decades, given voice to ordinary Americans who, for one reason or another, experienced difficulty in pursuing the mythologized “American Dream.” But Buford’s terminology denoted a dramatic rhetorical shift in the way authors portrayed the tragic quotidian of American life. This shift coincided with landmark publications by Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and Richard ford—three authors anthologized in Buford’s Granta collection. Together, in their treatment of underrepresented “blue-collar” populations, these three authors helped orchestrate the formation of what I will argue is a fundamental strategy of Dirty Realism: the suspension of a story’s protagonists in delicate equipoise between ignorance and awareness, inutility and agency, spiritual submersion and transcendence. In this carefully balanced state, Dirty Realism’s characters are forced to confront and reconcile their personal deficiencies with the abject reality of their environments. Here Ford, Wolff, and Carver’s laconic prose mold a new minimalistic aesthetic whose economy of language mirrors the barren social circumstances of the characters they address.

The advertisement for Granta Nineteen guarantees a collection of writers who will provide a new and “unillusioned” representation of American life, uncluttered in both style and content. However, Carver, Ford and Wolff openly resist identifying as newly “experimental.” In his essay On Writing, Carver applauds genuine literary innovation as “original, hard earned and cause for rejoicing,” but deplores the “cheap tricks” of 1960s experimentalism (15). Earlier, in a 1981 New York Times Book Review article, Carver had complained that

“too often ‘experimentation is a license to be careless, silly or imitative in writing. Even worse, a license to try to brutalize or alienate the reader. Too often such writing gives us no news of the world, or else describes a desert landscape and that’s all—a few dunes and lizards here and there, but no people; a place uninhabited by anything recognizably human…of interest only to a few scientific specialists” (Hicks 25).

Ford, like Carver, seems to discredit experimentalism in a Paris Review interview in which he names realists “Ray Carver, Joy Williams, Mary Robison, Anne Beatty” (51) as having helped avert his writing from experimentalism to realism. Similarly, Wolff demonstrates a distain for experimentalism, writing in 1983 that “literature is in danger of becoming…stylized and self-absorbed. There is a vast and growing body of fiction…[M]ost of it has become so ritualized and predictable that it is, in effect, simply another form of silence: white noise” (Matters of life and Death). He further indicts experimentalism as a subset of metafictional postmodernism in 1994, suggesting that:

In the sixties we began to see a different kind of story here, resolutely unrealistic, scholastic, self-conscious—postmodern—concerned with exploring its own fictional nature and indifferent if not hostile to the short story’s traditional interest in character and dramatic development and social context (Vintage Book of Contemporary Short Fiction, xiii).

 For Carver, Ford, and Wolff, this collective rejection of experimentalism renders Dirty Realism as a distinct reaction to, rather than an incorporation of, experimental fiction in the postmodern tradition. Here, Carver’s preference for “communicating” ideas to the reader rather than simply “expressing” an artistic vision is clearly promoted. So while Carver, Ford, and Wolff may experiment with novel modes of representation, alternative perspective, and metafictional framing, their criticism of experimentalism precludes interpreting their writing as a literary descendent of the genre. 

Additionally, the way in which Dirty Realist authors conceptualize “truth” differs from their experimentalist predecessors, emphasizing aesthetic precision over ideological genesis. For the realists, simple articulation is valued above complex epistemological representation As Dobozy suggests in his essay Towards a Definition of Dirty Realism, “the postmodern realist, aware of the discursive systems programming our vision of reality, attacks language until it becomes the protagonist” (16). In this way, economy of language becomes an active character in Dirty realism, a conspicuous and delimiting presence in a story’s mise en scene. This emphasis on style refocuses the genre towards a different scope, concerned with the “local details, the nuances, the little disturbances in language and gesture” (Buford, 4) that help to define authorial technique. Carver, in Fires, clarifies this ideal as a type of “correctness” in writing “about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language,” that can endow “a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring –with immense, even startling power” (15). For the Dirty Realists, style becomes a truth in itself, and aesthetics, dealing adjectively with appearance and affect rather than social and cultural realities, allow for an un-politicized view of marginalized society. As Carver explains, the Dirty Realist strategy is simply: “get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on” (Fires, 13).

With this imperative for brevity over plenitude, it is no surprise that Bill Buford used the short story as a model for introducing dirty realism in Granta. Like the characters of dirty realism, the short story is a form traditionally marginalized by the publishing and scholarly communities (Dobozy, 4). So too does its narrative length augment the realists’ desire for concision. And, like few other literary genres, the short story seems to invoke a peculiar reaction in the reader, allowed—at least in part— by the reader’s experience of a full narrative arc in one sitting. Unlike a novel, the short story does not require hours or days of commitment to its characters and plot, and yet is able to reach a length at which we are intimately engaged in the narrative trajectory and its characters’ fate. These features permit the short story to lead us towards a conclusive message that may only be observable after we have finished reading. As Norman Friedman suggests, in Recent Short Story Theory,

Because we can complete it at one sitting, the experience of closure in a story relates differently to our other life rhythms than reading a novel or a poem. It creates a rhythm of its own which is definite enough to displace our life rhythm until it is over. We can enter, move through, and leave story without interruption, and thus we build the story world as we read, apart from the other claims on our attention. So a story binds us more closely to the sentence than a novel and less closely to the word than a poem. Since the end in pushed closer to the beginning, each sentence carries a special urgency and calls for a higher level of attention (27).

Here, Friedman indicates the short story’s capacity for a kind of literary autonomy, enacted by a distinct “rhythm” that “displaces” the natural cadence of our own lives. This interruption permits the short story to function uniquely for the reader, suspending our narrative experience in a tensioned state of urgent anticipation, waiting for a conclusive message to emerge. Dirty realism benefits from this insistent structure, as its protagonists operate in the liminal boundary between self-knowledge and intellectual atrophy. Like them, we are perched on a precipice of comprehension, and are forced to anxiously await some form of enlightenment or anagnorisis.

This is not to say that the short story form is the only medium through which dirty realism can accomplish its distinctive goals. In Towards a Definition, Dobozy notes that the “music of Tom Waits, the films of John Cassavettes, and the novels, plays and comic books of Richard Ford, David Mamet, and Frank Miller, respectively, exemplify a movement too unfixed for any one genre” (4). I, for one, can think of several musical and visual artists who—along with those suggested by Dobozy—employ the “smallness of scope,” and terse minimalism that embodies the dirty realist aesthetic. The artists’ productions are inspired by an unconventional definition of American identity that focuses on marginalized society as a peculiar microcosm of our culture. They are concerned with exploring a world that most people would prefer to avoid, to drive past on their morning commute, and they present this uncomfortable reality without a sterilized garnish. Rather, these artists, like Carver, Ford, and Wolf, focus on the details that enliven mundane elements of life with the ability to communicate the candid reality of fringe society. 

I will argue that Dirty realist fiction does not cling to minutia—the chairs, window curtains, and earrings of Carver’s milieu—in order to avoid making summary sociological statements, but rather to locate a wider expository panorama within the tightened lens of individual experience. By positioning itself in a materially unadorned world filled with tragic-comically defeated characters, Dirty realism encourages us to recognize the dramatic irony of poverty in consumerist culture, to witness personal hypocrisy firsthand, and to view self-delusion and destruction in an intimate setting. When we read Dirty Realism, we are not watching “the war on drugs” on CNN; we are sitting at the kitchen table across from the addict. Dirty realists tackle these dark themes with profound minimalism; their prose lack the superfluities that endanger other stories with pedantic irrelevancy, and their messages are often tragically but unavoidably relatable. Often, the most compelling areas of their stories occur when protagonists confront their own insecurity, self-doubt, misanthropy, and disillusionment with the surrounding world. This confrontation frequently intersects with the use of drugs, alcohol, and a shift in point-of-view that invoke a more profound realization and epiphany for the implicated characters. 

Characters in Dirty realism are truly pitiable, as they struggle to navigate their world of poverty and reconcile their personal failures existentially. In a 1997 interview with Huey Guagliardo, Richard Ford suggests a possible cause for his characters’ perpetual dissatisfaction and spiritual fatigue:

(My stories) are also about varying degrees, varying sorts of human solipsism. The thing that defeats affection in each of these stories is one person’s inability really to look outside him—or herself, so much so that the needs, the preferences, the well-being, the sanctity of others are, in effect, are completely ignored or misunderstood, causing calamity. (Perspective, 178)

As Ford explains, his characters blind themselves with a narrow-minded egotism that prevents them from empathizing with those around them—defeating “affection” and leading to “calamity.” This phenomenon is emblematic of a recurrent failure of Dirty Realist protagonists to communicate their motivations and desires to their family, friends, and colleagues—a divergence between “knowing” what is true and “doing” what is right. Thus, rather than creating attachment and stability in their lives, these protagonists eschew connection and establish an itinerant, un-tethered and aimless identity in the world. Buford notes that “they drink a lot, and are often in trouble…they could just about be from anywhere: drifters in a world cluttered with junk food, and the oppressive details of modern consumerism” (4). Many of these characters are derived from the societal group known as “white trash” or “trailer trash,” whose name alone suggests residential impermanence. However, while it is convenient to prescribe the social underclass as the exclusive subject of dirty realism, we must also acknowledge the genre’s treatment of a middle class: Carver’s door-to-door salesmen (“Vitamins”), Wolff’s businessmen (“Passengers”), and Ford’s air force sergeants (“Great Falls”). Because they lay claim to a broad spectrum of society, these characters are defined not by what they are but by what they do; their action (or inaction) in the framework of consumerism shapes their identity (Dobozy, 10). So while they may be occupationally and geographically diverse, dirty realism unites its protagonist under a cheaply-made banner of operative dysfunction. Details ground these characters in a common culture of material preoccupation, and their personal dissatisfaction—manifested in their misguided deeds— illuminates “the whole of society reflected in individual experience” (Hallet, 487).

             Some critics would hastily disagree with this assessment of dirty realism’s potential for broad relevance, and further, with the genre’s capacity for meaningful insight. In a 1985 Washington Post column, the Pullitzer-prize winning book critic Jonathan Yardley advised the “trendy” among his readership to “keep an eye out for Hick Chic,” a term he coined to address the “regional,” “marginal,” and “unimportant,” narrative subjects of Carver, Ford, Jayne Anne Phillips, Joy Williams, and Andre Dubus among others (Rebein, 67). According to Yardley, the purpose of his column was to explain “why in a nation full of yuppies, conservatives and materialists, with college campuses full of business students and future lawyers, rural poverty is all the rage” (67). His answer, in brief, was that the newly emergent dirty realism—and its associated popularity—could be attributed to commercial fetishism, the same phenomenon that might send wealthy urban hipsters running to stores for the latest NIKE sneaker. “The urban faddists haven’t fastened on Hick Chic out of any inherent merit or interest that they discern in it,” Yardley wrote, “but because they see it as yet another product with which to bedeck their lives. (67)” Ironically, Yardley’s charge identifies dirty realism as a victim of the same cultural commodification that its authors would seek to undermine. For him, “urban” readers do not crave a realistic portrayal of rural life, fringe personalities, or a marginalized experience, but rather an “idea of country” to place on their coffee tables as a testament to their diverse intellect. The question is then: does Yardley’s Hick Chic correspond to dirty realism? Does the genre’s naturalistic approach promote a sensationalized view of the American underclass? I would argue that Yardley’s depiction of the Yuppie’s thirst for brand-name artifice oversimplifies dirty realism’s revelatory capability. While the subjects of poverty, professional aimlessness, and crime may not be directly relatable for the aspiring lawyers of America, these themes contain a metonymic capacity for illumination that Yardley seems to ignore here.

Ann Hulbert’s New Republic essay, “Rural Chic,” helps reconcile Yardley’s depiction of dirty realism’s superficiality with the genre’s real literary depth. In her essay, Hulbert distinguishes between the “Hollywoodized” take on rural life and the more serious literary efforts of dirty realist authors to expose rural marginality in a truthful format. Hulbert cites films such as The River, Witness, and Places in the Heart, as satisfying “a craving among the quiche crowd for pure country vistas and prettified country values,” deriving their popularity from a romanticized notion of agrarian life. These “Hick Chic” stories, Hulbert argues, exist in opposition to the darker, more honest material of dirty realism that evades Yardley’s classification as “superficial,” and deserve the more fitting label of “Hick Shock” (25). Hulbert notes that this separate genre sheds the populist romanticism that Yardley deplores, and favors instead “a sense of isolation, interrupted by crises that promote a tenuous, not triumphant, solidarity,” re-articulating the classically bucolic agrarian world as a place where “discontent and disorientation have long been as common as dirt (29).” In this way, dirty realism does not feed into the materialism of popular culture, but rather exposes the areas where fringe culture and marginalized society intersect with the pathology of contemporary consumerism (Rebein, 70).

However, the question remains as to how the short fiction of dirty realism—a genre of fiction that emphasizes the details of a microcosmic culture—can resonate with such a dynamic and diverse readership. I will argue that dirty realism accomplishes this end by extending itself beyond what has previously been identified as “tough-guy realism,” “under-world realism,” or “southern Gothic,” to what Harry Levin described in 1958—in his treatment of Melville and Hawthorne— as “the power of blackness.”  In Levin’s essay, Melville describes the dark side of Hawthorne’s fiction as a place where the author’s “Puritanical gloom” coincides with the nineteenth century reader’s conception of “Innate Depravity and Original Sin.” Melville writes of Hawthorne that

For spite of all the Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne’s soul, the other side—like the dark half of the physical sphere—is shrouded in blackness, ten times black…Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom,—this, I cannot tell. Certain it is, however, that this great power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Orginial Sin, from whose visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always and wholly free” (Rebein, 43).

Here, the interplay between an ominous, murky narrative underbelly and the public’s conceptualization of sin and guilt serves to vanguard the modern relationship between reader and story for the dirty realists. In the same way that Hawthorne tackled the “dark side” of Nineteenth century American culture, addressing looming issues of religious guilt, purity, and redemption, dirty realist authors challenge contemporary morality with their treatment of the Vietnam War, the drug trade, street violence, crime, and what Robert Rebein aptly terms “the cauldron of disappointment, bitterness, and fear characterizing race relations in the post-civil rights era” (Hicks, 44). The question then is not “how can one relate to such a specialized form of fiction as dirty realism,” but more appropriately, “how can one avoid seeing elements ones self—‘the dark side of the physical sphere’—in the masterful prose of these great authors.