Monday, January 28, 2008

Authorial Voice: Carver, Nabokov... Where is Walter Benjamin when we need him?

Dan Green has initiated two discussions on the Reading Experience: a piece on Tess Gallagher's announced intention to publish early versions (BGL-- Before Gordon Lish) of Raymond Carver's stories: HERE and on Vladimir Nabokov's request that his final unfinished manuscript be destroyed: HERE.

To date, there've been 41 comments to these posts. I would like to add a question. To what degree are all the opinions expressed in these comments (my own included): on postpartum authorial rights, the integrity of the individual voice, the limits of the editorial prerogative, not merely colored, but virtually pre-defined by a largely unexamined fetish of the Individual Creator?

The difficulty of extracting the aesthetic and existential questions from those of marketing rights makes the question all the more interesting.

1 comment:

  1. "To what degree are all the opinions expressed in these comments (my own included) ... not merely colored, but virtually pre-defined by a largely unexamined fetish of the Individual Creator?"

    Jacob, I'd have to say that this question is as colored by personal value (the word "fetish" isn't a neutral one, in this context) as the comments. Then again, what of it? What opinion, on any matter, *isn't* highly inflected?

    Meanwhile, as a guy who earns his living from copyrights held on intellectual property, I feel as entitled to be paid for (and uniquely associated with) the fruits of my labor as a surgeon, painter, sculptor, haidresser, sushi chef and architect are for theirs. Is the heart of your question a kind of materialist prejudice against intangible artifacts (as discrete and valuable creations)?

    When a lone carpenter builds an exquisite dining room table, do we consider the casual presumption that the table is her/his creation to be anything to do with a "fetish" of the Individual Creator? We'd consider arguments that the carpenter's work was a defacto "group effort", or an emanation of culture's collective unconscious, to be spurious, and rightly so.

    Anyway, that's just my response (laugh) to the word "fetish".

    Re: the Carver controversy: Carver's case is now beyond that question, since he wasn't a "lone carpenter". Carver, wanting to be published, acquiesced to Lish's often substantial *creative* edits; he made the decision and lived with the results (as did Lish, who, perhaps, deserved more credit than he first got?).

    It's not hard to imagine that he always felt (quite humanly) that his un-Lished efforts were better... it's just ironic that his name has enough clout, now, to get the originals published *because* of the prestige of the material he essentially co-wrote with Lish.

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