THE DEATHS OF THE AUTHORS: LITERARY CELEBRITYAND AUTOMORTOGRAPHY IN ACKER, BARTHELME,BUKOWSKI, AND CARVER’S LAST ACTS

Thomas H. KaneThomas H. Kane received his PhD in English from the University ofVirginia in 2003. He has published articles on Tupac Shakur and MartinLuther King, Jr. in Prospects and American Literature, respectively, andis finishing the manuscript for a book-length study of automortography.He has taught at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and Washington &Lee University and presently teaches at Phillips Academy in Andover,Massachusetts.

One aspect of poststructuralist thought concerns the ‘‘death of the sub-ject.’’ Through the opposed lenses of historicism and deconstruction,the likes of Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes exposed how the subjectwas historically constructed and maintained, and how the subjectwas deployed discursively in language that is ‘‘inherently’’ unstable.1

The Author frequently served as a symbol of the subject’s ascendancein modernity and those setting out to prove the death of the subjectoften wrote on the death of the Author, paradoxically becoming in theprocess the authors of postmodernity. This essay, however, is motivatedby the question: If the Author is dead, what happens when a handful ofAmerican authors face death in this period? In an attempt to formulatean answer, I examine what dying authors produce as they die, specifi-cally, what Kathy Acker, Donald Barthelme, Charles Bukowski, andRaymond Carver produced as they were dying. Taken together, theresult is surprising, even uncanny. They all write a kind of mortogra-phy: a writing that attempts to represent death. But using mortalityto mobilize the readers’ desire, the texts serve as invitations toread through the lens of the author’s death, or auto-mortographically.These pieces, and the climate of literary marketing that producesthem, encourage an automortographic mode of reading that seesthe work in relation to the now-deceased author.2

I’d like to thank Bill Albertini, Elizabeth Bridgham, Mendy Gladden, Jim Kim,Brenna Munro, and Alice Rutkowski for their very helpful comments on an earlier draftof this essay.

Literature Interpretation Theory, 15: 409�443, 2004

Copyright # Taylor & Francis Inc.

ISSN: 1043-6928 print/1545-5866 online

DOI: 10.1080=10436920490534389

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In this essay, I argue for a kind of reading that is invited in theselast acts, a reading that desires the biographical to meld with the fic-tional and thus encourages the production and reception of what I callautomortography. Automortography is a site where the intentions ofthe text, and its apparent author, meet those of the survivor, wherewitness can be performed intimately. It is a way of reading that oper-ates melancholically within the economy of authorship and within sys-tems of promotion that foster literary celebrity. The authors are verydifferent in style, temperament, tone, and to a certain degree audi-ence, and yet they use similar strategies to deal with and portray theirstruggle against death, and the death of the Author. They becomeauthors in the face of death and they simultaneously represent thedeath of the Author.

The automortographies of the authors discussed in this essay, aswell as the call for the death of the author, are melancholic gestures,unfinished and unfinishable. In writing on the death of the author, Iknow that I am participating in and perpetuating the Author. I amprolonging its life because these texts remain as a ‘‘living will.’’Coincidentally, I have chosen authors who are dying of cancer. Ofcourse, they all may have thought that they would ‘‘beat’’ the cancerand survive. None of them did. But they left behind these acts, thesefinal works that read back into their waning lives, these acts thatinhabit a space between life and death—our life and the author’sdeath. And each, in her and his own way, take the opportunity to stagea version of the death of the author, even as they die.

Each of these works—Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates, Barthel-me’s, The King, Bukowski’s, Pulp, and Carver’s ‘‘Errand’’—is riddledwith ruminations on mortality that pop up in conversation and inthe thoughts of narrators and protagonists that serve as tools for theplotting of action. It is as if these works are a rehearsal for the deathsof their authors. In A Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Zizek points out that‘‘narrative always involves an impossible gaze, the gaze by means ofwhich the subject is already present in the act of his=her own concep-tion’’ (16). In each of these literary last acts, we can see the impossiblegaze of the author scripting and directing his or her own death, becom-ing an audience even as the self or subject becomes an object (corpse).In each case, the writers construct a fictional realm where they can bewitnesses to their own death and its reception, and can thus script—tosome degree—the acts of mourning of the survivors. Their biographiesand biological deaths authenticate their impossible gazes. Theirfictions become biographies and their biographies fictions so thatthe pieces serve as invitations to read fiction biographically andbiographies fictitiously.

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Bukowski and Carver literally represent the death of the Authorby including historical authors in their fiction and rewriting thescenes of the deaths of Celine and Chekhov, respectively. Barthelmeand Acker look back to famous or canonical texts, rewriting works byThomas Malory and Robert Louis Stevenson, respectively. All fourdraw on European literary Masters or masterpieces, directly con-tending with the Authors of their own literary production. These lasttexts are uniquely situated in close proximity to death which furtherheightens the readers’ pleasure after the author has died, and showsthe abjection of the Author in a system of literary celebrity. After anexamination of authorship in this period, we can then turn to a hostof recent literary last acts by Bukowski, Carver, Barthelme, andAcker.

LITERARY LIVES AND CELEBRITY

Although our primary focus is on the staging and reception of thedeath of the author, the status of the author’s life in this period canhelp explain some of the surprising continuities for a group with suchdisparate aesthetic and social views. While Barthes famously proph-esied that the ‘‘birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death ofthe Author’’ (‘‘Death of the Author’’ 148), what has resulted in the sub-sequent period has been the ascendance of what Joe Moran calls theliterary celebrity—the marketable author. In the post 1960s US, theAuthor does not signify the Author of History as much as literary cel-ebrity—a writer who is known for producing ‘‘quality’’ writing, butwhose life and biography are central to the marketing and promotionof his or her books. These are the figures consumed in ‘‘Literature’’courses rather than in airports (though the success of literarycelebrity—and the simultaneous interrogation of the literary in litera-ture courses—makes such a distinction facetious, if illustrative).Regardless of where they are read, these authors retain a degree ofcultural capital—often signified in their lack of economic capital.

The nature of literary celebrity, and the role of the author’s life inthe promotion and production of ‘‘literary’’ works has changed inrecent years, particularly since the 1970s, because the publishingindustry has seen the smaller independent presses become absorbedby huge multi-media conglomerates such as Vivendi and Viacom.The evaporation of independent organizations has meant that thenewly consolidated entities have had to scramble for the symbolicand cultural capital that the formerly independent organizationsrepresented. (Frequently, this means the establishment of newimprints that may appeal to or appear to represent a subculture; the

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emergence of the ‘‘Vintage Contemporaries’’ label in the 1980s is afamiliar example.)

One of the places this cultural capital is bartered for is in literarycelebrity, which maintains the distinction between Danielle Steele,say, and Louise Erdrich. Although he uses different authors to illus-trate his point, Moran in Star Authors details this phenomenon, show-ing how Steele operates in a realm of economic capital—her booksmake money—but Erdrich’s promotion (by herself and the industry)is most often as one who has cultural capital (say Native Americanauthenticity) more than economic capital. And this promotion of cul-tural and symbolic capital over economic capital mystifies the machineof promotion—the placement of Erdrich’s books on the open tables atBarnes and Noble and the like, the huge numbers of her books pur-chased for bourgeois consumption in college courses, the function ofinfluential sites of review, the role of writing programs in the main-taining an ‘‘Erdrich’’ on the faculty and perpetuating Erdrich-esqueaesthetics in the workshops, and the graduate programs that neednew material for critics and academics to write about. What’s impor-tant here is not Erdrich, because any number of names could havebeen dropped into that slot, but the systems of value that maintainher difference from Danielle Steele. What is important are thevalences of value that the names signify.

Each of the authors in this essay fits more or less easily into thisrubric of literary celebrity, where they are first known for their liter-ary talent but as a result their names enter into a cultural symbolicrealm that is a celebrity system. The lives (and deaths) of theseauthors then get included in promotional material that serve toheighten their authority. Taking one of our subjects as an example,Raymond Carver’s life as an alcoholic circulates with the promotionof his early stories, and serves to give them credibility. In addition,his boyhood poverty, as the son of a saw mill worker, is the subjectof some of Carver’s own writing, and also serves to give his stories akind of firm class position, allowing him to be dubbed by reviewers(the affirmers and solidifiers of literary celebrity) as ‘‘the voice of theworking class.’’ It is important that Carver wrote about his own classposition because it shows that he has some agency in his own literarycelebrity; he is not purely the victim of celebrity. Moran calls this‘‘situated agency,’’ that is, a degree of agency within a field of historicaland cultural context (10).3 As these writers are dying they exhibitanxiety about their agency, and at the same time they have agencyin these acts, shaping the reception.

Each of the writers in this essay produce and are consumed inan historical moment when authorship is inseparable from the

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mechanisms of promotion, when the book tours, the institutionalizingof writing programs, and the rise of literary festivals have lent anadded dimension to authorship that invites readers to know, or feellike they know the authors they read. The authorship of these writersdepends on their lives. And in these literary last acts, the relationshipof life and text, of biography and fiction, or of death and authorship isintermingled, produced in an echo-chamber of production, consump-tion, and promotion.

D.O.A.: READING BACK THROUGH THE DEATH OFTHE AUTHOR

Within this system of celebrity, these last acts resemble and play withBarthes’s notion of a return of the author:

It is not that the author may not ‘‘come back’’ in the Text, in his text, buthe then does so as a ‘‘guest’’ . . . no longer privileged, paternal. . .. [H]is lifeis no longer the origin of his fictions but a fiction contributing to hiswork; there is a reversion of the work on the life (and no longer the con-trary); it is the work . . . which allows their lives to be read. (‘‘From Workto Text’’ 161)

Barthes’s after-life of the author with its reversion of text into lifearticulates the paradigm of these literary last acts, where the biogra-phy gets read differently in light of the last texts; it also brings up theimportant notions of propriety and will—whether or not one may comeback. We will see with Carver and Barthelme that the notion of a willhas particular resonance. These automortographies, operating withina system of literary celebrity, encourage the reversion of the work onthe life (and death), allowing the works and the lives to be read sym-bolically. These works, however, anticipate such reading by frequentlydeploying metafictive elements: they stage the death of the author byhaving authors die. In many of these last texts, famous writers expiresometimes in comical jest at literary immortality and sometimesaspiring to it.

Both Carver and Bukowski had reputations for making use of theirexperiences, for fictionalizing autobiography. In Bukowski’s case, hispoems and novels were barely concealed narratives drawn directlyfrom his own experience and filtered through his sardonic, cynicalwit. In Carver’s case, the characters and events are usually more fic-tionalized, though still composites of people around him or experienceshe had or heard about.4 For both, the use of autobiography meant therisking of relationships around them. (And in interviews and exposes

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we’re made aware of these costs.) At times, they even included discus-sions of these risks in their work. For example, in his story ‘‘Intimacy’’Carver has the narrator’s ex-wife ask to be written out of the stories, tono longer be included.5 The people around them become the objects oftheir storytelling, sacrificed on the Romantic altar of Art. In their lastacts, Bukowski and Carver change the object of their stories. Theyeach use the death of an historical author to fuel their plots, to payhomage to a writer or Author who has influenced them, and to scripta reading of their own deaths through the ‘‘impossible gaze’’ of fictionthat enhances their literary celebrity and elicits feeling in theposthumous reader.

Shunning his usually explicitly autobiographical prose and poetry,Bukowski’s last act, Pulp, is a parody=homage to the detective genre.Completed just before his death in March 1994, it ‘‘reads back’’ intothe text of Bukowski’s life and shows a writer writing against, butwithin the grasp of the abyss of mortality. One reviewer describedBukowski’s Pulp as ‘‘grimy, dark potboiler meets an allegory onauthoring’’ (Nericcio 791). Gundolf Freyermuth points out that inPulp, Bukowski had ‘‘interwoven two outstanding Los-Angeles-myths:the Noir myth of the California hard-boiled detective and his ownlegend, the Bukowski-myth’’ (qtd in Brewer 177�78). Pulp’s protagon-ist, Nick Belane—‘‘the best dick in L.A.’’—is hired by Lady Death tofind out if Louis-Ferdinand Celine is still alive because there is aman fitting his description roaming through Los Angeles (34). LadyDeath is described in a manner that combines the typically misogynistBukowski style with a parody of the detective genre, collapsing erosand thanatos. Apparently Celine slipped through Lady Death’s deli-cate fingers by not dying when history recorded his death in 1961.For Brewer, ‘‘Celine is an appropriate adversary for Belane duringtheir last days. The Frenchman’s cynicism, self-scrutiny, and depthof thought distinguish him as equally anachronistic in the superficial-ity of Hollywood’’ (181).

A profound influence on Bukowski, Celine’s emphasis on animmediate, earthy style, on the inclusion of slang, and his iconoclas-tic disposition resonate with Bukowski as a literary celebrity. BothBukowski and Celine write thinly veiled autobiographical works thatare dark and pessimistic. Both struggle with literary recognition. Andboth place an emphasis on the visceral over the literary, attempting tocreate affective pieces rather than pristinely crafted works. Kristeva’sdiscussion of Celine’s aim may just as easily be about Bukowski’swork: ‘‘to touch the intimate nerve, to grab hold of emotion by meansof speech, to make writing oral, in other words, contemporaneous,swift, obscene’’ (137). Indeed, with Lady Death lurking around every

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narrative corner in Pulp, Bukowski emphasizes the present with swiftobscenity. Both writers create works that ‘‘assume at least a doublestance between disgust and laughter, apocalypse and carnival’’ (Kris-teva 138). They both explore, in Kristeva’s words, the ‘‘abject,’’ in otherwords the ‘‘sort [of literature] that takes up where apocalypse and car-nival left off’’ (141). They have no faith in objectivity, except in show-ing humanity to be the object of its own absurd and treacheroussystems. All of these literary last acts rely on a kind of ‘‘double stance,’’though the aesthetic ground they stand on is very different.

In Pulp, Bukowski includes direct commentary on the relation offiction to biography, of life to work that shows him to be utilizing a‘‘double stance.’’ He is at once laughing at and disgusted with thesystems of literary celebrity. Indeed, both Celine and Bukowski areconcerned with their literary legacies and reputations. Celine nomi-nated himself for literary awards towards the end of his life, andBukowski wrote of Pulp, ‘‘It’s going to ruin my reputation. Lot ofbad stuff in it. I hope I’ve done it on purpose. . . . I don’t know whatmade me write it. I guess I got tired of writing about myself, aboutwhat happened to me’’ (Sounes 240).6 Bukowski is gambling with hiscelebrity status.

Bukowski admired Celine, particularly Jouney to the End of theNight. In addition to the thematic similarities, Bukowski may havebeen drawn to Celine’s vexed literary reputation, his biography thatscripted his reception. (Celine’s anti-Semitic works of the late 1930sbanished him from acceptance in literary circles of the French Leftuntil the mid-1960s.) Doren Robbins writes of Celine and Bukowskithat ‘‘the idea of being canonized is incomprehensible . . . what is indes-tructibly iconoclastic in literary tradition is implicit in their work; theyexist with eminence whether they are integrated or not. . . . There is ineach writer a kind of reckless liberty’’ (qtd in Brewer 6). But whereCeline sought stature as a writer, Bukowski was suspicious of the cel-ebrity system that circulated around writers and other artists. By the1990s, Bukowski can no longer have Celine’s faith or confidence in anunmediated artistic success and is wary of making his life an abjectobject of commodity systems. Living in Hollywood, he had an intimateknowledge of the corrupting power of celebrity reputations. Havinga U2 concert dedicated to him in 1992 after the band wrote a song(‘‘Dirty World’’) as an homage, Bukowski lamented: ‘‘a successfulmillionaire group like that, no matter what they said, THEY WERETHE ESTABLISHMENT’’ (Captain is Out to Lunch 132�33). Sounesdescribes this period as one of doubt for Bukowski: ‘‘after years ofbeing true to his art, he hoped he wasn’t being sucked into the showbusiness maw’’ (229�30). In part, Pulp is Bukowski’s attempt, with

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the double stance of the clear-eyed cynic and the Romantic artist, tobuck literary celebrity one last time and free himself from the‘‘maw’’ of promotion by writing a book that breaks from his earlierwork and that is even ‘‘dedicated to bad writing.’’

In order to stage the death of the author, Bukowski kills off Celinein Pulp. Belane brings together Celine and Lady Death, as the threemeet for a drink at one of Bukowski’s preferred L.A. haunts, Musso& Franks Grill—simply referred to as Musso’s in the novel. Just beforeCeline dies, the narrator ruminates: ‘‘I was feeling odd. Like nothingmattered, you know. Lady Death. Death. Or Celine. The game hadworn me down. I’d lost my kick. Existence was not only absurd,it was plain hard work’’ (108). The narrator’s resignation recallsBukowski’s works after he suffered from tuberculosis (the disease thatkilled Chekhov) in the late 1980s; in those works he fights with adesire to recede into nothingness.7

Exhibiting a concern with the body and a need to show the corpsethat both characterizes Celine’s work and importantly inhabits eachof these automortographic last acts, Bukowski has Belane narrateCeline’s death in the ‘‘double’’ register of tragi-comedy: ‘‘There was asound, the sound of screeching brakes. There was a loud thump, likemetal hitting flesh. I jumped up from the table and ran outside. Therein the middle of Hollywood Boulevard was the still body of Celine’’(111�12). As we’ll see Carver do, Bukowski has to display the corpse,representing the body of the dead Author. Halfway through his novel,Bukowski has killed off the Author, riddling him with cliches along theway that are meant to parody the detective genre, but that risk his lit-erary reputation. For example, ‘‘The good die old. . . . I heard the sirenthen. It’s when you don’t hear it, it’s for you’’ (112). Lines like theseserve to heighten Bukowski’s anxiety, and lead some readers to dis-miss the novel. Bukowski’s ‘‘reckless liberty,’’ combined with his ownexistential resignation exemplified in Belane’s comment about being‘‘worn down,’’ has him risk his reputation in the creation of Pulp.Perhaps the only thing that mattered, in the end, was to usurp expec-tations and dismantle the literary celebrity that he had constructed;perhaps, in Pulp, Bukowski not only killed off Celine, but attemptedthe suicide of his own literary self (and, paradoxically, thereby fomen-ted audience desire). Pulp portrays the death of one author (Celine)while it enacts the death of its author by breaking from aesthetic,readerly, and market expectations.

Displaying a similar admission of anxiety of influence and simul-taneous homage, Carver’s last story, ‘‘Errand,’’ portrays the deathbedscene of Anton Chekhov. Like Bukowski’s use of Celine, such a retro-spective reading allows us to see how Carver, in rhetorically exhuming

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Chekhov, shows just how an author becomes an object, and then howthat object gets animated in the imagination of the survivor, perpetu-ating a system of literary celebrity. The story, and its proximity to hisdeath, seals Carver’s literary reputation by allowing him to claimaffiliation through reproducing Chekhov’s aesthetics.

Carver’s ‘‘Errand’’ writes Chekhov’s death scene in a Chekhovianaesthetic mode; if Chekhov could have written his own death, hadaccess to the ‘‘impossible gaze,’’ ‘‘Errand’’ would have been what hesaw. Whereas Celine and Bukowski create works largely and almostexclusively out of their own subjective experience, Chekhov’s aestheticrelies on a system of apparent objectivity. He is less concerned withthe abject than the object of the human; but his emphasis on theartist’s hand may ultimately enforce the abjection of the audience.Celine and Bukowski often riddle their works with invectives, butChekhov felt that the reader should be the arbitrator of any moralconundrums that may be presented in his work. Human action inChekhov’s stories takes place on a plane that critics label ‘‘freedom’’(Valentine 56) or ‘‘impersonality’’ (Kelly 222). Chekhov expressed theintent behind his aesthetic in a letter:

You abuse me for objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil, lackof ideals and ideas, and so on. You would have me, when I describe horsethieves, say: ‘‘Stealing horses is evil.’’ But that has been known for ageswithout my saying so. . . . It’s my job simply to show what sort of peoplethey are. . . . Of course it would be pleasant to combine art with a sermon,but for me personally it is extremely difficult and almost impossible,owing to the conditions of technique. . . . I must all the time speak andthink in their tone and feel in their spirit, otherwise, if I introduce sub-jectivity, the image becomes blurred and the story will not be as compactas all short stories ought to be. When I write, I reckon entirely upon thereader to add for himself the subjective elements that are lacking in thestory. (May 195)

Chekhov is able to construct the objectivity through a progression ofnarrative techniques: first through juxtaposing the third person nar-rator’s and the protagonist’s observations and later through ‘‘doubleindirect discourse’’ where the dialogue is mediated through an objec-tive consciousness, and lastly through the melding of the narrator’sand hero’s voices (Chudakov 44). One might say that Chekhov’s pointof view of the human universe is from the top down, while Celine’saesthetic attempts to render the universe from the bottom up; it isthe difference between rendering humanity objectively or abjectly.For Celine (and Bukowski) their morality is immorality—showingthe limits or borders of morality; for Chekhov, his morality is his

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amorality, his refusal to moralize (which becomes his artistic or aes-thetic morality). But Chekhov’s ‘‘ought’’—in ‘‘as all short stories oughtto be’’—is telling, because he has very strict codes of conduct for anauthor that are intended to absent or mystify the authorial apparatus.For Chekhov the aesthetic is the only thing that is didactic in a story.

In writing a story that utilizes Chekhov’s aesthetic ‘‘oughts,’’ Carvershows how the objective masks the subjective hand of the author. Withless irony than Bukowski and in an act more purely of homage, Car-ver’s last story, ‘‘Errand’’ portrays the death of Chekhov. In the storyCarver plays with the role of fact, of biography in fiction, drawingdirectly on Henri Troyat’s biography of Chekhov in depicting the finaldays and moments of the Russian author. He transcribes three or fourpages of the biography verbatim—a move that troubles the individua-tion of the author (Carver) while it renders the author an object; inother words, Carver’s own authorship—his reputation—may be atstake (in a manner homologous to Bukowski’s gamble). The fact thatthis is Carver’s last story is not simply ironic or coincidental; it reso-nates with the reader, so that we read the story for traces of Carverthe way that Carver reads Troyat’s biography for traces of Chekhov.8

It is difficult to read the story outside of the fact of Carver’s demise,as it shows traces of his will. With the aid of biographical fact ofCarver’s death, the story is instrumental in sealing his status asan ‘‘author.’’ In fact, only posthumously does he get dubbed the‘‘American Chekhov’’ in tributes and largely because of ‘‘Errand.’’9

Now, more than a decade later, because of this inter-penetration offact and fiction, of fiction and reputation, he is widely referred to asthe ‘‘American Chekhov.’’ Whereas Bukowski is concerned with upset-ting his reputation by breaking new, ‘‘bad’’ ground, Carver’s taleshows him peaking in mastery.

One of the ‘‘crowning jewels in Carver’s oeuvre,’’ ‘‘Errand’’ beginssimply with the one-word sentence: ‘‘Chekhov’’ (Meyer 159; WhereI’m Calling From 512). The name stands alone. Not only does it signalthat we are dealing with an historical figure, but the name is meant toestablish the setting. In the first few pages of ‘‘Errand’’ Carver assim-ilates Troyat’s account of the eruption of Chekhov’s illness while atdinner with Suvorin, his trip to Badenweiler, a spa in the Black Forestin Germany, and his subsequent deterioration. While Carver’s interestin the story was first sparked when he read the account of Chekhov’sdoctor’s ‘‘extraordinary action’’ of requesting champagne to toastChekhov’s final moments, Donald Rayfield’s biography, whichconsciously works against idealizing the Russian writer, notes thatsuch a toast was simply part of ‘‘German and Russian medicaletiquette’’ (No Heroics 123; Rayfield 595).10 The story becomes

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Carver’s—and indeed becomes a story as opposed to biography—whenthe disheveled bellhop enters, carrying the requested bottle of cham-pagne to Chekhov’s deathbed; he is the Chekhovian vehicle thatCarver requires to get command of the story and fully objectify author-ship. When Carver is able to ‘‘speak and think in the bellhop’s tone andfeel in his spirit,’’ the story uses the system of objectivity to stageChekhov’s death within the ‘‘impossible gaze’’ of his own aesthetic law.

The waiter appears at the door, holding a tray with the Moet andglasses. The narrator, beginning in the straight voice of a biographer,offers this description:

The trousers of his uniform were wrinkled, the creases gone, and in hishaste he’d missed a loop while buttoning his jacket. His appearance wasthat of someone who had been resting (slumped in a chair, say, dozing alittle) when off in the distance the phone had clamored in the earlymorning hours—great God in Heaven!—and the next thing he knewhe was being shaken by a superior. (519)

The startling intrusion of the phone call certainly recalls other ofCarver’s later stories, but the passage is significant because it huma-nizes the action, it renders the death scene of this icon, the author,comprehensible.11 After all, contemporary readers will never reallyknow Chekhov who is shrouded in multiple histories and fictions,but this waiter is much more on the reader’s scale. The passage alsoexhibits the tension in the narrative voice: the fight between the deli-berate ‘‘was that of’’ of the historian, with the conjectured ‘‘say’’ of thefiction writer. In reanimating Chekhov, Carver must operate betweenthe realms of fact and imagination; just as Celine had escaped his his-torical death in Bukowski, Carver must slip through the grip of historyin order to revivify Chekhov.

Needless to say, Carver’s Chekhov dies of consumption after utter-ing his last, melancholically factual words: ‘‘It’s been so long since I’vehad champagne’’ (520). Olga, Chekhov’s widow, almost immediately‘‘dried her eyes and set about composing herself’’ (520). This composingis crucial to the ceremony of mourning; as Nesset points out, this cer-emony ‘‘lends structure to the unstructurable, to chaos arriving in theunseeable guise of death’’ (96). Like Carver’s story, Olga’s compositionis a performance. The doctor, we are told by Carver’s narrator, ‘‘leftthe room and, for that matter, history’’ (521). Olga stays with herhusband’s corpse, until she is aroused by a knock on the door, whichturns out to be the waiter coming to retrieve the glasses: ‘‘This time,however, his uniform trousers were neatly pressed, with stiff creasesin the front, and every button on his snug jacket was fastened’’

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(522). He has composed himself, and he awaits her instructions. In thenext paragraph, the limited omniscience shifts from Olga’s thoughts tothe waiter’s as he assesses the room, noticing the errant champagnecork which lies on the floor near his foot (a remnant from the Troyatbiography). He wants to do the proper thing and remove it but is‘‘afraid of seeming to intrude even more by drawing any further atten-tion to himself’’ (522�23). As Kelly points out, the cork is emotionallycharged because it recalls Chekhov’s dying words; it ‘‘underlies themoment of his recognition of his fate’’ (223). It also stands in metony-mically for Chekhov’s corpse, which the waiter registers in the samemoment he sees the cork; the young man is interpellated by both inthe same instant.

In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom asserts, or prescribes—okay, I’ll admit he makes me anxious with his tone: ‘‘Weaker talentsidealize; figures of capable imagination appropriate for themselves.But nothing is got for nothing, and self-appropriation involves theimmense anxieties of indebtedness’’ (5).12 While I am incapable ofmeasuring talents and imagination or unwilling to let loose someDarwinian theory that is merely a justification for my own personalprejudices, Bloom’s emphasis on appropriation and ‘‘self-appropriation’’is central to Bukowski’s Celine and Carver’s Chekhov. His theory of theinter-penetration of aesthetic debt and its place in self-creation is essen-tial to Carver’s and Bukowski’s last acts. Both writers appropriate thedeaths of their literary mentors in an act of idealization and admission.Yet, they both work to make these deaths their own, that is, subject totheir own particular aesthetic sensibility. ‘‘When a poet beholds hisend, however, he needs some more rugged evidence that his past poemsare not what skeletons think about, and he searches for evidence ofelection that will fulfill his precursors’ prophecies by fundamentallyre-creating those prophecies in his own unmistakable idiom’’ (Bloom152). Carver and Bukowski’s last acts attempt to reckon=wrestle withtheir own literary legacies, and pay homage to their influences. In kill-ing off Chekhov and Celine, they hardly exorcise the anxiety of influ-ence and instead script a way of reading their oeuvres through theirinfluences and their lives or biography. In their own ‘‘unmistakableidiom,’’ Carver and Bukowski stage works that can and should be readin relation to their deaths; they will a way of reading.

Carver’s act, the writing of a final story about the deathbed sceneof a world-famous Author, is comforting if we accept Chekhov’s andCarver’s authorial power, if, in other words, the site of reading isnot one of resistance. With Carver’s own death looming over the story’stext, the likelihood of a sympathetic reading seems heightened. EvenBukowski, who consciously tries to work against this sympathy by

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including absurd elements in his depiction of the death of Celine, ben-efits from this sympathetic context; Pulp is frequently and for someonly redeemed because it is Bukowski’s last act, the work of a personfacing death.13 Within this economy of authorship and ‘‘promotional’’context, the reader’s will is being directed, or worse manipulated (dis-playing perhaps Chekhov’s aesthetic ‘‘ought’’) by a system of literarycelebrity. These last acts, like so many others in and out of literature,are a battle of wills.

LITERARY WILLS

In order to illustrate the role of the audience in the tug of wills and themanner in which a work ‘‘reads back into a life,’’ I will briefly use anexample from Alice Munro. In her story ‘‘Open Secrets,’’ Munroobserves at one moment the ‘‘open secret’’ of reading into a photographof a deceased or disappeared person their fate, as if their gaze holdsthe knowledge of their future. The narrator says of Heather Bell,the missing girl, ‘‘She has blown away like ashes. Her displayed photo-graph will fade in public places. Its tight-lipped smile, bitten in at onecorner as if suppressing a disrespectful laugh, will seem to be connec-ted with her disappearance rather than her mockery of the school pho-tographer. There will always be a tiny suggestion, in that, of her ownfree will ’’ (159). Munro’s description illustrates how the site of reading‘‘the will’’ is always at least partly determined by the readers and theinformation they have—as Heather’s will has apparently changedfrom spite for the photographer or clowning for her classmates to awillful rejection of the world and all those who might seek her out ordesire to know her fate. The passage shows how a person becomesobjectified, and then how that object seems to take on intention or‘‘free will.’’ It is this double-move that I’m interested in here. Just asCarver’s last published stories enact a retrospective reading ofChekhov’s techniques—how they attempt to enact Chekhov’s ‘‘freewill,’’ and at the same time show Carver imposing his will on thereader—we can see this battle of wills in other last acts. After anexamination of will in Carver’s tale, we will look at the role of willin Donald Barthelme’s final novel and show how it is also in play inBukowski’s Pulp. We will explore just how ‘‘free’’ these wills can be,as the writer facing death may be less willing to cede control, and,paradoxically, may be apparently less assertive in displaying her orhis own will.

Carver plays with this notion of will in his ending of ‘‘Errand.’’When Olga breaks her silence, she is fully composed, having thoughtout her instructions for the boy who begins to become unnerved when

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he absorbs the fact that there is a corpse in the bedroom. Significantly,there is no direct representation of dialogue after the doctor departs,the entire story is filtered through the speculative narrative voice ofa consciously fictional narrator; like the doctor, we are now outsideof history; History has left the story. The effect is a leveling of thecharacters, an underscoring of Carver’s imaginative recreation, anda Chekhovian merging of the narrative voice with Olga’s instructions:

After securing permission to leave the hotel he was to proceed quietly andresolutely, though without any unbecoming haste, to the mortician’s. . . .This mortician would be in his forties, no doubt, or maybe earlyfifties—bald, solidly built, wearing steel-frame spectacles set verylow on his nose. . . . Only once while the young man is speaking doesthe mortician betray the least flicker of interest, or indicate that he’sheard anything out of the ordinary. But the one time the youngman mentions the name of the deceased, the mortician’s eyes rise justa little. (525�26)

Over the course of three paragraphs, there is a shift in verb tense fromthe past, to the conditional, and finally to the present. The descriptivesentences relayed in the conditional tense recall the narrator’s specu-lative ‘‘say’’ when describing the waiter earlier. But now the narratoris not alone in speculation: Olga joins him. (Notice also the effect ofthe name on the mortician, which is where Carver begins his story:the name is meant to raise our eyebrow.) This passage is entirely theimaginings of Olga and the narrator; the mortician has yet to ‘‘really’’enter the action. The final two paragraphs of the story make clear thefact that the waiter and Olga are still in the room. She asks him if heunderstands what he is to do and the story closes with this paragraph:

But at that moment the young man was thinking of the cork still restingnear the toe of his shoe. To retrieve it he would have to bend over, stillgripping the vase. He would do this. He leaned over. Without lookingdown, he reached out and closed it into his hand. (526)

The play of point of view in this final paragraph as well as the Chekho-vian compression of narrative device—the use of the cork in a way thatcouldn’t be exploited in the genre of the biography—underscoresCarver’s narrative authority. The sentence, ‘‘he would do this,’’ func-tions not only to hold out the note or moment, but it recalls the riskof the entire story, venturing outside of history into this conditionallyrepresented, contingent imaginative space. Whose ‘‘would’’ is that,after all? Is it the narrator’s, affirming the direction of the narrativeand peeking into the future beyond the story or is it the waiter’s,

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nodding to himself about the propriety of such an act? This is a ‘‘freewill’’ in that it is not clearly assigned. In addition, the closing phrase,he ‘‘closed it into his hand’’ connotes the care taken in retrieving thecork, the deliberation in the action, and synchronously the deliber-ation in the construction of the story; it connotes the author’s will.

Like Carver, Donald Barthelme devotes attention to the place of thewill in relation to death in his final work, using the opportunity toreflect on what he has willed. Published in the spring of 1990, tenmonths after he died of throat cancer, Barthleme’s The King includesruminations on death that characteristically appear in an act of liter-ary automortography. While one might expect a novel from Barthelmeentitled The King to refer to Elvis, Barthelme has other, more literaryfish to fry: namely, the story of King Arthur and the Knights of theRound Table captured in Thomas Malory’s literary legend, Le Morted’Arthur. Barthelme resituates Malory’s tale, importantly setting itduring the time of the early years of World War II. This givesBarthelme the opportunity to compare chivalric codes with more con-temporary practices while playing around with literal and ironicnotions of life and legacy (Arthur is 1100 years old, while Guinevereremains 36). As with anything Barthelme wrote, intention is specularand speculative, filtered through several levels of irony, parody, andpastiche. But there is much in The King that signifies for us,the survivors, a melancholic recognition of mortality. In fact, HelenBarthelme, the writer’s second wife, asserts: ‘‘After reading The King,I found it difficult not to believe that Don knew he was writing his lastnovel and the final story of his own life’’ (188). In addition to support-ing a notion that Barthelme wrote this novel as his last, her commentreveals two conundrums in reading Barthelme: ‘‘the difficulty of notbelieving,’’ and the relation of his writing to his ‘‘own life.’’ The firstis a question of intention, as readers are suspended between beliefand non-belief, as his stories explode the master narratives of the Westinto fragments of linguistic detritus; the stories are wisps of big ideasconveyed through irreverent cliche. The second is a question of biogra-phy, the relation of Barthelme’s life to his work; it is a question thathaunts Barthelme criticism, and one of the reasons he was reluctantto participate in many interviews. Both questions lead back to theAuthor: who he is and what he intends. In the end, Barthelme becamethe author of the deconstructed Author. His refusal to participate inpromotion, particularly interviews, along with his disallowance of sig-nificant editorial input exhibits Barthelme’s strong literary will andfuels his desire for literary celebrity.14 Still, The King showsBarthelme confronting, ever ironically, his own mortality and rumi-nating on his own authorship in the process.

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Early on in The King, Barthelme’s Arthur confesses that he’sobsessed with how he will be portrayed in his obituary: ‘‘ ‘Let me con-fess something,’ Arthur said. ‘I have always been worried about whatkind of obituary I’m going to get from The Times’ ’’ (12). And a fewpages later in a totally different conversation, Lancelot responds tothe Black Knight, who wonders what kind of ‘‘play’’ his death willget in the press, that he ‘‘‘took the precaution, some time ago . . . of sit-ting down with the chap who does The Times obituaries’’’ (18). Thespecter of the obituary haunts the novel even as it may have hauntedBarthelme. The obituary is the final cultural judgement, and the finalmeasure of literary celebrity (distinct from literary immortality), akind of evacuated, postmodern reckoning diffused through the massmedia. It also serves to pose the question: what possible legacy couldArthur and his chivalric notions have in a postmodern milieu? For hispart, Barthelme was remembered by Time magazine, thus: ‘‘Died.Donald Barthelme, 58, innovative journalist and fiction writer whohelped revive the popularity of the short story during the 1960s; ofcancer; in Houston. Specializing in surreal, collage-like pieces thatfrequently appeared in The New Yorker, Barthelme published eightshort-story collections (among them, Come Back, Dr. Caligari andCity Life), three novels, a book of parodies and a children’s book,The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, for which he received a NationalBook Award in 1972. A fourth novel, The King, is due to be releasednext year.’’15 There was no picture—something both Arthur and Lan-celot desire; Bukowski, for his part, had less text but an imageincluded.16

From early on when he began writing and publishing stories,Barthelme was concerned with his own literary stature, how he mightbe judged, recognized, and rewarded, exhibiting the deep ambivalenceabout his readership that is characteristic of the tension between cel-ebrity and the literary. For example, he was disappointed with salesand what he perceived as a lack of recognition, and at the same timewanted to turn down the offer to have City Life be a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection; he was concerned with ‘‘the kind of readership’’the club held and ultimately wanted ‘‘readers that he could respect’’(H. Barthelme 170). In the end, like Bukowski, Barthelme gambleswith his own reputation with the publication of The King.17

In addition to being concerned with his legacy, The King showsBarthelme is intensely concerned with notions of will or volition, parti-cularly in relation to mortality. Lancelot, a pious knight more inter-ested in discussing ethics with the Black Knight (who hails fromAfrica), laments that propriety is being violated when his own vulner-ability is being revealed in rumors. Guinevere quotes the rumors:

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‘‘They say they say they say. . .’’‘‘Shouldness is being flouted here,’’ said Lancelot. ‘‘Shouldness is per-

haps self-explanatory, but I have never seen it adequately dealt with,either in print or in the lecture hall. When that huntress got me in thebum with an arrow, it was an offense to shouldness. It shouldn’t havegone that way. . . . That a knight of the Table Round could be piercedin that way by a female has a significance quite apart from the ludicrous.It’s in the realm of those things which should not happen—a categorywhich holds much philosophical interest, as anyone who has ever lookedinto anomaletics will recognize. The insult to my dignity was not nearlyso grave as the insult to shouldness.’’ (Barthelme’s emphasis, King 106)

With his characteristic wit and irony, Barthelme opens up questions ofcosmic intention through his comic emasculation. Lancelot’s mascu-linity, in this case, seems synonymous with the cosmic order, theway things should happen. ‘‘Anomaletics,’’ is Barthelme’s coinage forthe study of anomalies, aberrations—but this concern with will isnot an aberration and in fact runs through many automortographies,making Barthelme’s text part of the cultural text of shouldness in theface of death. But Barthelme’s irony doesn’t endorse the world ofrumors that Guinevere’s comment plays with; while Lancelot may beout-moded, ripped out of his own time, his notion of shouldness hassome husk of viability or desire for Barthelme. For Helen Barthelme,the ‘‘theme of man’s responsibility expressed in ‘shouldness’ and ‘nobleexample’ is given powerful eloquence in this scene, and like many ofthe ideas and themes that recurred throughout Don’s writing life, itcan be traced back to his early stories and his own life and beliefs’’(191). As in the previously quoted passage, Helen Barthelme seeksto unify Barthelme with his works, and show him as consistent. Whilehe spent his career reworking the actual words that ‘‘they say theysay’’ by eviscerating and re-invigorating cliche, he does not want tohand over the language (i.e., anomaletics) nor the culture to the‘‘theys.’’ In expressing the risks of the ‘‘they,’’ Lancelot says: ‘‘In thiscountry, gossip seems the principle export sometimes. One must guardone’s reputation with an iron hand’’ (18). Barthelme is concerned withthe notion of will in a system that alienates production from consump-tion and that so mediates the exchange that one can never be absol-utely sure of intent—or the difference between fact and fiction.While he approaches everything through the surface and the signify-ing practices of language, The King shows him expressing curiosityand concern about his own will.

In not writing explicitly moral fiction, of the sort that John Gardneradvocated, Barthelme has risked his reputation on the ‘‘theys,’’ andhas—reminiscent of Chekhov—left it up to the reader (even while

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there is a strong sense of an aesthetic ‘‘ought’’ running through hiswork).18 In lamenting some French experimental work, Barthelmelocates his work in an aesthetic=moral space that is adjacent to Che-khov’s, but on the side of the ‘‘theys’’: ‘‘The emphasis [of these experi-mental works] was toward ‘pure abstraction.’ For me this is a problem,since they get further and further away from the common reader. Iunderstand the impulse—toward the condition of music—but as acommon reader I demand this to be done in a masterly fashion ornot at all’’ (McCaffrey and LeClair 38). Barthelme’s ambivalence—caught between the ‘‘common reader’’ and the ‘‘masterly fashion’’—recall the tension in Chekhov’s ‘‘ought’’; it is a tension between ademocratic and fascist impulse.19 In The King, Barthelme is wonder-ing—through Arthur and Lancelot—what he has willed, what the‘‘common readers’’ at and of the Times will make of his life and work.

Operating in a ‘‘double stance’’ that ironically explores and repre-sents ‘‘apocalypse and carnival’’ (to recall Kristeva) Barthelme’sshouldness is humorous, but also holds the husk of his intention.By choosing to go ‘‘straight to the heart of the literary matter . . . thelegend of King Arthur and the Holy Grail,’’ Barthelme can also usehis final novel to address a public critic of postmodern work and apublic Jeremiah of shouldness, John Gardner (Reid 6 J). Gardner,who wrote fiction that dealt with ancient Western lore including revi-sions of Grendel and Jason, was a staunch proponent of what he calledmoral fiction and led a public campaign against works by postmoder-nist writers such as William Gass, seeing them as lacking values andtherefore value. While Gardner admires Barthelme’s intellect, in OnMoral Fiction, he describes Barthelme’s moral faculties as ‘‘enfeebled’’because Barthelme ‘‘knows what is wrong, but he has no clear imageof, or interest in, how things ought to be’’ (emphasis added, 80). (Wecannot seem to escape these wills, these oughts.) For Gardner, he lacksa proper degree of ‘‘shouldness.’’ In his own last work, On Becominga Novelist, Gardner disparages a writer whom Barthelme mightapplaud: one ‘‘who cares more about words than about story’’ (6).For Barthelme, words are the story and it is his project to illuminatetheir construction by violently and parodically recontextualizing them,showing the reader the play of significations along the way. Barthelmelacks confidence in a transcendental Good and, as a result, Gardner’sconvinced that he is guilty of ‘‘Romantic self-love,’’ that he’s an ‘‘egoist’’engaged in a kind of solipsistic self-promotion (Moral 81).20 Finally forGardner, Barthelme’s work lacks the ‘‘quality that shouts from thesculptures of Thomas Malory’’ and that is essential to all ‘‘great art,’’a ‘‘vision unmistakably and unsentimentally rooted in love’’ (Moral83). Aside from the irony that Barthelme chose the figure Gardner

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holds up (Malory), the kind of reckoning that Arthur worries aboutserves as an opportunity for Barthelme to rebuke Gardner and criticsof his ilk. The King allows Barthelme the opportunity to have the lastword, creating a fiction that directly addresses this notion of a moralart, while not clearly endorsing it; he wills the ambivalent art object.

Within one of the (moral) commentaries in The King, on the absurd-ity of nuclear weapons, Barthelme hides a response to Gardner’s viewof the aesthetic. Dead before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and theend of the Soviet Union, Barthelme’s works were all produced firmlyin the Cold War. At one point in The King, Sir Kay presents Arthurwith the possibility of a ‘‘preemptive strike. Make them reflect onthings. Last things’’ (11).21 But Arthur admits that he has ‘‘neveracquired a taste for bombing civilian populations’’ (11�12). Later, asSir Roger attempts to convince the Blue Knight that they shoulddevelop an atomic weapon because it could be their holy grail, ‘‘some-thing to strive for,’’ Barthelme is able to comment on Hiroshima (78):‘‘Today, bombing is meant to be a learning experience. For the bombed.Bombing is pedagogy. A citizen with a stick of white phosphorus on hisroof begins to think quite seriously about how much longer he wants tocontinue the war’’ (79). The mass death of atomic warfare is the post-modern or Cold War conduct book. When presented with the plans tocreate an atomic weapon, Arthur declines. It is outside the chivalriccode. ‘‘I cannot allow it. It’s not the way we wage war,’’ Arthur says.Sir Kay tells Arthur that others will develop the bomb to which Arthurresponds, ‘‘the essence of our calling is right behavior, and this falseGrail is not a knightly weapon.’’ The knights are astounded. Lancelotsees it as a victory for ‘‘shouldness,’’ and exclaims, ‘‘I don’t thinkthere’s been a king in the history of the world who’s not done some-thing on this scale.’’ Arthur replies: ‘‘I call it negative capability’’(130). Barthelme is here ironically alluding to the term coined byKeats, and a direct aesthetic antecedent to Chekhov’s objectivity; itdescribes an author’s willingness to let ambiguity and uncertaintyreign rather than moralizing. Abrams defines it as: ‘‘to characterizean impersonal, or objective, author who maintains aesthetic dis-tance. . .’’ (113). In addition, negative capability describes a way ofreading that believes ‘‘that, when embodied in a beautiful artisticform, the literary subject matter, concepts, and characters are not sub-ject to the ordinary standards of evidence, truth, and morality, as weapply these standards in our practical experience’’ (113). Barthelme’suse of the term, typically pulling it out of its expected context, has himcommenting on Chekhov’s aesthetic, and—most importantly—per-forming negative capability. Barthelme, the author, is mystified here,‘‘maintaining aesthetic distance.’’ At the same time, the reader cannot

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finally or firmly determine Barthelme’s intention here, unless we readit with negative capability, suspend our ‘‘practical’’ judgements andview Barthelme’s text as a ‘‘beautiful artistic form.’’ Arthur’s pacifistdisposition meets Barthelme’s aesthetic ought, as the reader is willedinto passivity by the play of significations and juxtapositions.

The presence of a literary will and a will to literariness runsthrough many literary last acts. Faced with the abyss of mortality,there is a renewed or new sense of propriety and a need for didacti-cism. These are conduct books for the corpse—or more accurately,for the survivor viewing the corpse. Even the writer who spent acareer violating as many rules of the conduct book as he could indulgesin this sense of propriety. In the final lines of Bukowski’s Pulp, hisfirst person narrator actually dies. And, like Lancelot, he feels jilted,as if the narrative of his life is being snuffed in ways that don’t jibewith his imagined versions of it. Nick Belane has been shot, LadyDeath arrives on the scene and fulfills a promise that ends his questfor the Red Sparrow (his holy grail), and then Nick dies, but not beforeuttering the lines: ‘‘This can’t be true, I thought. This isn’t the way it issupposed to happen. No, this isn’t the way it is supposed to happen’’(202). The mechanical sparrow then opens its beak and reveals a voidand a yellow vortex. Taking the Red Sparrow to be symbolic of BlackSparrow Press, we can read Belane’s demise as Bukowski beingswallowed by his own literary production, his life lingering insidethe sparrow. Belane comments: ‘‘This isn’t the way it happens,I thought again’’ (202). And then he’s swallowed in light. Bukowskiwould like to script his reception, and in writing Pulp he is both givingin to this impulse and trying to upset that reception by creating some-thing out of character. But the newness of Pulp should not disguiseBukowski’s desire to maintain a literary legacy. As Brewer pointsout of his final poems, a ‘‘conspicuous number of pieces revealthe author’s preoccupation with his final literary worth’’ (146). LikeCarver’s conditional ‘‘woulds,’’ Bukowski opens up an imaginativetemporal space. It occupies three different tenses or realms, movingbetween what is ‘‘supposed’’ to happen, ‘‘the way it happens,’’ andBelane’s ‘‘I thought.’’ Belane’s ‘‘shouldness’’ is being violated in hisfinal moments; the truth for him is the way it is supposed to happen,the fictional realm, and not the historical of ‘‘the way it happens.’’

From Chekhov’s ought to Belane’s suppositions, we can seethe import of value, judgment, and will in literary endeavors,particularly when the judge is posterity. Each of these wills—Carver’s,Barthelme’s, and Bukowski’s—can be read as an attempt to anticipatethe site of posthumous reading and to script the affective climate if notresponse. But Belane’s acknowledgement and Lancelot’s lament point

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to the ceding of control in these situations. It is as if Bukowski andBarthelme are, through their characters’ ruminations, commentingon their own authorial limitations. While each figure may have beena participant in literary production and promotion, staging theirown literary celebrity as it were, they are faced with an audience theycan no longer interpellate or anticipate because of the specter of death.Death interferes with their wills—both in terms of volition and interms of legacy or reception; in their last acts, death becomes theirset, adorning the stage of their literary celebrity. As it does with otherforms of celebrity, death marks the narrative becoming a site of audi-ence desire and a means of promotion. As we will see in the next sec-tion, literary wills always include textual inheritances so that whileeach figure may be expressing intention, they are also and alwaysalready working within and against the texts they have received,including cultural notions of authorship and ownership.

STAGED TEXTUALITY

Whereas Bukowski and Carver literally embody and kill off theAuthor in a manner that may be an act of the anxiety of influenceas much as homage, Barthelme and Kathy Acker explore the textsproduced by Authors, locating authorship less in the body and morein the texts and the culture(s) that receives or reads them. Bukowskiand Carver prove what capable readers they are of their own respect-ive authors while Barthelme and Acker explore the site of reading inthe construction of authorial culture. Barthelme revisits the story ofCamelot, specifically Le Morte d’Arthur, while Acker recasts RobertLouis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island. Barthelme and Acker havedifferent senses of the use-value of art; Acker, the epitome of literarycelebrity, notoriously used everything from her life to canonical textsin the creation of her novels.22 Strangely perhaps, Acker and JohnGardner would seem to agree on the use-value of art, though theywould never agree on the values it should instill; Gardner’s ‘‘morality’’is far too canonical and masculinist to satisfy Acker’s punk, feministpolitics. But for both Gardner and Acker, art has a moral=politicalforce or potential that is instrumental in shaping and changing cul-tures. For Barthelme, the choice of high literature is important notbecause it shows a direct literary lineage or argues for change, butrather because it shows a genealogical transformation from a moreessentialist chivalric code to a freer, more playful notion of signifi-cation and subjectivity.

Barthelme’s use of Le Morte d’Arthur allows him to write a finalwork that stands uneasily between registers of parody and homage.

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The tone is both wistful and humorous and thus intent is layered andsomething to be deciphered and inferred (based on the matrices ofreader’s prejudices, biographical continuities, and promotional procliv-ities it seems). Medievalists who revere Malory will be disappointed inwhat Barthelme shows as the effects of Western culture’s embrace ofthe legend of Camelot and its entrance into mass culture (RichardHarris’s efforts notwithstanding). But the head-note to the NortonAnthology’s version of Malory’s tale describes his aesthetic in a man-ner that seems to hold true for Barthelme’s novel: ‘‘both he and themajority of his characters are masters of understatement who expressthemselves, in moments of great emotional tension, with a bare mini-mum of words. The result is highly provocative to the reader’s imagin-ation, which is made, in a sense, to do the writer’s work for him. Thisappeal to the reader’s creative imagination probably explains why LeMorte d’Arthur brings forth such widely differing responses from itsreaders’’ (345). With very little narration and an extreme reliance ondialogue that is typical of his work, Barthelme’s characters are farmore garrulous than Malory’s, but the effect is similar; Barthelme’stext, with its host of historical and literary allusions and its relianceon word-play, provokes the reader’s imagination. In fact, Barthelmeclaimed as much when he described his aesthetic: ‘‘The reader recon-stitutes the work by his active participation, by approaching theobject, tapping it, shaking it, holding it to his ear to hear the roaringwithin’’ (‘‘After Joyce’’ 14). His comment begins by emphasizing theparticipation of the reader in the work, but closes with an emphasison the work of art as an object, nearly a found-object.

While the choice of text may appear to have been whimsical, one cansee Barthelme using Arthur to comment on the changes that resultedfrom the rise of the Renaissance, the rise of the egocentric modes ofdiscourse and representation. If he is an egoist, as Gardner claims,then The King allows him to explore the roots, the genealogy of self-centered literature. Malory’s is a biography from the Renaissance.Le Morte d’Arthur signifies the death of the Arthur—so, as long asauthorship has been a ‘‘noble’’ calling, it has been romantically script-ing its own death. (Indeed, the term ‘‘author’’ in English emerges inMiddle English, derived from Anglo-French for progenitor which inturn adapted it from the Latin conjugation of augere, to increaseas in augment [also to act]; there is an historical and phonetic conjunc-tion of Arthur and author.)23 Just as Stevenson’s text (Acker’s source)is written with a degree of nostalgic, romantic retrospection—to anage when the maps were empty and masculinity had yet to be domes-ticated—Malory’s reporting of the chivalry of Camelot emerges fromreading tales and accounts, and is similarly founded on a desire for

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an impossible past. Thus, when Malory’s text ends with the line: ‘‘Hiciacet Arthurus, rex quondam, rexque furus’’ [Here lies Arthur, who wasonce king and king will be again] (359), it is reviving, in the telling,Arthur’s kingship for future readers; like Merlin’s prophesy, the textis fulfilling its own prophesy. Malory’s text, then, operates in the‘‘future anterior’’ realm of automortography, where everything willhave been; it is orphic, standing between an unreal past shimmering(like a mirage) and a future that will somehow need this past.24 Writ-ten while in prison, Le Morte d’Arthur wasn’t Malory’s bid for literaryfame or immortality as much as it may have been a way to wile awaythe hours. Though with a very different sensibility than Barthelme,Malory is also a sort of collagist, as Le Morte d’Arthur is the assem-blage of several bits of Arthurian legend into a singular text. Malorytakes disparate texts and synthesizes them into a more recognizablyhumanistic, more egocentric tale of a singular Arthur. Kathy Acker,on the other hand, seeks to usurp the patriarchal power of theauthor=Arthur, and dethrone a heteronormative way of reading.

Choosing Stevenson’s Treasure Island as her stage, Acker’s textfocuses on the anxiety and pleasure of repetition. Not content to standby as the cortege of the dead Author rolls past, Acker wants to cut upthe corpse; she sees her job to ‘‘kill off the Author’’ in as much asAuthor signifies an entrenched patriarchy. Pussy, King of the Pirates,is a punk, feminist, Burroughsian recasting of Stevenson’s novelamong other texts. Similar to Barthelme’s relationship to Malory, inher rewrite of Stevenson, Acker stresses difference or, in the wordsof J. Hillis Miller, the ‘‘likenesses in the unlike’’ (13). Acker makesthe violence and the death in the source-text overtly and graphicallysexual, even masochistic. Instead of an all male sphere, the narrativeat times represents an androgynous sphere, but is mostly filled withpunk=pirate girls, sexually free and loosely identified women. Acker’sproject doesn’t pretend to impartiality; it doesn’t try to seduce thereader into apathetic jouissance through some ‘‘realist’’ aesthetic ora purely ironic play of significations. Instead, it tries to jar the readeron every ‘‘traditional’’ level—plot, character, description, grammar—out of complacency; it tries to create what Karen Brennan calls an‘‘unstable textual territory’’ where the reader will have to work to gainfooting (247). Acker demands the interrogation of any received idea.She practices what Naomi Jacobs dubs ‘‘grammatical terrorism’’where, because grammar signifies and has been complicit in the con-struction of patriarchy, the reader is jarred by the intentional misuseof ‘‘proper’’ grammar (53). So while she is working within an economyof repetition, Acker is attempting to emphasize difference in order toshow the historical construction of patriarchy (in and through boys’

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books like Stevenson’s) and to point to some political alternatives.This, then, facilitates one of the deaths that surround this text, thatof the heteronormative reader. Acker sees the death of the reader asessential and necessary to a kind of liberation. Through her use ofothers’ texts, and defiance of expected literary conventions, sheexposes just how the reader, historically, has been complicit in theelevation of the patriarchal, heteronormative Author. Acker’s project,then, is to change the politics of reading and writing. In her conclusionto Gender Trouble, Judith Butler remarks that the ‘‘task is notwhether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, througha radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender normsthat enable the repetition itself’’ (148). Acker’s novel, with its incred-ibly unstable categories of identity and character, attempts to fulfillButler’s task of ‘‘displacement.’’ It displaces on many levels at once:aesthetically, culturally, and historically among others. Just takingthe title as an example, the choice of the term pussy shows how Ackerenacts a kind of counter-piracy and participation in patriarchy that ismeant to displace not only the term, but the power relations in whichit is deployed. Once we’ve read Acker, we can’t use the term in thesame way because now it has a kind of proto-feminist undercurrent,an affirmation that lends counter-political connotations.

Rendering literal Barthelme’s description of his reader ‘‘tappingand shaking’’ the text, Acker objectifies her own text and the textsshe works from. Picaresque without any (artificial) linearity, Pussy,King of the Pirates relies on a ‘‘cut up’’ aesthetic that is familiar toreaders of William Burroughs and Acker; the narrative is spliced intosegments and rearranged out of all sequence. While the ‘‘cut up’’ tech-nique provides a critique of what Acker in an interview dubs ‘‘theusual bourgeois linear narrative,’’ it also creates strange, uncannyreverberations in the text (Bratton). The novel then acts as an echochamber where a situation literally recalls another moment thatoccurred earlier. But rather than resolve the earlier episode, the situ-ation may logically or narratively antecede the earlier situation;regardless, resolution is always, and patently, frustrated. For thereader who sticks with it, the narrative enacts a readerly masochismin effect, as the reader must abdicate all authority to the instabilityof the text. Unlike Barthelme’s, Acker’s work does not rely on humor-ous juxtaposition as much as it relishes violent contrast. Her novels donot use humor to diffuse readerly action, and instead attempt to shockand instill anger so as to induce action or a change of thinking.

The violence she performs on linearity is also found in disturbancesof other mimetic structures: the characters are fragmented or discon-tinuous, the relationships of all characters are determined and repre-

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sented through physical or psychic violence, most often of a sexual nat-ure. Very much influenced by Bataille, Acker seems to be thematizinghis conception of ‘‘catastrophic expenditure’’ which Joseph Roach para-phrases: ‘‘violence is the performance of waste’’ (41). With a commen-tary that seems very suitable to Acker (and perhaps Celine andBukowski), Roach continues by offering his corollaries to Bataille,‘‘that violence is never senseless but always meaningful, because viol-ence in human culture always serves, one way or an other, to make apoint; second, that all violence is excessive, because to be fully demon-strative, to make its point, it must spend things—material objects,blood, environments. . .; and third, that all violence is performative,for the simple reason that it must have an audience’’ (Roach’s empha-sis, 41). In addition to laying waste to the canon, Acker’s performanceof waste importantly wastes time. It wastes the time of the usuallinear narrative, throwing a kind of chaos theory into the narrativemachine and perhaps more importantly or practically, it wastes thetime of the reader not because the reading is a waste but because itdemands attention and participation that consumes time. In compar-ing some of Stevenson’s ‘‘original’’ with those of Acker’s text, we canoutline the contours of her project and see the performance of wastethat Acker carries out on Stevenson’s text, and the violence she repre-sents and displaces in an attempt to be ‘‘demonstrative.’’25 It is anattempt to will the reader into a new, feminist way of seeing and beingin the world. The excesses of Acker’s novel are a response to theexcesses of Stevenson’s text which is highly mortographic, riddledwith corpses in nearly every chapter. Encouraged by his step-son,Lloyd (his main initial audience) who ‘‘insisted that there should notbe a woman in it,’’ Stevenson set out to make his first novel, TreasureIsland, a boy’s book (Becker 12). Indeed, there are only two womeneven mentioned in the entire novel, Jim Hawkins’s mother and LongJohn Silver’s exotic ‘‘woman of color,’’ ‘‘his old negress’’ (70, 286). Inrereading Stevenson’s text after reading Acker’s intervention, it isastounding just how male the narrative insists itself to be; the bulkof the story takes place on the ship or on the island, both entirely malespheres.

A significant component of Acker’s literary celebrity that garneredsignificant publicity, and one we can see in relation to Carver andBarthelme’s rewrites, is one form of repetition through similarity, orplagiarism—what Gabrielle Dane dubs Acker’s ‘‘parodic plagiarism,[or] willful pilfering of past literary works’’ (256). Throughout hercareer, she was accused of appropriating from the canon in order toshow how all art is derivative, a repetition, or, as Naomi Jacobsasserts, the ‘‘mediated, unreliable and quite probably falsified status’’

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of all texts (51). Like her character Silver’s line, ‘‘I don’t want to own,’’her use of the works, lines, and characters of others is an attempt toundermine western notions of ownership that inhere in authorship,performing an evisceration of the authorial apparatus, laying bareits mystified reliance on piracy. (It is directly opposed to Carver’sseamless and subtle use of Troyat’s text to elevate his authority.)

In looking briefly at a moment where Acker rewrites Stevenson’sfamous apple barrel scene, we can see how Acker produces ‘‘likenessin the unlike’’ and its relation to Barthelme and literary celebrity. Pre-dating Freud by some twenty years, Stevenson’s Jim Hawkins hasapparently returned to the womb by entering the apple barrel ‘‘bodily.’’Reflecting back on this prelapsarian moment, Jim follows the logic offetal knowledge that Lauren Berlant has shown to be constituitive ofsentimentality.26 Suddenly, Jim is disturbed ‘‘when a heavy man satdown with rather a clash close by. The barrel shook as he leanedagainst it’’ (Stevenson 93). The chapter then closes with one ofStevenson’s usual ‘‘cliff-hanger’’ lines; each chapter seems to end inan unresolved crescendo.27 Recognizing Silver’s voice, Jim ‘‘lay there,trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiosity; for fromthese dozen words I understood that the lives of all the honest menaboard depended on me alone’’ (Stevenson 93). Significantly, Acker’snarrator doesn’t get into the barrel because, ‘‘As I peered into thatdarkness, I realized that there were only apples left and that mostof them had been chewed by vermin’’ (224). Out of fatigue from a lackof food, Acker’s speaker falls asleep. Distrusting the ‘‘darkness’’ ofFreudian explanations, Acker’s version shuns Stevenson’s narrative‘‘lingerie,’’ refusing to tease the reader. After hearing a brief exchange,Acker’s narrator does not identify herself as the hero as Jim so readilydoes and instead, she seems to repeat a traumatic moment thatreturns to the moment of the ‘‘impossible gaze’’ when she realized thatshe was a construction, noting: ‘‘I could hear voices all around me.There were two of them. I was back in the hall in which I couldn’tsee. In the threshold of my parents’ bedroom. They were discussingmy character in words I could barely hear. For the first time, I knewthat I didn’t belong in this human world’’ (225). The parents here haveauthorial power which endows the narrator with a self-consciousnessas a fictional device. Perhaps drawn from Acker’s autobiography—as amain component of her celebrity derives from the inclusion ofsalacious elements of her own experience in her novels—the recollec-tion would seem to create a great distance between this narratorand Jim Hawkins.

But what Acker is playing on here is precisely Jim’s momentof self-consciousness, as this scene is crucial in Jim’s (moral and

434 T. H. Kane

psychological) development. Squatting in his apple barrel, Jim hearsSilver flatter one of the deck hands, using ‘‘the very same words of flat-tery as he had used’’ with Jim when they first met (Stevenson 95�96).Jim’s jealousy of the ‘‘old rogue’’ leads him to claim that if he couldhave he ‘‘would have killed him through the barrel’’ (Stevenson 95,96). Jim’s anger is purely libidinal, animated by Silver’s personalbetrayal and not because of the mutiny, which Jim and his audiencehave yet to hear of. As Jim listens, he learns. In addition to the plotagainst the officers, Hawkins’s most significant lesson is in notionsof class as Silver discloses his own desire to ‘‘ride in carriages’’ andto be a ‘‘gentleman of fortune’’ (Stevenson 96, 99). Silver’s gentlemanof fortune depends on two simultaneous notions of fortune: as wealth,and luck—making both his own money and opportunity. Jim’s classposition, which has been assumed to be upwardly mobile bour-geois—as he cast his lot with the Squire after his tavern-owner fatherdies, but which is far from fixed—becomes firm in this moment. ‘‘By agentleman of fortune they plainly meant neither more nor less than acommon pirate, and the little scene that I had overheard was the lastact in the corruption of one of the honest hands—perhaps the last oneleft aboard’’ (Stevenson 97). In telling the officers of Silver’s plot, Jimembodies a code of gentlemanly conduct, that a gentleman is geneticand not based purely or solely on ‘‘fortune’’; Jim’s gentleman is theembodiment of the Arthurian chivalric ‘‘good,’’ a good that is clearlyunder attack by the lower classes. But, in addition to Jim’s realizationof what ‘‘the good’’ is, this scene should also explicate what it elides,namely the officer’s or gentlemen’s motives in seeking fortune. Bynot interrogating their motives, the novel participates in bolsteringthe late Victorian and post-Victorian sense of what Etienne Balibarterms a ‘‘fictive ethnicity’’ that also finds its origins in Arthuriannotions (93). Trelawney, Dr. Livesy, and Captain Smollett haveneither biological nor ethical right to the treasure they seek; if any-thing, Silver’s association with the former owner of the fortune shouldgive him the ethical edge. But the reader is positioned, not acciden-tally, near this low-born, upwardly mobile, ‘‘gentlemanly’’ Jim so asto absorb this fictive ethnicity. That is part of the sinister ideologicalwork of this boy’s book that Acker seeks to disrupt; having readPussy, we can no longer presume ‘‘gentleman’’ to signify anything buta cultural construct serving to enforce masculinist domination. Pussydoesn’t share in the ambivalently wistful tone of Barthelme’s ‘‘rightbehavior.’’

While this apple barrel scene ‘‘fixes’’ Jim’s character by associatinghis judgement with ‘‘the good’’ which is overtly associated with themale sphere, Acker shows how all value and cultural production is

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based on the ‘‘common piracy’’ Jim purports to abhor. Acker’s strategyis to locate and test out what Nicola Pitchford dubs the ‘‘unreason-able’’; not trapped in the binary of ir=rational, instead Acker exercisessome agency of ‘‘protest, of someone’s stubborn refusal. . . . The un-reasonable person’s position implies that rationality isn’t everything,that other desires or even needs must also be taken into account’’(103�04). Just as Bartheleme uses valences of irony to deconstructor even ‘‘refuse’’ the rational, Acker uses gender to ‘‘stubbornly refuse’’the clutch of the rational or reasonable.

Barthelme and Acker both found their literary last acts on shiftingtextual foundations, but to very different ends. Both need these pasttexts and the pasts they represent; but Acker needs to work againstthem, while Barthelme’s relationship is more politically ambivalent,somewhere between a wink and a tear. The technique of resuscitatingthe master narratives of literature in order to expose their construc-tion lends both Barthelme’s and Acker’s works what Richard Lockedubs (in speaking of Barthelme’s book) ‘‘historical double exposure’’that illuminates both periods being represented at once, refractingone through the other in a manner much like Bukowski’s Celine andCarver’s Chekhov (A16).

Where Acker cuts up the text and terrorizes grammatical structuresin an effort to disorient, Barthelme’s works include ironic gaps, dis-orienting us through the maze of signification. For both Acker andBarthelme, the result of their aesthetic can be a more constructedand performative sense of identity. Acker’s characters lack any essen-tial identity, flipping gender and names constantly. In discussingBarthelme’s short fiction, Regis Durand claims that he ‘‘stages acentral speaking voice or subject, with a weak sense of identity, con-stantly seeking refuge in fantasy, word-play or self-pity, endlesslyplaying games of delusion which barely conceal a terror of failure, lossand disintegration’’ (28�29). Because there is almost no narration inThe King, the novel relies more on dialogical word-play than a weakidentity. Still, the entire exercise of revisiting Malory’s blueprint ofchivalry is one of fantasy, one waged playfully and ironically againsta certain postmodern celebration of meaninglessness. While under-scoring the contingent, it is as if Barthelme wants to bring the chival-ric code into relation with contemporary (World War II) practices inorder to ask what is Tom Brokaw’s ‘‘greatest generation’’ in relationto Camelot? He’s hardly serious, or seeking a serious answer, butthe juxtaposition serves to pose the question and thereby expose chiv-alry as one system of signification among others, a system that per-haps should inform postmodern practices. It is typically difficult topin down how much of The King is nostalgic and how much is purely

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play. Like much of Barthelme’s work, it operates in both melancholicand ironic registers simultaneously. Given Barthelme’s death, thenovel is frequently read (as we’ve seen Helen Barthelme do) more inthe melancholic register which then has Barthelme speaking almostdirectly. (Thus Helen Barthelme uses Arthur’s statement: ‘‘Theessence of our calling is right behavior’’ as an epigraph for her book.)For all of the affective dissonance and irony that his fiction relies on,however, there is always a highly controlled presentation that indi-cates the heavy hand of the author, that shows Barthelme behindthe curtain like the artists of high modernism, the wizards of Oz. AsJerome Klinkowitz points out in comparing Barthelme to collagistsin a manner that certainly applies to The King as well as to Acker,‘‘the artist’s act of combination is always in the foreground while vari-ous parts of his composition keep their former identity as well’’ (74).Parts of Le Morte d’Arthur and parts of Treasure Island retain theiroriginal form, but by displacing them, the emphasis is placed on con-text, and a pleasurable vertigo ensues; this pleasure reflects back onits creator. It enables the ‘‘reversion of the text onto the life’’ to recallBarthes, and thus bolsters a celebrity system while creating some-thing that appears auto-mortographic.

This pleasurable vertigo initiates the abjection of the reader, wherethe reader recognizes her or his self as servile to the endless evolutionof language and texts. Kristeva writes: ‘‘the abjection of the self wouldbe the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it isrevealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural lossthat laid the foundations of its own being’’ (5). The choice of sourcesfor each of these figures—Carver’s Chekov, Bukowski’s Celine,Barthelme’s Le Morte d’Arthur and Acker’s Treasure Island—revealsthe abjection of authorship within a post-Modern economy of literarycelebrity. The authorial self is founded on the shifting, impossiblesand of other texts. In exhuming European influences, they are notsimply engaging in an American anxiety about canonicity, but are alsoacknowledging their ‘‘inaugural losses.’’ The sources are all textuallymediated: Le Morte d’Arthur is the synthesis of a series of Arthurianlegends; Treasure Island owes a significant debt to mariner tales andnarratives of exploration; Carver’s Chekhov is Troyat’s invention orrepresentation; and Bukowski’s Celine is a textual composite drawnfrom the relationship of his writing and biography. Melancholic,orphically hanging between life and death, it is no wonder that theseliterary last acts return to a site of inaugural loss. The impending lossof their own subjectivity, seen through the ‘‘impossible gaze’’ ofautomortography, has illuminated literary celebrity’s fundamentalor radical abjection.

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NOTES

1. See Barthes ‘‘The Death of the Author’’ in Image, Music, Text.See also Foucault, ‘‘What is an Author?’’ and Derrida, OfGrammatology.

2. Automortography describes a genre that has the self attempting torepresent its own death. An automortographic act is read throughthe lens of death, such that the audience is invited to see theboundaries between fiction and reality as fluid, contingent, andeven porous. In the cases under consideration here, these writingsthat contemplate the death of the Author also invite automorto-graphic reading because their authors—Acker, Barthelme,Bukowski, and Carver all died soon after writing them. Thus, thedeaths they stage also can and are read as rehearsals. Finally,automortography is particularly fertile because it allows for theinteractions of both the dying’s intention and the audience or read-er’s intentions as they meet, at once, in the automortographic act.

3. If one compares Richard Yates and Carver, one can see the degreeof agency that each has, and how it is situated. They wrote similarstories in terms of class and aesthetics. Yates, perhaps because hecame before the big boom in short fiction, failed to ‘‘catch-on.’’ Hedid not participate in the promotion of his works, only held spor-adic or intermittent positions in writing programs, and did notexplicitly write or speak about the relation of his life to his work.Carver, on the other hand, participated in these systems fully—reviewing other’s work, affiliating himself with the Iowa Writer’sWorkshop (the epitome of literary cultural capita=ol which deniedYates tenure), working in other programs, and routinely enter-taining questions about the relation of his reality to the realismof his stories, often stressing the kind of class experiences thatinformed the tales.

4. Chuck Kinder’s recent novel, Honeymooners, is a fictionalizedmemoir of his friendship with Carver in the 1970s. Read next toCarver’s stories that were produced in the period, one gets a senseof the relationship of Carver’s fiction to his biography.

5. This use of people around him is everywhere in Bukowski—it isthe entirety of his plots, really. This referentiality, in part, fueledthe desires which circulated around his texts. The characters were‘‘real’’ people, who could be identified; thus, part of the fun of read-ing his works was to decipher the codes. For just one example ofBukowski’s use of people, see the discussion of Bob Lind’s visitto Bukowski in Sounes 150�52; in short, Lind visited and was par-odied the next week in Bukowski’s column in the L.A. Free Press.

438 T. H. Kane

6. Hewitt says of Celine that he ‘‘proposed himself for the Grand Prixde la Ville de Paris’’ and attempted to get Louis Malle to direct aversion of Journey (277). But Bukowski is everywhere in Pulp,in the voice of his narrator as well as in the web of significationsthat are meant to resonate with the familiar reader. John Martin,the man responsible for sponsoring Bukowski’s literary output andthe founder of Black Sparrow Press that published Bukowski’swork, appears in the novel in the form of John Barton. In amanner that recalls Martin’s luring Bukowski away from his jobat the Post Office in order to write full time, Bukowski has Bartonsay, ‘‘If you find the Red Sparrow, I will pay you $100 a month forlife’’ (Pulp 15). They were the same terms on which Bukowskistarted writing for Martin in the 1960s (though Bukowski wasup to $7000 a month by the time he died in 1993).

7. See the poems in The Last Night of the Earth. Even from the title,it is apparent that Bukowski equates his own death, that of hisself, with the apocalypse of the end of the world.

8. In fact, ‘‘Errand’’ was published June 1, 1987, in The New Yorker.Richard Ford, the novelist and close friend of Carver’s describestaking a trip with Carver to Europe early in the summer of 1987in which he ‘‘looked thin and kind of gaunt. . . . [S]omething wasamiss with him’’ (Halpert 159). By August, Carver had had a chestx-ray which indicated he needed surgery.

9. In obituaries in the London papers, The London Sunday Timesand The Guardian, Carver was dubbed the ‘‘American Chekhov’’and while he most often had been referred to as an heir ofHemingway’s, after his death he has been consistently linked toChekhov. This is, in part, because of the efforts of his widow, TessGallagher; see the introduction to Carver’s volumes of poems,A New Path to the Waterfall or All of Us.

10. Rayfield’s biography provides an interesting contrast to Troyat’sbecause he sets out to correct the elevation of the Russian, tryingto prove that Chekhov was ‘‘less of a saint, less in command of hisfate’’ (xv) than he has hitherto been portrayed or perceived.

11. It certainly echoes with ‘‘Whoever Was Using This Bed’’ and‘‘Intimacy’’ in which the phone plays a central role of intrusionand connection between characters. In his study of the finalstories, Randolph Runyon explicates the intertextual imbrication,arguing that the stories’ interactions create a unity.

12. My anxiety about Bloom arises not only from his formidable intel-lect, but also from his ultra-Modernist confidence in the role of art.His tone reflects a refusal to cede to postmodernism—a choice thatseems like it was made for me by my cultural moment. One way to

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respond to Bloom’s tone is to historicize it, to say that his firm jud-gements are so 1973 (or 1972 when he wrote it); that is, theyignore the burgeoning systems of literary celebrity which not onlysurround him, but in which he is caught up. After all, Bloom’smassive tomes on the Western Canon and on Shakespeare epito-mize the critical version of literary celebrity.

13. The novel came out almost simultaneously with Bukowski’s death,and the reviewers frequently cited his death as one of the redeem-ing aspects of the book. Otherwise, their tone would suggest, thebook should be dismissed.

14. According to his editor at The New Yorker, Roger Angell,Barthelme never sought and very rarely accepted editorial inputon his stories. See Helen Barthelme.

15. Barthelme’s obituary in Time 134.6 (7 Aug. 1989): 44.16. See Time 143.12 (21 Mar. 1994): 26 for Bukowski’s obituary.

Bukowski’s image may be included because his pock-marked facesignifies his class position and authenticates him as the ‘‘bard ofskid row.’’

17. The reviews range from Tom Nolan’s praise (Los Angeles DailyNews 7 Oct. 1990, L 26) to polite disappointment of Tom Dowling’sreview in the San Francisco Examiner (24 May 1990, C-3). Morethan part of the polite tone is out of ‘‘respect for the dead.’’ WereBarthelme alive when these reviews were written, one senses thatthe book might have been bludgeoned.

18. Barthelme’s work was often cited by John Gardner and others asindicative of a kind of amoral, and thus ultimately immoral, post-modernism. For Gardner’s view, see On Moral Fiction. For otherversions of this position, see Gerald Graff’s Literature AgainstItself and Frank McConnell’s Four Postwar American Novelists.

19. Indeed, Barthelme’s King Arthur laments the constitutionaldemocracy of Twentieth-Century England, claiming that it hasled not only to a dissipation of his power, but to mediocrity(12�13). His work ambivalently shuttles between the erudite aes-theticism and a democracy of cliche.

20. In The King, Barthelme characterizes Arthur’s bastard son,Mordred, in these same terms, accusing him of romantic self-love(which is portrayed as masturbation in the novel).

21. It’s as if Barthelme had access to Richard Perle and PaulWolfowitcz’s documents in the Reagan Department of Defensethat articulated a policy of preemption and are the blue print forGeorge W. Bush’s ‘‘war on terrorism.’’

22. For a full discussion of Acker’s literary celebrity, see the chapterMoran devotes to Acker in Star Authors.

440 T. H. Kane

23. See Webster’s College Dictionary. 1996 ed. It locates the coinage ofauthor from 1250�1300. The first work on Arthur in English, byLayamon, the Worcestershire priest, dates to approximately1205; in the late 12th Century a French version was written byRobert de Borron. Subsequent versions added Welsh elements,but perhaps the migration of the works from English to Frenchand back with Malory precipitated an etymological relationshipbetween Arthur and author. Certainly the story of Arthur’s auth-ority would suggest an affinity. One might say that Arthur was anearly product of a globalized economy of ideas and ideals. (Infor-mation on the evolution of Arthurian legend can be found inBrewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. 14th ed. 1989.) For furthercorroboration of the historical etymology of the term author, seethe Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. (It indicates 1384as the first known usage.)

24. This notion of the ‘‘future anterior’’ is borrowed from DonaldPease, ‘‘Doing Justice to C.L.R. James’ Renegades, Castaways,and Mariners.’’ Boundary2 27.2 (2000): 1�16.

25. The cut up method along with the hollow and shifting ghosts orhusks of character make Acker’s work particularly difficult to dis-cuss. So, the episodes we will discuss, while discrete, do not neces-sarily give one the sense of the scope of disruption that Ackerundertakes in the work as a whole.

26. While Berlant is examining a contemporary (post Roe vs Wade)formation of national identity, one can see Jim’s retrospectivereconstruction enlisted in what she has shown to be a familiareconomy of sentimentality: the fetus as unprotected, the site ofultimate innocence and pain. See Lauren Berlant, ‘‘The Subjectof True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics.’’

27. Stevenson’s cliff-hanger chapter endings result from the con-ditions of publishing in his moment; serial publishing encouragedsuch suspense. Stevenson’s already bound by the literary market-place in his formal choices.

28. Acker rewrites Stevenson’s map, filling it with text; there are noblank spaces on Acker’s map which has been completely filled withlanguage.

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