Desdemona, or how to make another version of Carver

 Recently I did a presentation on form and genre in literature. Now before you shrivel up and die on me, I'll just say, it was terribly exciting. So bear with me because I'm about to inflict it on you now - it's also a lead-in to my latest published story.

Raymond Carver's book What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a classic in the short story collection genre. What he does is so hard and fast, mostly set in the domestic sphere. Carver's stories typically depict the cosy household and then he proceeds to smash it up with the basest instincts of humanity. His style has been largely credited to his editor, Gordon Lish who was famous for his sculpting of Carver's works. Most editors stay behind the scenes. Lish did not, as he described how he'd cut out the last paragraph of a Carver story, to give us a single line, a devastating end to a story cut short ... like a life. Questions follow any ending of a Carver story. A quick look at Carver's book covers for What We Think About illustrates the domestic weird of his work:

 

 

So his story So Much Water So Close To Home, in the above mentioned collection, depicts a wife recounting her feelings after her husband went fishing with his mates on a remote river. They drink whiskey on the first night, they play cards, they hang out. The next morning the men go fishing in the river and they find a woman, a murdered woman, in the river while they are fishing.

This is written from the wife's point of view, and I find it interesting that in Raymond Carver's muscular, masculine form of writing, he quite often does this. What the men do next has spawned several movies and songs - yeah form and genre, told ya.

They tied the dead woman's foot to a tree branch in the river and then they went on fishing. She was on ice, they thought. No point turning back now, they thought. Turns out it was the best fishing trip they'd ever had. It was like mother luck had struck them. Truly amazing. They took lots of photos of them holding up the giant trout. Giant grins. Two days later, they hiked up back to civilization and called the police. The next day, their grinning fishing photos would be on the front page of the papers. Outrage ensued.

This is not a true story, or not as far as I know. Maybe Carver read something in an obscure paper, or maybe he just made it up. But the reality of this situation cuts through to us and that's why his fiction works. We all know how it could happen. And we all know how, as a wife or normal human being, we'd be thinking what the actual fuck? And how do I even know you anymore?

Not long after the So Much Water So Close To Home writer died (1988) ,the Australian songwriter Paul Kelly brought out the song Everything's Turning to White (1989), depicting the wife and her feelings about her husband, basing it on Carver's story. Once again, it's written by a man from a woman's perspective:

 Paul Kelly also wrote the music score for the film Jindabyne, another rendition of Raymond Carver's tale. Jindabyne came out in 2006 and was directed by a man (Ray Lawrence) and narrated by a female lead. The film Jindabyne is based on So Much Water So Close To Home but dwells on unique Australian anxieties. The woman in the river is Aboriginal and there are already racial tensions in the small town. Catholic and Protestants, mental illness and class divides all play out here. It's a drowned town, where the whole town had to move to high water after the hydro scheme took over. In other words, there's so much water, so close to home.

When recently, I was asked to take part in anthology responding to Paul Kelly songs, my brain went in all sorts of strange places. Road trips when there were tape players in cars, that time I was an asshole at one of his concerts and getting naked to swim downstream before said concert in front of a lot of tourists, long conversations about his songs ...

When asked whether or not I could do this, all I could think about was Paul Kelly's song Desdemona and how I've always thought Desdemona had a bad rap and how this story connected with Shakespeare's Othello and then back to Raymond Carver again. 

So here it is, another version of an old story. In this book Minds Went Walking, I tell the story of a young woman who is married to a jealous man. It's always bothered me that Othello is portrayed as a victim of Iago and his situation. This story Desdemona is told by a woman from a woman's point of view.