It doesn’t take a Tolstoy: Raymond Carver’s “Put Yourself in my Shoes”
During a visit to his house by a writer (Myers), Morgan tells a story intended as “raw material” for his guest. Met with the writer’s silence and laughter rather than the acknowledgement he is seeking, Morgan will tell two more stories, unconsciously modifying their realist premises with each tellin...
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| Опубликовано в: : | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Главный автор: | |
| Формат: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Язык: | Anglais |
| Опубликовано: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2006
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| Online-ссылка: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Итог: | During a visit to his house by a writer (Myers), Morgan tells a story intended as “raw material” for his guest. Met with the writer’s silence and laughter rather than the acknowledgement he is seeking, Morgan will tell two more stories, unconsciously modifying their realist premises with each telling, as he appropriates bits and pieces of a new discourse hidden in the subconscious forces of Myers’s silence: his own other. At the end, Myers walks away with a story of both men’s appropriation of the discourse of the other: Morgan’s now, but also Myers’s assimilation of the “old masters” then, when he rented Morgan’s house while the academic was paying “homage” to the “old masters” in Europe. Morgan’s house, which he guards with the help of Buzzy the dog, is in fact a petrified monument to the “masters” of realism. By breaking the “lease” that bound him to the house, Myers was freeing himself from their influence and breaking new ground. The whole story, finally, belongs to both men, and the reader must piece together the moving parts of both men’s appropriation of new and old matter in order to know the whole - writer and story. |
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