Disease and Anti-Naturalism in the Works of Raymond Carver and David Lynch

David Roche (Université Stendhal (Grenoble III))

It may seem odd to propose a comparative study of the most influential contemporary American short story writer, famous for his « minimalist » style and treatment of domesticity, and the provocative director celebrated (when not criticized) for his sophisticated aesthetics and fascination for the bizarre. As I’ve shown elsewhere, it is highly likely that Carver directly influenced Lynch. The dead girl floating in a river in Twin Peaks is reminiscent of Carver’s ‘So Much Water So Close to Home’, while Lynch’s short film ‘The Amputee’ (1974) recalls Carver both thematically and stylistically; the « voice-over » tells a story of adultery full of implied meanings and the directing itself is as minimalist as you can get, using one steady shot from beginning to end.

However, I don’t propose to explore these intertextual references in this paper. While taking into account their differences and the essential fact that Carver and Lynch work in two very different mediums, I’d like to argue that there are several fundamental links between two artists who appear, at first glance, to have nothing more in common than their nationality and their innovative contributions to their respective art forms.

My first point will be that, in the works of Carver and Lynch, disease is mainly based on a play between metonymy and metaphor. I will focus on disease as a relation of contamination or contagion, i.e. a relation of contiguity like metonymy; but as disease is also used as a metaphor for cruelty, spiritual malaise, poverty, etc., I will try to show how these two aspects of the representation of disease form a coherent aesthetic. Moreover, this aesthetic greatly contributes to a discourse on naturalist thought that I would like to qualify as “anti-naturalist," in relation both to physical illness and to that form of domestic malaise which Carver and others have called “dis-ease”. I’d like to argue that Carver and Lynch attack the disengaged reason the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor sees as essential to modern thought which is deeply rooted in naturalism and utilitarianism. But more fundamentally, as artists, Carver and Lynch are questioning the very idea of nature as an essence. It is in this sense that I would say they take on what the French philosopher Clément Rosset calls an “artificialist” point of view, i.e. there is no nature, there is nothing but chance (as opposed to divine intervention or fate) and human “artifices” which include norms. This should enable me to go even further by arguing that the representations of disease and “dis-ease” are both linked to a representation of the subject and the body as purely “artificial” in the sense that they are, as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler would have it, entirely shaped by the powers of normative discourses. It is at this level that the representation of disease as based on a relation of contiguity takes its full meaning: disease would appear to be discursive, hence disease would be an artifice.