

Interview with Raymond Carver (1983) - benbreen
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3059/the-art-of-fiction-no-76-raymond-carver

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benbreen
Lots of interesting bits in this interview, but this stuck out to me in
particular. Not sure I agree, but it's unusual to see a professional
writer/artist take a stance like this:

"Listening to a Beethoven concerto or spending time in front of a van Gogh
painting or reading a poem by Blake can be a profound experience on a scale
that playing bridge or bowling a 220 game can never be. Art is all the things
art is supposed to be. But art is also a superior amusement. Am I wrong in
thinking this? I don't know. But I remember in my twenties reading plays by
Strindberg, a novel by Max Frisch, Rilke's poetry, listening all night to
music by Bartók, watching a tv special on the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo
and feeling in each case that my life had to change after these experiences,
it couldn't help but be affected by these experiences and changed. There was
simply no way I would not become a different person. But then I found out soon
enough my life was not going to change after all... I guess I came to the hard
realization that art doesn't make anything happen. No. I don't believe for a
minute in that absurd Shelleyan nonsense having to do with poets as the
“unacknowledged legislators” of this world. What an idea! Isak Dinesen said
that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like
that. The days are gone, if they were ever with us, when a novel or a play or
a book of poems could change people's ideas about the world they live in or
even about themselves. Maybe writing fiction about particular kinds of people
living particular kinds of lives will allow certain areas of life to be
understood a little better than they were understood before. But I'm afraid
that's it, at least as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps it's different in
poetry."

