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Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle

46 | Spring 2006 Special issue: Raymond Carver

Vasiliki Fachard (dir.)

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/117 ISSN: 1969-6108

Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes

Printed version Date of publication: 1 March 2006 ISSN: 0294-04442

Electronic reference Vasiliki Fachard (dir.), Journal of the Short Story in English, 46 | Spring 2006, « Special issue: Raymond Carver » [Online], Online since 13 June 2008, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/jsse/117

This text was automatically generated on 3 December 2020.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword Linda Collinge and Emmanuel Vernadakis

Prolegomena to Any Future Carver Studies William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll

Introduction Vasiliki Fachard

Putting yourself in the shoes of Raymond Carver Charles E. May

It doesn’t take a Tolstoy: Raymond Carver’s “Put Yourself in my Shoes” Vasiliki Fachard

Dreams and Other Connections among Carver’s Recovered Stories Randolph Paul Runyon

Symbolic Significance in the Stories of Raymond Carver Daniel W. Lehman

Now This Is Affirmation of Life: Raymond Carver’s Posthumously Published Stories Arthur F. Bethea

Women and Violence in the Stories of Raymond Carver Sandra Lee Kleppe

Houses of Identity: Inhabiting and Emerging from Despair Hilary Siebert

On Waiting in Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing” Harold Schweizer

“Errand,” or Raymond Carver’s Realism in a Champagne Cork Claudine Verley

Raymond Carver’s America profonda Gigliola Nocera

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Foreword

Linda Collinge and Emmanuel Vernadakis

1 Among the numerous twentieth century short-story writers dealt with in the JSSE issues, Raymond Carver proves to be one of the favourites. In the general index, no less than 40 entries and more than 150 cross-references are listed under his name. The special interest of French and international academics to his stories made it a long-time project of the editors to devote a special issue to his work.

2 The task was entrusted to a committed Carver specialist, Professor Vasiliki Fachard, whose various contributions on Carver published in previous issues of the Journal offered a particularly insightful and new approach to his fiction. Her article on “Fat” submitted for JSSE33 struck us in its systematic pursuit to make sense not merely of what the writer was saying but of all that he left unsaid. We welcomed her vision of Carver’s linguistic world as one of mysteries to be solved. She also seemed to be giving form to – rather than merely talking about – theoretical notions concerning the reader that have been with us for some time. Her analyses of Carver’s language in articles that followed (on “Vitamins,” “Collectors” etc.), investigated the crypts and labyrinths of his unconscious in his fiction; she persists in seeing his writing as Paul Valéry saw literature in general: “Je vois la littérature avec de tout autres yeux que vous – comme résolutions successives sémantiques.”

3 Vasiliki Fachard studied French and Comparative Literature in France and the U.S. where she completed a Ph.D. on Paul Valéry. After a decade of teaching French at the State University of New York at Albany, she currently teaches in Lausanne, Switzerland. Her discovery of Carver was, in her own words, “bringing America back to her, irrevocably this time.” She undertook academic research on the writer and devoted several years to the putting together of the present issue.

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Prolegomena to Any Future Carver Studies

William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll

Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest. Immanuel Kant. Preface to the Second Edition, The Critique of Pure Reason (1787)

1 Ever since the tenth anniversary of the death of Raymond Carver (1938-1988) scholars and general readers have been uneasily aware of what has come to be known as the Carver controversy. This controversy was precipitated on 9 August 1998 when the journalist D. T. Max published in the New York Times Magazine an exposé entitled “The Carver Chronicles” that called into question Raymond Carver’s authorship of many of his most celebrated stories.

2 The principal actor claiming to have played Francis Bacon, Lord Strange, or some other masked nobleman to Carver’s low-rent Shakespeare was none other than the dead man’s estranged friend and former editor, Gordon Lish. First in his capacity as “Captain Fiction” at Esquire magazine during the wonder years of the 1970s and later as a trendsetting senior editor at the New York publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf, Lish was for twenty years the kingmaker of American fiction. During the 1980s he published and promoted the young royalty of what the East Coast media regarded as the reigning literary dynasty of a decade of diminished expectations, the so-called minimalists, among them Mary Robison, Amy Hempel, and (the early) David Leavitt.

3 The arch-minimalist, according to reviewers and journalists who coined the term and retailed it ceaselessly, was Raymond Carver. Throughout the 1970s Gordon Lish published Carver’s work in Esquire, promoted it to agents and editors in New York, and against all odds persuaded McGraw-Hill, a textbook firm, to publish Carver’s first book of short stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? in 1976. The following year proved to be

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a turning point for each man. In 1977 Carver succeeded in his arduous struggle to give up alcohol, and Lish parted ways with Esquire and landed a position at Knopf. That same year saw the publication of Carver’s second collection of short fiction, Furious Seasons and Other Stories, by Capra, a small press in California with no ties to Lish.

4 It was not until several years later that Carver and Lish reconnected as writer and editor. The product of their reunion was the book that cut the pattern for minimalist fiction. This was Carver’s third short-story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). Edited by Lish and published by Knopf, it was celebrated by Michael Wood on the front page of the New York Times Book Review on 26 April 1981. Reviews, overwhelmingly positive, followed in newspapers and magazines across the United States, with no one capturing the book’s astringent bite better than Donald Newlove in the Saturday Review of the same month: “Seventeen tales of Hopelessville, its marriages and alcoholic wreckage, told in a prose as sparingly clear as a fifth of iced Smirnoff.”

5 Just about everyone liked the quarter-inch-thick book and counted it the measure of the author’s scope and scale; just about everyone, that is, except Raymond Carver and the handful of writers who had read his original manuscript. The first story Carver published after What We Talk About was “Cathedral” in the September 1981 issue of the Atlantic. As readers immediately grasped and Carver subsequently corroborated, in style and substance this spiritually inflected story was the polar opposite of the bleak and bare-boned fictions in the book he had published less than six months earlier. Carver’s change of direction veered into a stunning reversal of field when, in the spring/summer 1982 issue of Ploughshares, he published “A Small, Good Thing,” a vastly longer and more hopeful version of “The Bath” in What We Talk About. Further evidence of Carver’s dissatisfaction with his minimalist book emerged in Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, a small-press miscellany published by Capra in the spring of 1983. Fires contained fuller versions of three more stories in What We Talk About: “So Much Water So Close to Home,” “Everything Stuck to Him” (titled “Distance”), and “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit” (titled “Where Is Everyone?”). For anyone who had missed the evidence in magazines and small-press publications, Carver’s transformation from postmodern minimalist to humanistic realist in the manner of Chekhov and Cheever was confirmed by his next major-press book, Cathedral. Published by Knopf in September 1983, it featured “Cathedral” as its title story and “A Small, Good Thing” as its center of gravity. A book more different from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is difficult to imagine.

6 What accounts for the striking turnabout in Raymond Carver’s fiction between 1981 and 1983? The answer to this question resolves the Carver controversy and establishes an authoritative textual foundation for future Carver studies.

7 In the opening sentence of “The Carver Chronicles” D. T. Max asserts that rumors about Lish’s influence on Carver’s fiction had circulated well before 1998. “For much of the past 20 years,” Max writes, “Gordon Lish, an editor at Esquire and then at Alfred A. Knopf who has now retired, has been quietly telling friends that he played a crucial role in the creation of the early short stories of Raymond Carver.” On the basis of this hearsay evidence, and abetted by Lish’s caustic ad hominem remarks about Carver’s ingratitude and “mediocrity,” Max builds a conspiracy theory worthy of a Kennedy- assassination buff. He suggests that nearly every significant person in Carver’s life had a hand in the making of his work and deserves or claims partial credit for it. His first wife, Maryann Burk, inspired it; his second wife, the writer Tess Gallagher, contributed

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key lines to it; above all, his editorial Rumpelstiltskin, Gordon Lish, spun Carver’s mediocre straw into marketable gold.

8 Where, in the lurid light of the Carver controversy, do Carver studies stand? For the scholar as for the general reader, questions about the substance, form, and intentionality of Carver’s work are so fundamental as to be ontological in nature. Who was Raymond Carver and what did he write? To what degree do the stories attributed to him represent his original writing, his editor’s alterations for publication purposes, or Carver’s unconstrained intentions with respect to stories published in multiple versions?

9 Lish’s postmortem claim that he effectively created Raymond Carver can be tested only by rigorous textual analysis. The requisite materials for such an undertaking are available in libraries and archival collections as well as in the little magazines, chapbooks, and small-press books in which Carver published his writing throughout his lifetime. Carver’s manuscripts of his stories that were heavily line-edited by Lish and published in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) are preserved among the voluminous Gordon Lish papers in the Lilly Library of Indiana University. So too are the Carver manuscripts for Cathedral (1983), where Lish’s far lighter line-editing is seldom reflected in the published book. Also preserved are Carver’s many letters to Lish, beginning in 1969 and breaking off abruptly in the spring of 1983, a few months before the publication of Cathedral. To examine this evidence systematically and reach empirically and rationally supported conclusions requires long-term research.

10 More important, it requires a fundamental reformulation of the research question. For Max and the popular press, the Carver controversy is about Lish. How did the sophisticated New York editor put genius into the writings of a mediocrity from the boondocks of the Pacific Northwest? For scholars, the Carver controversy must be about Carver. What did Raymond Carver write, and what is the relationship of that writing to the various publications that bear his name? For future Carver studies, this restatement of the question is analogous to the epistemological Copernican revolution that Immanuel Kant effected in the realm of philosophy, and it is from Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that we adapt our title. In the Prolegomena (1783) as in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant redirected the attention of philosophers from the objects of knowledge to the preconditions of knowing. Future Carver studies, insofar as they address the issues raised by the Carver controversy, must redirect their attention from the editor to the writer. What did Raymond Carver write?

***

11 Locating, verifying, and making available what Carver wrote has been the focus of our research for some twenty years. The results of this inquiry have been published in half a dozen books, including No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings (1991), All of Us: The Collected Poems (1996), Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose (2000), and most recently Tell It All (poems, plays, and recollections, 2005). In response to “The Carver Chronicles” we made extended research trips to the Lilly Library in 1999 and 2000 to examine the Carver manuscripts preserved among Lish’s papers. Our goal was to recover the words that Raymond Carver had written from beneath the editorial alterations made by Gordon Lish. We initially focused on the stories that Carver gave to

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Lish for the book that became What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It was challenging work, involving decipherment, transcription, and collation. It was also exciting work in that it quickly overturned erroneous assumptions that underlie nearly all past and present studies of Carver’s writings, including one of the earliest, William L. Stull’s “Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond Carver” in the winter 1985 issue of Philological Quarterly.

12 Versions of signature stories such as “So Much Water So Close to Home” and “A Small, Good Thing” that were assumed to be Carver’s later expansions of his earlier minimal stories were discovered to be restorations of texts that Carver had written long before submitting them to Lish for publication by Knopf. In effect, stories written by the “more generous” Carver of Cathedral (1983) antedated the “minimalistic” Carver of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981). Although Carver, a twice-bankrupt recovering alcoholic, had acquiesced to Lish’s radical editing of the stories in What We Talk About, he had done so under protest and with shame. Moreover, Carver had signed a book contract with Knopf before reading Lish’s edits, and this obligation compounded his legal and financial predicament. In the end he was persuaded to let the truncated book go forward, but the bond of trust between writer and editor was severed. Immediately after the publication of What We Talk About Carver began restoring his stories to their original forms. When Lish sought to exert editorial control over Cathedral, Carver forbade him to do so and thereby brought their friendship to a bitter but artistically liberating end.

13 A first step toward settling the Carver controversy – and toward putting future Carver studies on a solid footing – will be the publication of Beginners: The Original Version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. That book is now complete, and it will make its first appearance, likely in 2007, in Japanese translation by the internationally acclaimed novelist Haruki Murakami, a longtime literary comrade of Raymond Carver. Editions in English and other languages will follow.

14 The Copernican revolution in Carver studies has begun. Preliminary examination of manuscripts and magazine publications suggests, in addition, that there is an original Raymond Carver book to be extricated from the Lish-edited Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? There are also unpublished letters, notebooks, and related archival materials to be brought to light.

15 Writing is an act of discovery, Raymond Carver often said. When his original writings reach their audience, reading too will be an act of discovery. The Copernican revolution in Carver studies will replace the vagaries of the Carver controversy with verifiable evidence. With a new world of material to be explored, the future of Carver studies promises to be a renaissance.

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AUTHORS

WILLIAM L. STULL William L Stull and Maureen P. Carroll are research partners on the faculty of the University of Hartford in West Hartford, Connecticut. Their publications on Raymond Carver include Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography (1993), All of Us: The Collected Poems (1996), Il mestiere di scrivere (with Riccardo Duranti, 1997), Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Prose (2000), and Tell It All (2005). Their current project on Carver, based on five years of archival research, is Beginners: The Original Version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (forthcoming in Japanese translation by Haruki Murakami). They have also written on the poetry and fiction of Tess Gallagher, and their essay “Two Darings” served as the introduction to her book Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray (2000).

MAUREEN P. CARROLL William L Stull and Maureen P. Carroll are research partners on the faculty of the University of Hartford in West Hartford, Connecticut. Their publications on Raymond Carver include Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography (1993), All of Us: The Collected Poems (1996), Il mestiere di scrivere (with Riccardo Duranti, 1997), Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Prose (2000), and Tell It All (2005). Their current project on Carver, based on five years of archival research, is Beginners: The Original Version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (forthcoming in Japanese translation by Haruki Murakami). They have also written on the poetry and fiction of Tess Gallagher, and their essay “Two Darings” served as the introduction to her book Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray (2000).

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Introduction

Vasiliki Fachard

1 Commemorations, I once read, can often resemble an author’s second funeral unless the work can continue to interrogate us as well as enable a new generation to (re)discover the force of its message. Although “special issues” need not by any means be commemorative (rigorous scholarship is by its nature oblivious to it), there was a more compelling reason why this volume could not. Dampening any celebratory thrust or inhibiting it from becoming another encomium to the “master” or the “American Chekhov” were the revelations by D. T. Max in the New York Times of August 1998, the stupor one felt from the very opening sentence of that article: “For much of the past 20 years, Gordon Lish, an editor at Esquire…, has been telling friends that he played a crucial role in the creation of the early stories of Raymond Carver.” From this side of the Atlantic at least, it seemed that Carver’s status in American Letters had been “rattled,” the hagiographies stained. Should the issue focus on, glide over, or ignore the controversy and the new, glaring light it had come to shed on his work and reputation? The process of editing this volume really got under way when William Stull, the recognized authority on the subject and whom I asked to address the controversy, kindly agreed.

2 My deepest gratitude for his acceptance notwithstanding, my ruminations on his forthcoming edition of pre-Lish stories and Carver’s work as it now stood continued.Could the narratives which had resulted from a process of intimate collaboration with Lish now extricate themselves from what had become their own history? Their past was part of their present state, their “process” part of their now “fixed position.” Characteristic also of Carver was to seek the eye and the ear of the other – a double – in his own process of becoming a writer. Stories such as “Neighbors,” “Collectors,” “Viewfinder” and “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” among others, attest to an uncanny dédoublement or often puzzling relation between two intimate strangers. If Lish had played the role of such an other, how could we now begin to deconstruct the fruit of that symbiosis? The neophyte in Carver who had consented to Lish’s earlier cuts is ever joined to the writer who will ultimately, in full possession of his craft, seek to disconnect and liberate himself from the patriarchal presence of the other.

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3 The formation of amber appeared to me a felicitous metaphor for the process that congealed or crystallized into the stories we have today. In going from the viscous, jello- like (Carver’s word in “Viewfinder”) resin found in the Baltic littoral to the adamantine hardness of a semiprecious gem stone, organic matter, such as tiny insects, was often caught in the process. Far from diminishing its value in Antiquity, such impurities caused wonder and made it all the more precious rather than flawed.1 Thus process – in Carver’s case one of exclusions rather than what minerologists call inclusions in the above geological phenomenon – can presumably be an active ingredient of a work’s esthetic quality. Of course, Carver scholars and readers can only pray that the uncut stories will soon see the light. Juxtaposed to the Carver we now have, the two may yield to us what the narrator of “Viewfinder” sought from the man with the polaroid: a “motion shot” of the tremolo or oscillation between the two, a fuller gaze into the moving process of its construction, a possible glimpse at the kind of “material” Carver was appropriating, “collecting,” during a fourteen-year correspondence and friendship with Lish. For the time being the “gems” at our disposal cannot be disowned by their author any more than could the “baby” or metaphorical oeuvre by the “father” in the eponymic story – no matter how strange or unrecognizable it may have looked to him (Carver) after Lish’s slashes.

***

4 As this volume was taking final shape, I came across an article in the literary supplement of the Italian Stampa (September 3, 2005). Titled “Splendori, miserie, vite minime: da Balzac a Carver,” it announced, along with the works of other European masters, the upcoming edition of Tutti i racconti di Raymond Carver by the prestigious Meridiani collection of Mondadori Press (comparable to the French Pléiade or The Library of America). I asked Gigliola Nocera, the editor of Racconti, for a contribution. She accepted instantly and with the same enthusiasm as all the writers in these pages. It is with her Introduzione as an Appendice that I felt this issue should close, as I mused over the resonance of an Italian title that placed the French master’s Splendeurs et misères next to the American Carver’s “minimal lives” in the land of Boccaccio, the master story-teller who, in Carver’s words, “had invented the genre.”Such illustrious company was not new for Carver. While visiting the bookstore across from the Sorbonne in the Fall of 1999, I stopped at the table displaying works of the authors chosen for the year’s English section of the CAPES, the demanding nation-wide examination in France. There was Carver’s work next to that of Shakespeare and Dickens. Would Myers (Carver) in “Put Yourself in My Shoes” continue to laugh at Morgan’s veneration of the “old masters” if he knew that Europeans had included him in their pantheon? What was the seemingly antinomic connection between the birthplace of Tel Quel and Carver’s view of the deconstructionists as “crazy” in Conversations? Had the Myers of “The Compartment” (also Carver in my reading of the story) intuited that his fiction was destined for such future recognition when his car was “uncoupled” and he no longer knew “where this train was going”? There is something of that intimation to be decrypted in the lines immediately following: “He had understood, at the time he purchased the ticket, that the train to Strasbourg went on to Paris. But he felt it would be humiliating to put his head into one of the compartments and say, ‘Paree?’ or however they said it – as if asking if they’d arrived at a destination” (emphasis added).

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5 The above questions pointed to a broader conversation, sotto voce, between two continents, and Carver, once again, had encrypted a sub-story about that in the literary resonance of the axis of cities his train was traversing. In the parodic Jamesian tour of Europe Myers undertakes in “The Compartment,” “He had gone first to Rome,” then Venice, Milan and the border city of Strasbourg before continuing on to “Paris and fly[ing] home. He was tired of trying to make himself understood to strangers and would be glad to get back.” “Venice,” we are told, “had been a disappointment. There were grimy, water-stained buildings everywhere he looked.” At one point, Europe becomes to him insupportable: “…he looked out the window at this hateful place.” If this American’s impressions of Venice would have Henry James turning in his grave, part of the “old master” had not been oblivious to the possibility of a radical change or reversal of affairs in a projected future, as the following famous lines about his return to America show: Here I am back in America…Here I am da vero…. My choice is the old world – my choice, my need, my life.… My work lies there – and with this vast new world, je n’ai que faire. One can’t do both – one must choose. No European writer is called upon to assume that terrible burden, and it seems hard that I should be. The burden is necessarily greater for an American – for he must deal, more or less, even if only by implication, with Europe; whereas no European is obliged to deal in the least with America. No one dreams of calling him lesscomplete for not doing so.… The painter of manners who neglects America is not thereby incomplete as yet: but a hundred years hence – fifty years hence perhaps – he will doubtless be accounted so (emphasis added). My impressions of America, however, I shall, after all, not write here.… In many ways they are extremely pleasant; but, Heaven forgive me! I feel as if my time were terribly wasted here!

6 If James wanted nothing to do (je n’ai que faire) with the American continent, “a hundred years” later Carver (who said, “You’re not your characters, but your characters are you”) also tells us through an irreverent Myers, that his fiction has everything to do with the new “American scene.” He reaffirms his position in “The Train,” another mysterious story in which an old man with “white hair and a white silk cravat” is evocative of an aged Randolph in Daisy Miller. If he is uncannily also waiting at a train station “without shoes,” it is to better feel his native ground, far from “that tribe” of earlier expatriates whose “existence is taken up with café au lait and cigarettes, their precious Swiss chocolates….” Juxtaposed to Carver’s recognition by the literati of Rome and “Paree,” the above signaled a definite reversal of an old hierarchical order – in literature as elsewhere. Europe was now dealing with an American writer on his grounds and not with one who looked to the older tradition for his “material.” If my view of Carver’s itinerary to the territory of the “old masters” as a dominant subtext in his fiction holds, my next question then is, is there anything to commemorate in that?

***

7 Turning now to the present assessments of a work inexorably fixed in time, one can discern that in spite of the diversity of angles the authors have chosen, their eyes often meet, their fields of vision intersect. “Neighbors” are thus formed. The linear order in which they appear in this volume consequently contains “couples,” converging on some points while diverging on others. Opening the issue is Charles May with his analysis of “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” a complex narrative that was Carver’s story

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about a writer as well as on the writing process itself. While focusing on “Put Yourself,” however, the author of Short Story Theories provides us with a theoretical survey, spanning the Russian formalists and other critics, of a story’s intrinsic doubleness: its mere “description” of events and “narration,” récit and histoire, story and plot, the “bits of details” of the former and the mysterious process of “transforming them into significant parts of an artistic coherent whole” that gives life to the narrative. What Morgan, the academic who is opposed to the writer, cannot understand is that the three stories he tells as a series of events throughout the evening do not constitute such a whole. He thus becomes the object of Myers’s laughter and derision. To understand the writerly process which escapes him, Carver turns to the reader, asking him to put himself in the writer’s shoes.

8 One would be hard put to disagree with May’s assessment of Morgan and Myers as representatives of the two axes of the story. The minimal events which form the linear thread of Morgan’s sequence of stories are not enough to explain the spell it casts on the reader, nor the process of giving those events what May calls a “poetic life” irreducible to the “real story” of what actually happened. Equally difficult to refute is May’s citing of Lukacs that “the short story [and “Shoes”] contains cryptic, elliptical mysteries of human experience that cannot be explained by rational means.” Where my reading of the same story diverges from May’s is in the precise function of that reader, whom I see not merely as an observer but as an active participant in the writer’s process. To participate, however, is not to “explain” what the writer himself does not know, as Carver, who liked to “mess around” or “tinker” (Carver’s word for Jakobson’s bricolage) with a story, himself admitted: “Maybe I revise because it gradually takes me into the heart of what the story is about. I have to keep trying to see if I can find that out. It’s a process more than a fixed position.” It is in the act of writing that a writer can hope to know anything, as Carver once again tells us in Conversations: “…how do I know what I want to say until I see what I’ve said?” It follows that the process which the reader is solicited to observe contains “matter” which escapes the writer’s cognition, “signals” pointing to the unconscious forces which so often erupt and fissure Carver’s “smooth (but sometimes broken) surface” of mimesis. Manifesting themselves in the form of a lapsus, anagrams, gaps, or other semantic incoherencies, such signals constitute the “material” for the construction of a reader’s other story, one that will write Carver as much as he writes it. Thus for both writer and reader, “To truly know A is to make (faire) A,” as Valéry iterates in his Cahiers (II 1041). Knowing is an act and not contained in any verbal sequence.

9 Also focusing on the unconscious forces clinging underneath the mimetic surface of a story is Randolph Runyon’s “Dreams and Other Connections among Carver’s Recovered Stories.” While my essay tries to reconstruct a story from the plethora of parts under its “broken” referential surface, however, Runyon is drawn to the “connections” linking all of them. In a clearly Freudian reading, he perceives the connecting parts as being analogous to the “residue” used in the “dream process,” ever “recycled” or woven into the material of subsequent stories. Having shown such “connections” in his book Reading Raymond Carver, Runyon returns to tell us, with no less brio, that the posthumous stories published in Call If You Need Me are unmistakably Carver in so far as they also yield similar connecting links to form what he once called “intratextuality.” If his connections, do not explain what the stories are about, they cast much light on them as they cross and intersect with each other, as well as on what is so often suggested

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rather than made explicit in a Carver text. Thus, the pervasive hatred of a father toward a son that we see in his fiction and poetry is obliquely expressed in the fire that consumes a child in a (childless) wife’s dream as well as a neighbor’s children in the posthumous story “Dreams.” The hidden “wish” of the husband is thus being “fulfilled.” Runyon’s reading goes a long way toward elucidating Claire’s sudden ellipsis in “So Much Water So Close to Home”: “There is a connection to be made of these things, these events, these faces, if I can find it. My head aches with the effort to find it.” In searching to find “it” Runyon unveils much of what Carver himself insisted on calling “obsessions” rather than “themes” in his work.

10 Contrapuntal to the focus on the unconscious forces at work in Carver’s narratives is Daniel Lehman’s essay. His article, which first appeared in JSSE in Autumn 1991, constituted a response to the postmodern critics of the 1980s who, in a climate of rampant postmodernism, claimed Carver as one of their own. Struck by the freshness and continuing relevance of Lehman’s position after reading it more than a decade later, I asked him for permission to reprint it. Situating him squarely within the realist tradition, Lehman argues that Carver’s “rhetorical rein over objects and events” is “deeply controlling.” Far from suspecting the referentiality of words or creating “ambiguity,” Carver’s “symbolic strategy resolves” it. Where postmoderns see “entropy,” he discerns a “meticulously crafted order in which facts offer reliable symbolic guideposts for the reader.” The fact that his characters often do not see those “guideposts” does not absolve the reader from seeing and trying to “make sense” out of them. Such “guideposts” to the nature and flux in the relationship of Edna and Wes are the clouds and other “meteorological signs” in “Chef’s House.”

11 Prompted to apply Lehman’s arguments to the above story, this reader can see still another symbolism in the name “Chef” for the owner of the house he was letting them have “for almost nothing.” If the two characters have not given that name a thought, its intent is unambiguous from the beginning: the irresponsible couple (“Wes had quit his girlfriend, or she’d quit him – I didn’t know, didn’t care”) cannot make a viable, clean start in life so long as they remain impervious to the fact that the house, along with the responsibilities it carries and they refuse to assume, is not theirs. Edna has a glimmer of the above when Chef comes “in his big car” to tell them they must move out and she finds herself saying, “He dropped his hat and gloves on the carpet and sat down in the big chair. Chef’s chair, it occurred to me. Chef’s carpet, even.... I sat down on Chef’s sofa…” (emphasis added). There is little doubt for the reader that Chef is the head (caput) and master of this house and – unlike Wes – of his life as well. Lehman’s quasi- diametrical opposition to my own essay’s view of a writer who only half-knows what his stories are about, thus reducing his capacity to control his own process, takes nothing away from the cogency of his arguments nor from the force of his riposte to the postmoderns – then and now.

12 A common subject links Arthur Bethea’s “Now This Is Affirmation of Life: Raymond Carver’s Posthumously Published Stories” to Runyon’s “Connections,” also in the posthumous work. The similarity seems to stop there, however. For unlike Runyon’s search for hypogean material that Carver recycles from one story to the next, the author of Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction of Raymond Carver comes to remind us – and especially myself – that his fiction is referential and not only self-regarding, filled with human subjects and not merely describing a scriptor monitoring his own unconscious as he gazes at a process that structures itself. As Carver himself said,

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“Fiction that counts is about people. Does this need saying? Maybe. Anyway, fiction is not, as some writers believe, the ascendance of technique over content.” This is not to say that technique is absent or minimized in the posthumous stories analyzed by Bethea, whose essay swarms with symbolic references. His focal point, however, remains on the characters, whom he now finds “much more economically, intellectually, psychologically, socially, and even spiritually endowed.” He seems to leave out no details in pointing to the “amazingly expanded world” resulting from their new acquiescence, or self-control when coping with marital problems, thwarted expectations, or “devastating personal loss.” The former menacing forces, in other words, are still there, yet the characters rarely succumb to despair even when they cannot altogether subdue them. Appeasement and reconciliation are prevalent, even when violence looms near: in the fire than burns a neighbor’s house in one story, a house in another; it is also present in a wife’s dream. In “Dreams,” for example, Mary’s two children used to sell “seeds,” a sign of resurrection, before their death in the fire. They, as all children in the posthumous stories, are “passionately loved” by their mother, what constitutes a change in Carver country. Rebirth is also seen in the “spring,” the season Mary, whose name is associated with love, speaks of actually planting the seeds they left behind. Culturally more “endowed,” she also listens to Scriabin while reading Great Expectations.

13 One question that arises after reading so much evidence of an “attitudinal shift” in the climate of the posthumous stories is what prevented Carver from publishing them during his lifetime. Could it be that such mellowed characters, suspended between the existential fears of earlier stories and the grip Carver will manage to have on his own life in a near future, mark a stage “in-between,” a phase of “collecting” “kindling” (the title of the first story) material that will be used in the later “fires” of creation? Are we to see them as bearing (or being) the “seeds” that will germinate into (the) later stories? Whatever the answer to the above, the questions Bethea asks along with his “affirmations” are most engaging.

14 Sandra Kleppe’s study of “Women and Violence in the Stories of Raymond Carver” shares with Bethea a segment of the visual field through which both regard human subjects within a social framework and reality. Within that field, however, she zooms in on women in particular and on the violence which they either submit to or perpetrate themselves. For women who “send dishes…smashing and scattering across the floor,” “throw a pan against a wall over the sink,” or even inflict a gunshot wound on a husband “for not meeting his payments,” violence performs a “communicative” function: it is a necessary vehicle through which they express a long-muffled “dissatisfaction with roles and norms prescribed to the two sexes.” Therapeutic as well, it enables them to achieve some control over their lives and move on to another phase. Focusing at the end of her essay on “So Much Water,” Kleppe presents the narrative as a “fictional recording” of an actual series of murders perpetrated in or around the Naches River, where the story’s female corpse was found by Claire’s husband and his fishing companions. Undoubtedly aware of the murders in his native Northwest, Carver transfers the dangers and violence targeting women to both versions of “So Much Water.” Kleppe brings out a significant change in the longer version, however, when Claire refuses to yield to her insensitive husband’s demand for sex. It is a sign that she has made a step toward affirming her “independence and concern with the issue of women’s brutalization.” Claire’s move parallels a similar one in a society’s acknowledgement of domestic violence and its consequent metathesis from the private

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to the public sphere: “In 1988, significantly, the year of Carver’s death, the U.S. Surgeon General declared domestic abuse as the leading health hazard to women.” By linking women’s violence to a very precise social context, Kleppe shows the proximity of a literary discourse to a social one. Within the literary one, however, other readers may see a significant contrast with Hemingway. If the old realist could write Men Without Women, Carver could only write with, for, or about women, seldom with or about men alone. As the “old guy” who dances with the younger woman in “Why Don’t You Dance?” intimates, there is always “His side, her side” in almost every Carver story. Women, Kleppe reminds us, were not merely present in Carver’s fiction but had also a compelling story to tell. Carver parts company with the old master at least on that issue.

15 “I’m not given to rhetoric or abstraction in my life, my thinking, or my writing,” Carver had said in his conversation with Larry McCafferey and Sinda Gregory in 1984, “so when I write about people I want them placed within a setting that must be made as palpable as possible.” In “Houses of Identity: Inhabiting and Emerging from Despair,” Hilary Siebert explores such settings or houses as “palpable” spaces people do not merely inhabit, statically, but which are dialectically bound with their identity, as they also propel their process of becoming. He affirms that there is a “dynamic movement between structures which house being and those which allow it to expand outward and emerge into new spaces.” For Siebert “characters undergo experience in highly particular physical situations and settings: a house…, a kitchen…, or a bed,” spaces which echo Carver’s answer to William Stull’s question “Can poetry open doors?” in Conversations: “The door to the kitchen, the door to the living room, the door to the closet. Even the bathroom! And if it’s locked, why not open it?” Thus Wes and Edna’s short-lived experience in “Chef’s House” is inextricable from the house they rent, Bill and Arlene Miller’s from the “transformative” possibilities of the house of their “neighbors”; the narrator’s vision of the private space of his house will be irrevocably altered after having a “glimpse” of the monumental structure and spiritual resonance of a cathedral in the eponymic story. Readers can continue the long list of residences which open doors to the “differing kinds of reality and the nature of experience in Carver’s stories.” It can even be stretched in my view to include characters deprived of residences altogether, or on the hop from one to another. Such are the Holits in “The Bridle,” the three people waiting at a station in “The Train,” and Myers in the moving train of “The Compartment.” Beyond them there is poetic space itself (Gaston Bachelard’s eponymous work inspired Siebert), the writer’s own “house of fiction.” Siebert has opened many doors to future studies of space in Carver.

16 Coupled with the above notion of space is that of time, to which Harold Schweizer is drawn in “Waiting in Raymond Carver’s ‘A Small, Good Thing.’” The essay’s virtuosity or articulate attempts to grapple with a temporality that escapes words – such as the emptiness of “waiting” for a son to wake up from a coma, the nothingness of his loss, the parents’ and baker’s attainment of a “temporality where waiting is no more endured, where time is no longer” – attest to a highly philosophical and not so often encountered “window” into Carver’s fiction. Pointing no less to Schweizer’s penchant for the abstract and philosophical are his references to Bachelard, Bergson, Levinas, as is his grasp of their concepts of mémoire and durée. Simultaneously, however, his essay is not to be reduced to mere metaphysical pirouettes or excursions into an abstract territory. For Schweizer also makes those excursions “palpable” by localizing time into three spaces: the waiting room in which Scotty’s parents seek to “harness” it to their

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own “human desires,” where “waiting” is “expectation”; the parking lot and its indifference to their hope; the bakery with its cathedral-like ceiling and “unexpected plentitude” following the child’s death, the place where “the empty planes of duration are suddenly gathered up in an impromptu celebration.” As he yokes temporality to the passage of Scotty’s parents from one “locus” to another, ever fusing its movement with a “symbolic space,” Schweizer also draws our attention to the scientific dimension of such a fusion, one which Tess Gallagher also intimated in Remembering Carver: “Carver’s stories had the kind of impact on American fiction that Einstein’s theory of relativity had on science. We couldn’t quite fathom how it worked, but it changed the way we regarded the lives of middle-class working people.” Time and space are as inextricable from matter for the scientist, as they are from the “material” of the artist. The correlation can be extended to “The Compartment,” where the lost chronometer or “watch” Myers was to give his son and his lost destination when the train was uncoupled in Strasbourg, a city of linguistic crossings and fusions, work hand in glove.

17 The above story – cited by me often enough in these pages – shows an uncanny resemblance to a French nouveau roman which also takes place exclusively on a train. Michel Butor’s LaModification (1957) is also about a trip during which the protagonist changes his mind and decides not to abandon his Parisian wife for Cécile, the mistress waiting for him in Rome, the train’s place of destination. Curiously, the last word of the novel is compartiment. Carver’s Myers reverses the direction, from Rome to Paris. Could he have read or known of the novel, or are the similarities a pur hasard? Be it as it may, the nouveau roman and most notably its critics (its most zealous defender being Roland Barthes) did impose their presence on American criticism in the twenty years before Carver’s death. If they also turned English departments into what Jay McInerney in Remembering Ray calls “a battleground between theorists and humanists, [as] poststructuralism lay heavy upon the campus,” the last article by Claudine Verley can be seen as representative of a new narratological approach many of the above theorists imported from France. If the import often suffers in transit – and the method sometimes turns into a sterile exercise – her essay makes clear that such an approach is simply native to her.

18 With Claudine Verley’s “Errand,” or Raymond Carver’s Realism in a Champagne Cork,” we move from content, or what (and who) goes in his fiction to how Carver manoeuvers narrative devices (voice, point of view…) in order to say something about Chekhov and the act of writing. No brief summary here could do justice to her vastly intricate and multi-levelled analysis of Carver’s exploration of narrative “performance” as he weaves a new hypertext from the elements of the implicit hypotext. In the process of shifting or modulating his narration from one to the other, Carver has taken the reader from the “exclusively autobiographical” narrative territory and its “polyphony” of voices (from “diary, memoir, letters and press release”) in the beginning of “Errand” to a single, subjective viewpoint of an “openly fictional character.” The “second narrative voice [in] the second story” is that of Olga, Chekhov’s wife, who, after instructing the bellboy to go and bring a mortician to the room in which Chekhov has just died drifts off into an image or story in which she – possibly the actress in her – fancies her “errand” being executed: “He was to behave exactly as if he were engaged on an important errand…he should imagine himself as.... The mortician…was a man of restraint and bearing.... The mortician takes the vase of roses.... Chekhov, you say? Just a minute, and I’ll be with you.” At this point, the fictive image she has been concocting of a situation she infuses with solemnity is broken when the bellboy’s eye takes in the

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champagne cork, a trivial object from the real rather than imaginary world. With it, reality also erupts into Olga’s fictional space, collapsing it like a “house of cards.” It thus supplies “Errand” with “a lesson in realism” Chekhov would have undoubtedly liked and which is also Carver’s way of paying homage to his own master. By exploring the narrative strategies used to stitch together a story in which fiction and reality interpenetrate, Claudine Verley has demonstrated, in a dynamic rather than static narratological fashion, what the story itself is also about: “What could be the subject of such a story,” she asks in her closing paragraph “except the process of writing and the nature of the realism that links the two writers in the same tradition?” With her ending Claudine Verley brings this issue full circle to the point where the American critic Charles May had opened it with his focus also on the writing process, in which Carver tells the reader, “Put Yourself in My Shoes.” Lastly, since “connections” are what this introduction is much about, Carver may not have known Baudelaire as well as he did Flaubert. Nevertheless, in the idiomatic expression of the above title there is a distant literary echo of the symbolist addressing the reader as mon semblable, mon frère in his prologue to Les Fleurs du mal.

***

19 If the presentation of the essays ends with Claudine Verley’s study, the volume itself, as stated earlier, closes with Gigliola Nocera’s Introduzione to the forthcoming Tutti i racconti,Carver’s work a neighbor to Balzac’s. As introductions often go (and epilogues too, for that matter), it does not provide us with a single aperture to Carver’s work, as do all the other contributions, but with something for which, once again, Carver had a word: a “territorial vista.” As such, it will serve best as this volume’s epilegomena, a contribution for which I am most grateful to the Italian critic, as I am to all the Carver scholars who precede her. As for its prologue, I am indebted to William Stull and Maureen Carroll, not only for their generosity in accepting to write it, but also for their encouragement and collaboration from the initial stage of this editing process. Their presence and editorial authority, along with the rich reflections to be found in all the essays, can only help to make this issue a tribute to the Carver of both continents. (Is “tribute” much different from “commemoration”?)2

NOTES

1. The “ant” and “bee in amber” images found their way into Martial’s Epigrams: “While an ant was wandering under the shade of the tree of Phaeton, a drop of amber enveloped the tiny insect; thus she, who in life was disregarded, became precious by death” (bk VI, ep. 15); “The bee is enclosed, and shines preserved, in a tear of the sisters of Phaeton, so that it seems enshrined in its own nectar. It has obtained a worthy reward for its great toils; we may suppose that the bee itself would have desired such a death” (bk. IV, ep. 32). 2. I am grateful to the Helm Fellowship Committee at Indiana University for a grant that permitted me to consult the Carver archives at the Lilly Library. I would especially like to offer

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my warmest thanks to Breon Mitchell, its Director, as well as to all the other members of the Library staff for their efficiency and hospitality. They helped make my stay there memorable.

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Putting yourself in the shoes of Raymond Carver

Charles E. May

1 There is usually no mystery about the identity of personal pronouns in the titles of Raymond Carver’s stories. The “you” in “Why Don’t You Dance,” and the “I” in “I Could See the Smallest Things” have clear references to characters in the stories. Even the generalized “We” in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is based on a specific group of characters. However, in “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” neither the “you” in “Yourself” nor the “I” in “My” refers to anyone in the story. The only reference to the title in the text is uttered by the character Mr. Morgan, who, after relating an anecdote about a colleague’s affair with a student, says to Myers, a character identified as a writer: “Put yourself in the shoes of that eighteen-year-old coed who fell in love with a married man. Think about her for a moment, and then you see the possibilities for your story.” Lacking any other possible referent, the title seems to be a direct address by which Carver asks the reader to identify with him.

2 This identification is further suggested by Carver’s response to an interviewer’s question about “Put Yourself in My Shoes”: “I think every young writer is cautioned about writing a story about a writer…. But then every writer goes ahead and writes at least one story about a writer, and that’s my story about a writer” (Conversations 61). Like most authors, Carver insists that his stories are always a mixture of “a little autobiography and a lot of imagination” (Conversations 137). The “little autobiography” component of “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” Carver tells us, is that he and his first wife did once rent a house from some people going to Europe. Other particulars of the story – Myers’s former job at a publishing house, the Christmas season, the woman who died in front of Mr. and Mrs. Morgan – also have some autobiographical basis, but, as Carver notes about composing stories generally, it is all a matter of piecing things together. “You pull something from here, and you pull something from over here, well, it’s like a snowball coming down a hill, it gathers up everything that’s in its way – things we’ve heard, things we’ve witnessed, things we’ve experienced. And you stick bits and pieces here and then make some kind of coherent whole out of it” (Conversations 127). Carver claims that when he conceived “Put Yourself in My Shoes” he did not know the guy in it

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was going to be a writer, that it began with only the one line: “The telephone rang while he was running the vacuum cleaner.” Convinced that a story belonged with the sentence, Carver says, “I made the story just as I’d made a poem; one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story, and I knew it was my story, the one I’d been wanting to write” (Fires 17).

3 The basic critical question is: Just what kind of “coherent whole” is “Put Yourself in My Shoes”? Martin Scofield has suggested that the story reveals, through its own form, “Carver’s aesthetic, the oblique angle of vision by which he gets through to truth” (268). However, when it comes to establishing what the truth of the story is and how Carver’s “oblique angle of vision” gets at it, Scofield, as well as other Carver critics, find the story a problem. Scofield is bothered by the fact that Meyer’s “initial surliness” is not accounted for and that his laughter at Mrs. Morgan’s story seems “churlish” and not fully motivated. He wonders if there is some “impurity” in the story, something “not fully disinterested” (269).

4 Arthur M. Salzman accounts for the story’s puzzling nature by calling it one of Carver’s rare satiric stories. He suggests that it may be an indictment of the profession of writing for the offense of voyeurism or “writing as appropriation” (53). Adam Meyer calls it one of the finest and most complex stories in Carver’s first collection, but that the central character’s lack of empathy calls into question the “appropriateness of his vocation as a writer.” He argues that when Morgan tells his final story about the Myers’ house-sitting, Myers is “forced to put himself into the other person’s shoes, and he does not see much to admire when he looks at himself from that perspective,” thus “indicting himself for having a lack of sympathy for his characters” (54-56).

5 The most elaborate attempt to account for the story’s strangeness is Randolph Paul Runyon’s discussion of what he sees as “an almost incredibly complex narrative.” Runyon argues that Morgan’s getting the Ys and Zs mixed up in his final tirade is a Freudian slip that reveals his desire to exchange places with Myers, concluding: “If there is anything more likely than an academic wishing he had the writer’s freedom and gift for creation, it is a professor wishing he could have an affair with one of his students.” Perhaps the most far-fetched theory to account for the metaphor of putting yourself in another’s shoes is Runyon’s further argument that Morgan wants Myers to identify with the young coed because Myers is the object of his own homosexual desires (43-53). All these readers know that the story has something to do with the nature of empathy or identification, but they assume that the title metaphor refers to a character in the story. I suggest that the title asks the reader to put himself or herself in the shoes of Raymond Carver as he transforms the events into a short story.

6 The story begins with a man running a vacuum cleaner when the phone rings with an invitation to get out of his “ivory tower and back in the real world for a while.” However, as Henry James so complexly explores it in his famous story, “The Real Thing,” the “real” world is not the artist’s true subject. Mr. Morgan’s point of view in Carver’s story is much like that of the Monarchs, who argue for the superiority of the “real thing.” Morgan believes that what actually happened to actual people is the “real story.” He does not understand, as Victor Shklovsky once reminded us, that “the forms of art are explainable by the laws of art; they are not justified by their realism.” A “story,” as Shklovsky noted, and Boris Tomashevsky reiterated, is merely a description of events, whereas what the writer aims for is a composition of motifs or themes, a

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coherent verbal structure with a unifying theme running through it (Shklovsky 57, Tomashevsky 63).

7 From the point of view of the writer’s constructive task, the problem is how to convert mere events, one thing after another, into significance. From the perspective of the writer’s relationship to the reader, the problem is – once the reader is encouraged to keep turning pages to find out what happens next – to find some way to make the reader see that what happens next is not what is most important. The central problem, says C. S. Lewis, is that for stories to be stories, they must be a series of events; yet at the same time it must be understood that this series is only a net to catch something else. And this “something else,” which, for want of a better word, we call theme, is something “that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality” (91). The result is that the means of fiction are always at war with its end.

8 Lewis says, “In real life, as in a story, something must happen. That is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied” (91). E. M. Forster has called attention to the same paradox in a famous mock lament in Aspects of the Novel, reminding us that even as we agree that the “fundamental aspect of the novel is its story-telling aspect,” we voice our assent sadly: “Yes – oh, dear, yes – the novel tells a story.” Both Forster and Lewis agree that the problem lies in the sense of time. Forster notes that in addition to the time sense in daily life there is something else, something not measured by minutes or hours, but by intensity, something called value. Story, qua story, however can only deal with the time sense. Story, the “naked worm of time,” is an atavistic form which presents an appearance both “unlovely and dull,” says Forster (41).

9 This basic incompatibility is even more obvious in the short story, which, in its frequent focus on a frozen moment, seems atemporal. As Julio Cortázar has noted, “The short-story writer knows that he can’t proceed cumulatively, that time is not his ally. His only solution is to work vertically, heading up or down in literary space” (247). Georg Lukács has argued that whereas the novel gives us the totality of life by its contents, the short story does this only formally (Theory of the Novel 51). Characterizing this distinction as the difference between the techniques of narration and description, Lukács further notes that in description (the primary technique of the realistic novel) events are only loosely related to the plot and could be eliminated, whereas in the short form, events constitute a stylistically patterned relationship to the central focus of the story. Description provides no true poetry of things, he continues; objects “come to life poetically” only to the extent that they are structurally related to human life in the texture of the story (Writer and Critic 137). And indeed, as Chekhov recognized when he criticized one writer’s works for lacking the “compactness that makes short things alive,” in the short story “life” means “poetic life,” not the ordinary life of everyday experience (197).

10 Walter Benjamin makes a similar distinction between primal storytelling and the information-based novel, claiming that whereas storytelling always had a validity that required no external verification, information must be accessible to immediate verification. When stories come to us through information, they are already loaded down with explanation, says Benjamin; it is half the art of storytelling to be free from information (89). According to Benjamin, although realistic narrative forms such as the novel focus on the relatively limited areas of human experience that indeed can be

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encompassed by information, characters in stories encounter those most basic mysteries of human experience that cannot be explained by rational means.

11 A striking example of the difference between the “life” inherent in the short story at its most typical and the “life” inherent in fiction when information begins to dominate can be seen in the two versions of Carver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home.” What gives the shorter version its life is the basic, mysterious and unarticulated reaction the wife makes to the image of the dead girl. The second version is made longer by the drive toward explanation of what the discovery of the dead girl means – a drive that becomes so pervasive that the narrator makes explicit expository assertions: “Two things are certain: 1) people no longer care what happens to other people; and 2) nothing makes any difference any longer.” The sense of life in the longer version is more reassuring, more filled with information than the shorter version, less fraught with mystery, less dependent on the pattern of the story and more dependent on simple explanation. What Lukács calls stylistically patterned form, typical of Carver’s early stories, results in what Benjamin calls the cryptic, elliptical mysteries of human experience that cannot be explained by rational means.

12 The result of the short story’s tight formal patterning is the strange sense felt in Carver’s early stories that reality seems both real and unreal at once. Larry McCaffery has caught the seeming contradiction best. “To be inside a Raymond Carver story is a bit like standing in a model kitchen at Sears – you experience a weird feeling of disjuncture that comes from being in a place where things appear to be real and familiar, but where a closer look shows that the turkey is papier-mâché, the broccoli is rubber, and the frilly curtains cover a blank wall” (62). However, it is just this dependence on poetic patterning that has frequently caused critics such as John Aldridge to equate the lack of information in the work of Raymond Carver, Mary Robison, and other contemporary short story writers, with a lack of “significance.” Applying critical approaches derived from the novel to the short story, critics such as Aldridge are then quick to dismiss the form for being unable to focus significantly on what they think is meaningful in human experience.

13 It is unfortunate that an understanding of the short story in American criticism has been inextricably linked to that influential interpretive maneuver known as Formalism, which has come under fire for being naive and non-theoretical. However, as José Ortega y Gasset has reminded us, a work of art lives on its form, not on its material. “Perception of ‘lived’ reality and perception of artistic form…are essentially incompatible…. ” (23). And Umberto Eco has insisted, “the formal analysis of a work’s structural mechanics...does not lead one to treat the work as an end in itself...but serves to provide the instruments by which to understand the relations between work, cultural context and the personality of the writer.... the formal approach is the sole way of correctly clarifying relationships between the work and the world of other values” (142). More recently, William H. Gass has reminded us that the artist’s “fundamental loyalty must be to form, and his energy employed in the activity of making. Every other diddly desire,” says Gass, “can find expression; every crackpot idea or local obsession, every bias and graciousness and mark of malice, may have an hour; but it must never be allowed to carry the day” (35).

14 One indication that “Put Yourself in My Shoes” asks the reader to identify with the formal writerly process by which a story is created, rather than the readerly process of identifying with anecdote and as-if-real characters, is that other fiction writers seem

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most aware of the story’s centrality for understanding Carver’s attitude toward his work. Jay McInerney once said, “‘Put Yourself in My Shoes’ is very much what Ray said fiction is all about… “When I first read the story, I felt the menace of it. Like much of his work, it has an edge of darkness. But when I heard Ray read it, what came through was the humor.… It was remarkable in the way you felt impelled to laugh at some of the most awkward moments. I think he liked that and thought it was not an inappropriate response to his work” (47-48). Indeed, “Put Yourself in My Shoes” is a writer’s “in joke,” a story about the difference between what real writers and non-writers see as the most important aspect of their work. For example, it is hard to say why Mr. Morgan thinks it would take a Tolstoy to tell the anecdote about his colleague’s affair with a co-ed, but Carver admires Tolstoy, mainly because Tolstoy rewrote War and Peace five times from “stem to stern with pen and ink” and was making corrections in the galley proofs right up to publication. The “real work” on a story, Carver says, begins, not with its anecdotal basis, but when the crafting of the individual sentences starts. It was not uncommon, Carver has said, for him to do ten or twenty drafts of a story.

15 Haruki Murakami, who has translated all of Carver’s works into Japanese, offers the most striking example of another writer identifying with his writing process: “As I translate what Ray has written, I can sense line by line the rhythm of his breathing, the warmth of his body, and the subtle wavering of his emotions. I can sense the feelings he experienced when writing certain lines. It is truly an extraordinary experience. Of course, you can probably get this kind of pleasure even from just reading his books. That is, after all, the sign of great fiction. But there are times when I am translating, painstakingly transforming one word after another into Japanese, that I sometimes feel just as though I have become one – body and soul – with the author. Through his words I can sense clearly the sadness or joy he experienced at the moment of writing them. Instead of translation, I prefer to call this ‘experiencing Raymond Carver.’ And there is nothing that can substitute for this experience. ” (131).

16 Murakami’s way of “experiencing Raymond Carver” seems particularly relevant to the story “Put Yourself in My Shoes.” He has noted that Jay McInerney once suggested that the opening line of his own story “The Windup Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” in which a man gets a phone call from a mysterious woman while boiling noodles, is similar to the first line of Carver’s “Put Yourself in My Shoes.” “It is possible,” says Murakami in response to this observation, “that I have absorbed the rhythm of Ray’s phrasing and something like his view of the world much more deeply than I had suspected” (132).

17 As Carver has insisted, the “real story” of a story, as opposed to what non-writers like Mr. Morgan assume, lies in the actual process of creating a “coherent whole,” not in the mere events that provided the initial impetus to the creation of that whole. In other words, Myers understands the crucial Russian Formalist distinction between “story” and “plot,” while Mr. Morgan does not: “Real incidents, not fictionalized by the author, may make a story. A plot is wholly an artistic creation” (Tomashevsky 68). One source of confusion about this distinction is the fact that “Put Yourself in My Shoes” ends with Myers driving away in silence because “He was at the very end of a story.” However, in an interview Carver has said this story is about a man who is not writing, but by the end is ready to write. The question that this seeming contradiction raises is: How can Myers be both at the end of a story and its beginning? The answer may be that the personal pronoun “he” in the final sentence refers to that character who has been brought into being by the constructive process of Carver’s writing the story. At the end,

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Carver/Myers is ready to begin the process by which he will proceed through the story until, as a created character, he will be at the end of the story in the final sentence.

18 The primary pattern of motifs that develops this process is established in the first section of the story by contrasting Myers with characters who are not writers. Myers has quit his job to become a writer, as opposed to Dick, a man in the office who has always talked of becoming a writer, which he, in romantic Hemingway fashion, associates with going to Paris. Ignorant of the hard work of writing, Dick tells Paula to tell Myers to get out of his “ivory tower and back into the real world.” When Paula tells him the “horrible news” about Larry Gudinas committing suicide by shooting himself in the mouth and expresses her puzzlement by saying, “Can you imagine, Myers?” Myers does indeed put himself in the shoes of the man. “He could imagine the jolt, the head snapping back.” On his drive to meet Paula, Myers looks at the people on the sidewalks, the gray sky, and the tall buildings. “He tried to see everything, save it for later.” However, as Carver once noted, the short story writer is not interested in “things” as mere bits of detail but rather in transforming them into significant parts of an artistic coherent whole. “It is possible,” Carver has written, “in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things – a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring – with immense, even startling power” (Fires 15). Near the end of “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” when Myers sees that the events and people around him are material for a story, he comes alive for the first time.

19 Since Mr. Morgan is the primary representative of the non-writerly response to the world, it seems inevitable that the two men are very early established as doppelgänger figures.1When Myers sees the Morgan house with its lighted windows, snow on the roof, and the station wagon in the driveway, he makes one of his rare reactions to the world in the first part of the story: “something took him.” Since Myers has previously lived in the house, what “took him” is his awareness that someone else is occupying the same space he once occupied. (Of course, we learn later that what Mr. Morgan is upset about is the way Myers occupied his space while he was in Europe.) After the dog rushes at Myers, making him fall, Morgan observes Myers closely and says, “I saw it. I was looking out the window when it happened.” This remark seems “odd” to Myers, and he then looks closely at Morgan. That this identification of Morgan and Myers is crucial to the “sense of mystery” of something happening “beneath the surface” is further suggested by the several repetitions of Morgan and Myers focusing on each other. Frequently in the story, Myers catches Morgan staring at him, and several times Myers seems to be the only one who is aware of Morgan slamming cupboard doors and cursing in the kitchen when he goes to get them drinks.

20 As soon as Paula tells the Morgans that Myers is a writer, Morgan recounts his “horrible story” about his colleague’s affair with a coed, much as Paula told Myers “horrible news” at the beginning about the suicide of Larry Gudinas. Morgan makes the usual mistake of the non-writer by assuming that all it takes to make a fiction is an anecdote, what the Russian Formalists call a “story.” He is unaware, as Tomashevsky notes, that the “aesthetic function of the plot is precisely the bringing of an arrangement of motifs to the attention of the reader, not simply recounting real incidents” (68). After finishing the story, Morgan again meaningfully gazes at Myers; however, while Mrs. Morgan and Paula call the event “disgusting” and “horrible,” Myers simply grins and says nothing. Although Mrs. Morgan thinks of how the wife

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must feel and Paula tries to imagine what the boy must be going through, Mr. Morgan says, “But here’s something I don’t think any of you has thought through. Think about this for a moment. Mr. Myers, are you listening? Tell me what you think of this. Put yourself in the shoes of that eighteen-year-old coed who fell in love with a married man. Think about her for a moment, and then you see the possibilities for your story.” He then pompously proclaims, “It would take a Tolstoy to tell it and tell it right…. No less than a Tolstoy.” Abruptly, Myers says, “Time to go” and stands up. There is no clear motivation for this reaction except the fact that Myers is a writer and knows about the demands of the writing process which Tolstoy and other writers, including himself, must meet to create a story.

21 The second narrative is introduced when Mrs. Morgan says that because Myers is a writer she wants him to hear the story about Mrs. Attenborough. Myers, not wanting to hear still another story, once again tries to leave. However, Mrs. Morgan, in a clear statement of her failure to understand the writing process, says to Paula, “This is your chance to see how your husband’s mind goes to work on raw material.” Because Myers knows he is the only one in the room who understands how a writer’s mind works on raw material to create a story, he tries to change the subject by saying, “That dog almost tore my leg off.” This, in turn, sets in play another dialogue about writers, Mrs. Morgan commenting on how writers exaggerate, Mr. Morgan responding with a cliché about “the power of the pen and all that,” and Mrs. Morgan twisting the chestnut by saying, “Bend your pen into a plowshare.”

22 When Morgan says that his wife will tell the story, Myers once again gets up to leave. And at this point, the exchange gets heated: “You tell it, dear. And Mr. Myers, you listen closely,” Mrs. Morgan said. “We have to go,” Myers said. “Paula, let’s go.” “Talk about honesty,” Mrs. Morgan said. “Let’s talk about it,” Myers said. Then he said, “Paula, are you coming?” “I want you to hear this story,” Morgan said, raising his voice. “You will insult Mrs. Morgan, you will insult us both, if you don’t listen to this story.” Morgan clenched his pipe.

23 Mrs. Morgan then tells the anecdote about leaving her purse in a ladies’ room at a museum in Munich and a well-dressed woman with white hair returning it to her and then dying in their living room. When she says, “Fate sent her to die on the couch in our living room in Germany,” Myers can no longer restrain his scorn for the Morgans’ lack of knowledge about what the writer does and laughs helplessly.

24 Mr. Morgan then challenges Myers, “If you were a real writer, as you say you are, Mr. Myers, you would not laugh…. You would not dare laugh! You would try to understand. You would plumb the depths of that poor soul’s heart and try to understand. But you are no writer, sir!” As Myers continues to giggle, Morgan slams his fist on the coffee table and declares, “The real story lies right here, in this house, this very living room, and it’s time it was told!” Morgan, using anonymity conventions of the nineteenth- century novel, then tells his convoluted story about a couple occupying another couple’s house while they are living in Germany for a year. However, he becomes so angry during his fictionalized account of the Myers’ transgressions that he gets confused. Although he begins identifying the Myers as Mr. and Mrs. Z and himself and his wife as Mr. and Mrs. Y, by the end of his rant he has reversed the anonymous designations, making the Zs the aggrieved party. While there is no mistaking who did what to whom in reality, it is not clear who is in whose shoes in Morgan’s amateurish

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account. This makes Morgan’s insistence that his own story is the “real story” all the more hilarious to Myers, for he knows that Morgan has no idea what a “real story” is.

25 Myers is now happy for the first time in the story, having been given a wonderful Christmas gift by the Morgans – not any of the anecdotes they have told him, but rather this encounter between a writer and people who have no idea of what the writer does. Myers knows, as Ortega says, that the artist is never content merely to duplicate reality, but rather must repudiate reality by placing himself above it. “Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist” (45). As they drive away and Paula says, “Those people are crazy,” Myers pats her hand and does not answer. “Her voice seemed to come to him from a great distance. He kept driving. Snow rushed at the windshield. He was silent and watched the road. He was at the very end of a story.” Although Myers the character is at the very end of an event, Carver the writer is at the very beginning of the making of a coherent artistic whole. To put yourself in the shoes of Raymond Carver is, as Haruki Murakami says, to participate in the process of the creation of the work. “That is, after all, the sign of great fiction.”

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.”Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Jonathan Cape, Ltd., 1970. 83-109.

Carver, Raymond. Fires. NY: Vintage, 1984.

---. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? New York: Vintage, 1992.

Chekhov, Anton. “The Short Story.” The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens: Ohio UP, 1994:195-98.

Cortázar, Julio. “Some Aspects of the Short Story.” Trans. Aden Hayes. The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens: Ohio UP, 1994: 245-55.

Eco, Umberto. “The Analysis of Structure.” The Critical Moment. NY: McGraw-Hill, 1963. 138-45.

Forster. E. M. Aspects of the Novel. NY: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1927.

Gass, William H. Finding a Form. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Gentry, Marshall Bruce and William H. Stull. Conversations with Raymond Carver. Eds. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990.

Kittredge, William. When We Talk About Raymond Carver. Ed. Sam Halpert. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1991.

Lewis, C. S. “On Stories.” Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Ed. C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1966. 90-105.

Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971.

---. Writer and Critic. Ed. and Trans. Arthur Kahn. London: Merlin Press, 1970.

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McCaffery, Larry and Sinda Gregory. “An Interview with Raymond Carver.” Mississippi Review 40-41 (Winter 1985): 62-82.

McInerney, Jay. When We Talk About Raymond Carver. Ed. Sam Halpert. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 1991. 41-50.

Meyer, Adam. Raymond Carver. NY:Twayne, 1995.

Murakami, Haruki. “A Literary Comrade.” Remembering Ray. Eds. William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1993. 130-35.

Ortega y Gasset, José. The Dehumanization of Art. NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1956.

Runyon, Randolph Paul. Reading Raymond Carver. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1992.

Salzman, Arthur M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia, South Carolina: U of South Carolina Press, 1988.

Scofield, Martin. “Story and History in Raymond Carver.” Critique 40 (Spring 1999): 266-80.

Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska Press, 1965. pp. 3-24.

Tomashevsky, Boris. “Thematics.” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln, Nebraska: U of Nebraska Press, 1965. pp. 61-95.

NOTES

1. As a side note here, William Kittredge says he remembers a book in Carver’s library, marked up and scribbled all over – a college textbook on double stories, e.g. Dostoevsky’s “The Double” and a story by Henry James (probably “The Jolly Corner”). “One of the things that struck me about those stories,” says Kittredge, “was the way they were like Ray’s. Sort of put yourself in my shoes or try my blindness” (30).

RÉSUMÉS

Raymond Carver’s self-confessed “story of a writer,” “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” asks the reader to identify with the formal writerly process by which a story is created, rather than the readerly process of identifying with anecdote and as-if-real characters. As Carver has insisted, the “real story” of a story – as opposed to what non-writers like Mr. Morgan assume – lies in the actual process of creating a “coherent whole,” not in the mere events that provided the initial impetus to the creation of that whole. Although at the end of the story, Myers the character is at the conclusion of an event, Carver the writer is at the very beginning of the making of a coherent artistic whole. To put yourself in the shoes of Raymond Carver is to participate in the process of the creation of the work.

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AUTEURS

CHARLES E. MAY Charles E. May is Professor Emeritus of English at California State University, Long Beach. He is the author of Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the Short Fiction and The Short Story: Reality as Artifice and the editor of Short Story Theories and The New Short Story Theories. He has published over two hundred articles on short fiction in various books and journals.

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It doesn’t take a Tolstoy: Raymond Carver’s “Put Yourself in my Shoes”

Vasiliki Fachard

In the everyday rounds of our consciousness, the internally persuasive word is half-ours and half- somenone else’s. Mikhail M. Bakhtin Don’t you people understand that there is a key to this comedy? Luigi Pirandello

1 “I insist on knowing,” vociferates Morgan as Myers, the writer to whom he has played host throughout the evening, is leaving his premises. “I am waiting, sir.” Precisely what the professor of literature in the story “Put Yourself in My Shoes” (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?) would like to know is whether the writer has stolen his “two-volume record of ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic,’” walked away with it at the end of his sojourn in the house Morgan had rented to the Myerses while he and his wife were on sabbatical in Germany. By the end of a story which dovetails with the end of the visit, however, the reader suspects that the record is an alibi or an object on which Morgan displaces his fear or gnawing intimation of a much more serious and menacing theft: that the writer has usurped him of his once authoritative discourse on realism, subverted the very premises which Morgan sees as his function to defend. In a story about the writing process, those premises were made manifest throughout the evening in a series of stories Morgan told, initially aimed at providing Myers with “raw material” for his. Far from acknowledging those narratives, the latter will repudiate them through silence, laughter and other non-verbal signs of insolence in which his angry host feels a menace for all that he upholds. His fear that a new writer has been invading his territory, chipping away at the old Tolstoyan monument he guards and seeking out in the fossilized matter of the “old masters” material for a new story will ultimately be confirmed after Myers has ended his visit and he and his wife are leaving Morgan’s grounds: “He was silent and watched the road. He was at the very end of a story.”

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2 In diametrical opposition to the above closing lines, the opening shows Myers going through a writer’s block: “He was between stories and felt despicable.” Polarized thus between a story emerging at the end and the lack of one in the beginning, the story-in- between has been about its own making, a story-as-process which, as the name Myers (My/yours) suggests, must be shared by both men. For paradoxically, if Myers is the explicit writer in the story, he has done no telling whatsoever, leaving that task entirely to Morgan. On the other hand, by not acknowledging Morgan’s first story, Myers provokes his host into telling two other stories, each time hoping to obtain the writer’s endorsement. The sequence of the three framed stories told throughout the visit will thus provide the warp for the whole narrative, whose discourse is spun invisibly by Myers’s insolent behavior. In the end, Myers will have piloted Morgan’s voci-feration in silence, supplying him with “raw material” of a different kind and which Morgan does not acknowledge any more than Myers does his. It is raw “matter” from unconscious forces which, by virtue of being unarticulated, Morgan (whose function is to verbalize) can never know or recognize as part of himself – his own Other.

3 With each successive story, therefore, Morgan will be unconsciously yielding to new imperatives he simultaneously resists, holding on to old tenets while moving into new grounds. As the writer invades his premises in silence, Morgan is being jostled out of his former fixity and the realistic discourse of each story he tells is “rattled,” but only to redress itself after each jolt with particles from the debris of matter resulting from his collision with Myers. His third and last narrative, consequently, will have come to meet the demands of an altogether new writer and no longer of an “old master” like Tolstoy. To know the change Morgan’s narrative vision has undergone from the first to the last, the reader must shift focus from their content to their structuration, not neglecting the inter-space between them. The modulation his discourse undergoes as each story is rebuffed by the writer’s silence points as much to the interstices between the tryad of stories as to what the actual events are about; less to the stories themselves than to the dialogic space resulting from the agonistic “match” between realism’s custodian (Morgan) and its saboteur (Myers).

4 The above story of Morgan’s assimilation of new matter, however, is only half of the diptych of a story the writer leaves with at the end of the visit. To be whole, it must be matched with its opposite, or Myers’s appropriation of old matter during the year he inhabited Morgan’s house. Re-visiting that same house now, Myers can begin to reject the premises of realism he had thoroughly assimilated then, distancing himself from the “old masters” Morgan guards in order to find his own voice. In so far as that appropriation was dynamic rather than static, transformative rather than imitative, it permitted him to break into new narrative territory. As the two men move in time (past/present, present/past) appropriating old and new material, they are simultaneously polarized between the forces each half embodies: conscious/ unconscious, reactionary/subversive, silent/articulated. The opposition in their functions transforms the visit into a “match,” with each contestant defending his part of a larger narrative territory on which Carver fictionally projects his own need to know the equally divided or binary structure that “creates tension” in his narratives: “It is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it’s also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things” (Fires 17).

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5 As two parts of a self-reflexive story, the two men are functions of each other, at once sharing and colliding in a house which, having been inhabited by both at different time periods, emerges as their “common literary residence” (Skenazy 79) or Jamesian house of fiction. Having turned it into a sanctuary or pantheon to the “old masters,” Edgar Morgan guards its premises ferociously with the help of his dog1. By extension, the “lease” he also accuses Myers of breaking is the mimetic contract which once bound both men to the referential illusions of realism, a copula that fused them into a single couple or perfect “match.” To break away from the above univocal “match,” the writer need only lay bare or unveil the conventions through which Morgan is masking rather than penetrating into what he claims to be the real. He best achieves such unveiling of realism’s artefices by leaving his host’s stories telles quelles, unacknowledged and unwrought rather than put through the realist “mill” for which Morgan proposes his “material” as “grist.”

6 Serving as the story’s matrix, unveiling is first suggested in the name of the bar the wife chooses in which to meet Myers for a drink: “He found Voyles, a small bar on a corner next to a men’s clothing store.” An old French spelling for voiles ‘veils’ whose etymological root designated the canvas-like material used to cover a statue or a work of art before its inauguration, the word also means sails, thus evoking what Myers’s process lacks: the wind needed to “puff” (“Fat”) those sails into narrative activity. Functioning also as a muse in the story, Paula achieves yet another objective by inviting her husband to Voyles: she has brought him out of the house, where he was vacuuming rather than writing. It is also at Voyles that the inspiration to visit the Morgans, in whose house Myers will be rid of his writer’s block, comes to her: “Why don’t we stop and visit the Morgans for a few minutes?” Helping him overcome his resistance to the visit when he recalls “that insulting letter they sent telling us they heard we were keeping a cat in the house,” she assures him that “they’ve forgotten about that by now.”

7 Although not the only infraction the writer committed then, it is on the cat – forbidden on his grounds by the lease – that Morgan displaces his fear of the writer’s process of “knowing” the other’s territory: cat-like in its silent and intuitive penetration of the space which houses the literary traditions of the past2. In contrast, Morgan’s need to defend unquestioningly the old premises compels him to have a dog, the animal that functions oppositionally to the cat and which will go after the writer couple as they approach his grounds: They got out of the car…. They had gone a few steps when a large bushy dog hurtled around the corner of the garage and headed straight for Myers. “Oh, God,” he said, hunching, stepping back, bringing his hands up. He slipped on the walk, his coat flapped, and he fell onto the frozen grass with the dread certainty that the dog would go for his throat. The dog growled once and then began to sniff Meyers’ coat.

8 Morgan has apparently not forgotten the incident of the cat, for they have been received as tresspassers to his property by the Cerberus-like Buzzy. Yet more hostility lies in store for them the moment they reach the professor’s door: “We’re the Myerses,” Paula said. “We came to wish you a Merry Christmas.” “The Myerses?” the man in the doorway said. “Get out! Get in the garage, Buzzy.”

9 The equivocal position of “get out,” directed at Buzzy yet immediately following the interrogative “The Myerses?” blurs the addressee, as does the order that immediately follows: “‘Get, Get! It’s the Myerses,’ the man said to the woman who stood behind him

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trying to look past his shoulder.” Is Morgan, we wonder, telling Buzzy to get away (“get”) or inciting him to “get” (go after) the Myerses, the name that is in the same direct clause? The doubt will be dispelled later when Morgan inadvertently admits he did nothing to stop Buzzy from going after Myers: “I saw it. I was looking out the window when it happened.” For the present, the above intersecting signals point to Morgan’s effort to suppress the hostility he still fosters against one who violated the “lease.” Mixed with the anger, however, is also a curiosity to know the writer couple: “We’ve been very curious about the Myerses. You’ll have a hot drink, sir?” The curiosity is shared by the wife: “Stay…. We haven’t gotten acquainted yet. You don’t know how we have…speculated about you.” Her use of “speculated” signals the mirror- like (specular) effect each couple is to have on the other through the refraction of parts belonging to the whole but atomised writer.

10 Unable to displace his repressed anger on Buzzy once inside the house, Morgan will now “muffle” it in the kitchen, where he goes to prepare his guests’ drinks: “Myers heard the cupboard door bang and heard a muffled word that sounded like a curse.” Transposed to writing, an analogous muffling or veiling of his real feelings through literary conventions will be manifest from the first story Morgan begins to tell once back in the living room: “‘I heard something the other day that might interest you.… It’s a horrible story, really. But maybe you could use it, Mr. Myers .… Grist for the mill, you know and all that,’ Morgan said and laughed and shook the match” (emphasis added). The reader’s eye could glide over the “match” were it not for its repetition in Myers’s manner of disposing of his: “Myers lighted a cigaret and looked around for an ashtray, then dropped the match behind the couch” (emphasis added)3. Cohering with Myers’s provocative function in the story – his disregard for social (literary) conventions and violation of Morgan’s grounds – the polysemic “match” “dropped” by Myers constitutes his first act of insolence, just as Morgan’s shaking of the “match” initiates a series of fissures he will inflict on the perfect (realistic) “match” he once formed with his other half. The first tremor was felt when Morgan “laughed” at a “horrible story” he nevertheless urges Myers to “use.”

11 Disengaging himself from the plight of his characters before he has even begun, Morgan will alienate Myers even more with his parodic4 telling of the “torrid affair” the fellow colleague had “with one of his students.” After asking for divorce, the man was hit on the head with “a can of tomato soup” by the son, causing a “concussion that sent the man to the hospital. His condition is quite serious.” While touching an emotional chord in the two wives, the story elicited a mere grin from Myers rather than involvement. “Catching the grin and narrowing his eyes,” Morgan, who is after the writer’s acknowledgement of his story rather than that of the credulous readers the two wives represent, will propose a point of view or identification with a character who will have the reader’s sympathy: “Now there’s a tale for you, Mr. Myers.... Think of the story you’d have if you could get inside that man’s head.” No sooner, however, had Morgan suggested Myers put himself in the “man’s head” than Mrs. Morgan come to the defense of the wife (“Or her head.…The wife’s”), while Paula’s sympathy goes out to “the poor boy.” Seeing that Myers is losing interest in his story (“Mr. Myers, are you listening?”) Morgan decides to shift his focus from the man to the coed: “Think about this for a moment. Mr. Myers, are you listening?.... Put yourself in the shoes of that eighteen-year old coed who fell in love with a married man. Think about her for a moment, and then you see the possibilities for your story.”

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12 “Lean[ing] back in his chair with a satisfied expression,” Morgan has little doubt that his “raw material” as well as suggestions for the narrator’s perspective are worthy of a Tolstoy: “It would take a Tolstoy to tell it and tell it right…. No less than a Tolstoy. Mr. Myers, the water is still hot.” Rejecting the premise of a realist author’s omniscience, his ability to “get inside” a character’s head, Myers declines to share the “hot drink” with his host and brusquely answers, “Time to go.” By refusing to endorse any one of the four characters as most deserving of his sympathy, the writer has also repudiated the very postulate of deciding the above for the reader; in hushing his own voice, he has implicitly acknowledged the voice of all the other three persons in the living room who, in differing, have sympathized alternately with all four characters of Morgan’s story: man, wife, boy, coed. He has thus undermined the once single voice of the author who led the reader by the nose, arbitrarily deciding where his/her sympathy should go. Through a silence, finally, that prompted Morgan’s shift from the “man” to the “coed,” a move that was motivated not by moral considerations but by the greater “possibilities” offered by the latter, Myers has exposed a non-involvement Carver equates with a lack of “honesty” in Conversations: “Honesty in writing is one of the things that has remained with me.... If I were to write a story about the lady next door, say, who’s over there starving to death and I don’t really care about her dying, then the reader feels my non- involvement on the very first page of the story; my feelings and my apathy are expressed by my choice of words.” (78)

13 Defeated after his first story’s attempts to draw the writer back into the “shoes” of a realist, Morgan will utter his second “curse” as he returns to the kitchen to prepare a second round of drinks before venturing on a second story: “He went to the kitchen and this time Myers distinctly heard Morgan curse as he slammed the kettle onto a burner.” As the embarrassed Mrs. Morgan tries in her turn to “muffle” his “curse” with a “hum,” a chorus of carolers heard in the distance makes her raise her head in an attempt to listen: “Mrs. Morgan rose from her chair and went to the front window. ‘It is singing. Edgar!’ she called.” The Myerses also proceed to the window followed by Morgan, all four characters holding their cup. At still another window “Myers could see the faces across the way – the Ardreys…”5 A metaphor of the writer’s self-reflection, the double window functions much as in other narratives by Carver, and more precisely in “Viewfinder,” whose narrator (and presumed writer monitoring his work through a series of photographs) examines the picture his other half has taken of him standing at the window of his (fictional) house: I looked a little closer and saw my head, in there inside the kitchen window. It made me think, seeing myself like that. I can tell you, it makes a man think.

14 Whatever thinking our four characters have done on this house of fiction as they stand by the window, Mrs. Morgan alone will give voice to her thoughts: “‘They won’t come here,’ Mrs. Morgan said after a time.” Astonishing everyone, the innuendo of her remark stings Morgan most of all, who will retort by saying: “What? Why won’t they come here…. What a goddamned silly thing to say!” Her answer, “I just know they won’t,” propels the husband to uncannily turn to the other wife in the story, thus reinforcing the reader’s suspicion that she is part of the foursome that is, in reality, a single, fractured writer: “Mrs. Myers, are those carolers going to come here or not? What do you think? Will they return to bless this house? We’ll leave it up to you.” Although Paula did not answer, what Mrs. Morgan must know about “this house” is

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apparently grave enough to make her “put the cup down and…weep” – as the carolers pass her house by.

15 The word “bless” strikes the reader as semantically wrong for carolers – since when are carolers endowed with a clergyman’s canonical authority, according to the Scriptures, to “bless” a house? Its resonance, however, infuses the window scene with religious connotations as it also recasts it in a double mise en scène or stage-within-a-stage. As the four people at the window (proscenium) are watching a religious process-ion, we too are watching them (through the window of the Ardreys/Read[y]rs), holding their cup (chalice) and quest-ioning (“they won’t come”/“will they come?”) or beseeching the (holy) figures for a moral assessment of a story just told. Such an assessment is effectuated through a masterful glissando from Morgan’s real house to the fictional house of which his story is metonymic. Beginning with the former, Mrs. Morgan’s remark and weeping suggest a murkiness that Morgan is reluctant to probe into, thereby dismissing the episode as mere “excitement”: “‘Well, now that all the excitement is over,’ Morgan said and went over to his chair. He sat down, frowned, and began to fill his pipe.” No more willing to share the house secret with their guests is Mrs. Morgan, who escapes from the malaise through melodramatic tactics from which neither the weeping nor the “handkerchief” with which to dab her tears is missing: “Morgan gave his handkerchief to his wife.… Mrs. Morgan…dabbed at her eyes. She used the handkerchief on her nose.” In dodging the issue of the carolers’ veering away from their house, the couple acts antithetically to Carver, who writes in Fires: “You have to be immensely daring, very skilled and imaginative and willing to tell everything on yourself. You’re told time and again when you’re young to write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?” (201) The contiguity between the secrets of a real house and those of a story that does not inscribe them into its discourse deprives both houses of a blessing. For the synecdoche house/fiction, in other words,“bless” has acted as an unlocked valve: lack of honesty in one cannot but conflue with and contaminate the other as well. Resisting the above permeability, the Morgans persist in closing the valve, or withholding their secret while continuing to think themselves authorized to “talk about honesty” in their stories. It is precisely what Mrs. Morgan will urge her husband to do in the next story after intimating, through the allegory dramatized by the carolers, that “honesty” was the missing ingredient in her husband’s first story and what deprived it from their benediction: “We’ll let Mrs. Morgan tell this one.” “You tell it, dear. And Mr. Myers, you listen closely,” Mrs. Morgan said. “We have to go,” Myers said. “ Paula, let’s go.” “Talk about honesty, ” Mrs. Morgan said. “Let’s talk about it,” Myers said. Then he said, “Paula, are you coming?” (emphasis added)

16 Incoherent is the writer’s consent to “talk about it” as he simultaneously prepares to leave. Has Myers, we wonder, even heard what Mrs. Morgan said? Or is the discrepant answer his way of telling Morgan that he too has been saying one thing and doing another, soliciting the reader’s sympathy for the “horrible story” that happened to a “friend” while he “laughed” at it himself. Failing to engage Myers with his words, the didactic Morgan can only empower them by “raising his voice” in the manner of an angry pedagogue: “‘Iwant you to hear this story,’ Morgan said, raising his voice. ‘You will insult Mrs. Morgan, you will insult us both, if you don’t listen to this story.’ Morgan

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clenched his pipe.” Little did the professorial Morgan know that the writer’s “grin” at his own previous “tale” about the coed would turn into even more insolent laughter after hearing his wife’s story about a stranger named Mrs. Attenborough who died in the Morgans’ house soon after returning to Mrs. Morgan the purse she had lost: “Fate sent her to die on the couch in our living room in Germany,” Mrs. Morgan said. Myers began to laugh. “Fate . . . sent . . . her . . . to . . . die . . . in . . . your . . . living . . . room?” he said between gasps. “Is that funny, sir?” Morgan said. “Do you find that amusing?” Myers nodded. He kept laughing. He wiped his eyes on his shirt sleeve. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “I can’t help it. That line ‘Fate sent her to die on the couch in our living room in Germany.’ I’m sorry. Then what happened?” he managed to say. “I’d like to know what happened then.”

17 Parodic once again of “literary” or “pseudo-poetic” rather than “common language, the language of normal discourse, the language we speak to each other in” (Fires 29, 28) sounds Mrs. Morgan’s use of “fate” for a fait divers of a story, an absurd accident void of the transcendence the narrator wishes to give – force upon – it. Oblivious to the writer’s mockery, however, Mrs. Morgan resumes the story which ends with the discovery of her own “hundred twenty dollars” in the dead woman’s purse. The revelation of the stranger’s dishonesty leaves Mrs. Morgan “astonished,”6 but the didactic Morgan, for whom literature must also have a moralizing function, cannot resist expressing his “keen disappointment” at the theft, thus causing Myers to giggle once again. The giggling will so inflame Morgan that he will accuse Myers of not being a “real writer,” or what we know by now the academic equates with realist: “If you were a real writer, as you say you are, Mr. Myers…you would not dare laugh! You would try to understand. You would plumb the depths of that poor soul’s heart and try to understand. But you are no writer, sir!”

18 Can the “poor soul” Morgan is referring to be the same Mrs. Attenborough who had removed the money from his wife’s wallet? If so, he has forgotten the “keen disappointment” he expressed at the woman’s deceit in the preceding sentence. Wishing to merely “talk about honesty,” Morgan has ended up defending a dishonest stranger, and exposing his own insincerity as a narrator in the process. The glaring contradiction must have seeped into Morgan’s unconscious as well, for in his next tirade against a Myers who is “shaking with laughter” he unwittingly implies that for all their realism, his two previous stories were not “real,” as the third one he is menacing to tell presumably will be: “The real story lies right here, in this house, this very living room, and it’s time it was told! The real story is here, Mr. Myers,” Morgan said. He walked up and down over the brilliant wrapping paper that had unrolled and now lay spread across the carpet. He stopped to glare at Myers, who was holding his forehead and shaking with laughter.

19 Comic indeed is the sight of Morgan walking on the “brilliant paper” that his wife has been wrapping the Christmas gifts with throughout the visit. There is more than humor, however, in the doggedness with which he walks “up and down” the presumably narrow width of the gift-wrapping “paper that had unrolled,” his feet clinging to it as to a magnetic field until the end of his story: “Morgan’s lips were white. He continued to walk up and down on the paper, stopping every now and then to look at Myers and emit little puffing noises from his lips.” Even taking into consideration his paroxysm of anger at the sight of a laughing Myers, his seeming oblivion to the rustling

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and tearing his feet are doing to the paper is so excessive by any mimetic standards as to draw the reader’s regard on the paper itself: the “brilliant” side being ruffled and “broken” by Morgan’s feet is clearly evocative of Carver’s own “smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface” (Fires 17) of a story, 7 whereas Morgan’s inability to extricate his feet from the paper endows it with an uncanny power that is new for Morgan. In the fiction Myers represents and which Morgan is about to appropriate, paper exercises a magnetic ocular pull on the writer as it draws to its white surface forces lying, unsuspected, within him. As such, it is no longer the inert material on which the events of a story pre-existing in his head are trans-[s]cribed but the first truly “raw material” on which those forces will be in-scribed. Escaping the auctor’s control and turning him into a scriptor, paper functions much as it did for the symbolist Mallarmé remembered by Valéry in his Cahiers: “I have often heard Mallarmé talk of the power of the white page – generating power. One sits in front of the empty paper. And something writes itself, creates (makes) itself – etc. The power of the void…” (II 1035). A similar passage can be found in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe: “Writing is not doomed to be the shadow of speech. Be attentive to yourself as you write and you will mark there are times when the words form themselves on the paper de novo, as the Romans used to say, out of the deepest of inner silences” (142-143). Not much different from the above is Carver’s own rhetorical question in Conversations: “How do I know what I want to say until I see what I’ve said?” (171).

20 Coming out of Myers’s “deepest…silence” and given utterance – voci-ferated – by Morgan in a new crescendo of anger is a new story that will now write Morgan as much as he will write it. Clinging to his diegetic linearity and coupling with it, it will unveil his embryonic appropriation of new tenets resulting from his collision with Myers. In yielding with reluctance to Myers’s new imperatives, Morgan’s third and last story will also be honest in so far as it is – unlike the ones before – referential to his own life rather than to the lives of others: it is about the infractions Myers committed when he was lodging in Morgan’s house. As such, it meets Carver’s definition as well: “The fiction I’m most interested in…strikes me as autobiographical to some extent…. At the very least it’s referential” (Fires 200).

***

21 Contrary to what we might expect from his insistence on “here,” however, his “real story” does not unfold in the hic et nunc but in the past. Yet Morgan is not all wrong when he says that his story is “here.” Underneath the seeming contradiction, he is beginning to intimate an uncanny connection between the writer’s behavior now and his sojourn then: it connects oppositionally to what he appropriated (with the help of the cat) when he inhabited (and was inhabited by) the realist’s grounds. Without a thorough assimilation of the message of the “masters” then, “this story,” as Morgan will soon tell us, “would not exist.” Both acts – the writer’s appropriation of matter in the past and its ultimate subversion now – are two phases in his dialogic appropriation of realism’s tenets, two parts of a single transformational process that is simultaneously “here” and “there,” or temporally double.

22 Overlapping, furthermore, with Myers’s appropriation of the ancients then is Morgan’s embryonic assimilation of a new narrative technique now; as one (Myers’s) is about to come to an end “here”in the form of a story, the other merely begins to coalesce in

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Morgan’s consciousness. Still clinging to the past while yielding to the impact of new forces, Morgan can be seen as putting on the new writer’s shoes without having taken off his own. Similarly fusing past and present is the “brilliant…paper” the “shoes” rumple and dent: it has “unrolled” like a scroll on which new material or in-scriptions will be engraved alongside Morgan’s old discourse, turning the scroll into a palimpsest. To read both the visible and invisible script of the palimpsest – the two men’s separate (ex)(in)cursions into and out of the space of “this” house at different time intervals – Morgan has well intuited his need of a reader who is “friends with” both men. Such is the mutual “friend” who found Morgan a tenant while he was in Germany: Consider this for a possibility, Mr. Myers! Morgan screamed. Consider! A friend – let’s call him Mr. X – is friends with…with Mr. and Mrs. Y, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Z.

23 Still mindful of social codes and convenances, Morgan most likely uses letters to veil the identity of his guests. What he may not be conscious of, however, is that the same letters (typographical characters) are simultaneously doing away with one of realism’s illusions: names for real-life characters. Moving away from an old psychology through which a writer had the illusion to “plumb the depths” of a human “soul,” Morgan’s use of the algebraic-sounding XYZ points instead to “human presences defined only by a system of relationships, by a function….” (Calvino 34). It appears that Morgan, the old realist whose use of XYZ now smacks of Jacobson’s theory of functions, is about to appropriate a new…narratological discourse. As functions of each other, Y and Z are two parts of a single writer for whom division is a pre-requisite to “know[ing] each other,” to seeing more clearly the incessant shuttle of different “raw material” each brings to the other. Mr. and Mrs. Y and Mr. and Mrs. Z do not know each other unfortunately. I say unfortunately because if they had known each other this story would not exist because it would not have taken place. (emphasis in the text)

24 Coming from a man who could barely “muffle a curse” when serving Myers a drink and whose hostility toward him we have been witnessing all along, Morgan’s use of “unfortunately” first strikes us as semantically dissonant for two men who hate each other in real life. Most likely, what Morgan wants to say is that he would not have taken Myers as a tenant if he had known the transgressions he would commit. When Morgan repeats and underscores “unfortunately” in the second sentence, however, it becomes clearer that he has glided once again (as with “bless”) from life to fiction: the word is no longer contiguous to the two men as real-life characters but to their function in the story (“…if they had known each other this story …”). In a self-reflexive reading of “unfortunately,” in other words, Morgan has intuited that this new story owes its existence to their inherently divided narrative vision. The convoluted temporality of the second sentence, from which we can extract the following premises, as of a syllogism, shows Morgan’s attempt to fuse or reconcile the two: - 1. this story exists because it has already taken place. - 2. this story exists because the two men did not know each other.

25 In the first premise Morgan is conforming to realism’s demands that a story take place before a writer can do with it what Morgan urges Myers to do with his: “put that story into words and not pussyfoot around with it….” Writing, then, becomes “the shadow of speech.” In the second premise, however, Morgan is acknowledging the existence of a story that came into being because of their other-ness to, or not knowing each other. While one man verbalizes the order of events, the other pilots the silent process that brings ever new matter to the threshhold of Morgan’s utterance. In their vision of

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realism, moreover, the two men are also at odds with each other. Divided in time, they are also separated by two continents as well as two different concepts of a literary house. Morgan, for whom writing is imitative of the “old masters,” pays “homage” to them in a European museum which houses a “Bauhaus exhibit”: One afternoon in Munich, Edgar and I went to the Dortmunder Museum. There was a Bauhaus exhibit that fall, and Edgar said the heck with it…let’s take a day off. We caught a tram and rode across Munich to the museum. We spent several hours viewing the exhibit and revisiting some of the galleries to pay homage to a few of our favorites amongst the old masters.

26 To this day I have found no existence of a “Dortmunder Museum” in Munich (Dortmund being in Westphalia and Munich in Bavaria, at the other end of Germany). Although Carver may have known of such a museum when he published the story in the Iowa Review in 1972…, it is more likely that he engages in scriptural play with the names Dortmund[er] and Bauhaus – and possibly poking fun at the professor’s geographical and cultural lacunae. Interestingly, the composition of Bau-haus points to the construction, or building (bauen) of a (literary) haus. The underscoring of “Bauhaus,” however, may serve to recall to the reader what Morgan may ignore: that it was an avant garde movement which radically broke with the past and was thus subversive of “old masters.” Morgan, whose house is as full of “clutter” as his discourse full of verbiage, could not have paid homage to Gropius nor adhered to his motto of “less is more” if the work of the new master were not innocuously exhibited in a museum, petrified or fixed in time. Equally significant is the composition of the name Dort- munder in its evocation of a speech (mund ‘mouth’) that is distant (dort ‘over there’) or far-away from where Myers is while the academic is groping to find his bearings in Europe. Rejecting the canonical trip expected of an American writer and that Morgan urges Myers to also take (“I should think a trip to Europe would be very beneficial to a writer”), Myers was able to dialog with the ancients right here in his native soil and in Morgan’s (his own other’s) house. It was here, in a living house, that he also brought what one cannot bring to a museum: a cat; here that he was able to turn their “influences [into] forces” (Fires 19) through an intuitive act Morgan will never know so long as Mrs. Morgan, an extension of himself, can never have any living animal in the house: Now, Mr. and Mrs … Z move into the house and bring a cat with them that Mr. and Mrs. Y hear about in a letter from Mr. X. Mr. and Mrs Z bring a cat into the house even though the terms of the lease have expressly forbidden cats or other animals in the house because of Mrs. Y’s asthma.

27 Menacing for Morgan was the cat-like intimacy Myers was to acquire of every nook and cranny in his “house.” It marked the writer’s first violation of the “spirit and the letter” of the “lease” that bound him to the order of the ancients. The disruptive act of bringing the animal that will leave nothing unturned provokes Morgan into sending “that insulting letter” which signaled the first fracture in a couple whose prior one- ness Morgan will unveil in his confusion of Y and Z in the following lines, a lapsus in which the two men are shown to be as permutable as algebraic symbols: The real story, Mr. Myers, lies in the situation I’ve just described. Mr. and Mrs. Z – I mean Mr. and Mrs. Y’s moving into the Z’s house, invading the Zs’ house, if the truth is to be told. Sleeping in the Zs’ bed is one thing, but unlocking the Zs’ private closet and using their linen, vandalizing the things found there, that was against the spirit and letter of the lease. (emphasis in the text)

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28 What Morgan has ended up saying after his own correction (“Mrs. Z – I mean Mr. and Mrs. Y’s…”) is that the Morgans (previously designated by the letter Y) have moved into the house of the Myerses (previously designated by the letter Z) rather than the opposite. Is the error due to inattention on the part of Carver? Although not to be excluded, that possibility is made remote by the fact that the shuffle was done following a hesitation and “correction,” both presuming a brief moment of awareness on his part. If intentional, Carver may have chosen to ridicule Morgan’s inadequate assimilation of the language of functions, part of a narratological discourse that plays tricks on him for not yet being entirely his. A trick, however, may also be played on the old reader, for such an error can ultimately not say any of the above if it goes undetected, as it risks to be by the passive reader of a realistic story who would never suspect an author of not getting his characters straight. For the reader who questions the authorial voice, however, who does not glide over the graphic material of a scriptor, the permutation of letters comes to strengthen the intuition that the two men are one divided writer or “this same couple” that Morgan tells us about immediately following the confusion that momentarily blurred their identity: And this same couple, the Zs, opened boxes of kitchen utensils marked ‘Don’t Open.’ And broke dishes when it was spelled out, spelled out in that same lease, that they were not to use the owners,’ the Zs’ personal, I emphasize personal, possessions.” (emphasis in text)

29 As two parts of a writer’s severed self, oscillating between a narrator of process and of a “fixed position,” the two men are as inextricable as the two parts of the story, a splintered new narrative characterized by a flux toward a fixity that must never be reached, for that would spell the end of “tension,” “menace,” or the “sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion, or else, most often, there simply won’t be a story” (Fires 17). Thus, Myers can circulate and pry into all that Morgan’s house contains – it is his function to do so – but when he invades the “attic” or uppermost layer of Morgan’s mimetic territory, where silence breaks into speech, “a line has to be drawn,” as Mrs. Morgan protests: “And the bathroom things, dear – don’t forget the bathroom things.... It’s bad enough using the Zs’ blankets and sheets, but when they also get into their bathroom things and go through the little private things stored in the attic, a line has to be drawn.”

30 In the topography of the literary house, the “line” that must not be crossed if tension is to be maintained is that which splits the story/writer into conscious and unconscious forces, the membrane that generates the dynamics of process. For such a story’s new brand of realism, the wife is first to intuit, Tolstoy is no longer the model, as he was for the first story (“It would take a Tolstoy to tell it…”). “And it doesn’t need Tolstoy to tell it,” Mrs. Morgan said. “It doesn’t need Tolstoy,” Morgan said.

31 Sensing the above as the couple’s surrender to the imperatives of his own narrative vision, Myers now knows that his function has come to an end: “Myers laughed [and] he and Paula got up from the couch at the same time and moved toward the door. ‘Goodnight,’ Myers said merrily” (emphasis added). Unsurprisingly, it is the only time Paula will not try to hold him back. His merry disposition contrasts with Morgan’s sense of defeat, the intimation that he served merely as mouthpiece of a process masterfully steered by the silent Myers. Sensing the departure to be definitive this time and having run out of tactics with which to hold the writer back, Morgan, who has

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hosted his guest’s story, turns vicious and makes the following accusation: “I didn’t intend to bring this up, but in light of your behavior here tonight, I want to tell you that I’m missing my two-volume set of ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic.’ Those records are of great sentimental value. I bought them in 1955. And now I insist you tell me what happened to them!” In a move that surprises the reader, Mrs. Morgan will now come to the defense of the other husband in the story: “In all fairness, Edgar,” Mrs. Morgan said…“after you took inventory of the records, you admitted you couldn’t recall the last time you had seen those records.” “But I am sure of it now,” Morgan said. “I am positive I saw those records just before we left, and now, now I’d like this writer to tell me of their whereabouts. Mr. Myers?”

32 Left with two versions, the reader who has by now learned to doubt Morgan’s sincerity, who knows that his stories contain contradictions (“poor soul” for Mrs. Attenborough), errors (X for Y), discrepancies (“unfortunately”), as well as untold secrets, cannot but suspect a gap in his memory now as well. Turning, therefore, not to what Morgan says but to signs of what he does not, more reliable for such a reader is the title and date of the record, the inherent opposition of “Jazz” and “Philharmonic” (literally, love of harmony, the opposite of jazz). The “sentimental value” Morgan attaches to the moment the higher institution opened its doors to the one which had contested its laws of composition may tell us something about the only kind of appropriation Morgan considers legitimate: that which has been canonized – blessed – by a venerable institution such as the Philharmonic. Morgan, we presume, could not have recognized jazz before 1955, a landmark date that commemorates an event: the harnessing, after a lapse of time, of the menacing forces once inherent in its movement. Such commemorations, as we know, tend to touch a sentimental chord.

33 Evocative of a similar process for the academic was the Bauhaus, a modernist movement which waged its war on the “old masters” of architecture before finally gaining admittance into the (imaginary) “Dortmunder.” Morgan could not have accepted their heretical ideas before such recognition or “canonization” any more than he could have accepted jazz before 1955, the year it was instituted within a larger musical tradition. By analogy, deprived of the canonical blessing of a higher authority, what Myers did in Morgan’s house remains in his eyes an act of usurpation rather than a contractual appropriation respectful of the “lease.” Antipodal to a professor of literature who needs an external authority to “bless” or acknowledge the phenomenon that has taken place in his living room is the writer: he has participated in the creation rather than commemoration of an event. For Myers, appropriation is “self-wrought” and the result of an “inaugural act [which] has an implicit teleology. It creates history” (Miller 29).

34 As they leave the Morgans behind, the Myerses “surprised Buzzy. The dog yelped in what seemed fear and then jumped to the side.” Having earlier “growled” and “gone for his throat,” has Buzzy, we wonder, now come to recognize a new “master”? Has his function, that is, also undergone permutation: from Cerberus (guardian of the dead) to Argos (Odysseus’s dog who recognized his real master despite the clothes veiling his identity)? Or has he been deprived of his function altogether, as the following statement from Roland Barthes’ inaugural speech at the Collège de France may suggest: Ce n’est pas, si l’on veut, que la littérature soit détruite; c’est qu’elle n’est plus gardée: c’est donc le moment d’y aller” ‘It is not, so to speak, that literature has been destroyed; it is that it is no longer being guarded: it is therefore the moment to go in’ (27).

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35 Sounding like a license to loot, Barthes’ “moment to go in” would be alarming to Morgan, as would all new “fictions without authority” (Bonnefoy 10) that proclaim the death of the author. Such anarchy would be devastating for the hierarchical order Morgan maintains in his house, beginning with the place he assigns to Buzzy: “‘He sleeps in the garage,’ Edgar Morgan said. ‘He begs to come in the house, but we can’t allow it, you know.’ Morgan chuckled.”8 Gloating over his control of Buzzy’s living quarters, Morgan shows that the first condition in his rapport with his own dog is one of distance rather than affection, a rapport of “master” to “servant” reflecting his own submission to the unquestioned authority of the “old masters.” His relation to Buzzy thus illuminates the broader hegemonic discourse we have seen him hold on literature, a body of works he cannot know when deprived of the authoritative voice of a master or an “official line” (Bakhtin 345) to which he will passively submit. He thus remains he on whom new knowledge is forced rather than embraced by. At the end of a narrative which has unveiled its own process, the portrait of the “real” Morgan is also being unveiled: that of a reactionary academic whose “authoritative discourse demands our unconditional allegiance” rather than our “free appropriation and assimilation” (Bakhtin 343). The disturbing implication of the above does not escape Paula as she leaves his house: “Those people are crazy…. They were scary.” “Scary” indeed is a dogmatic professor in his defense of calcified “material” and petrified monuments to dead writers who remains deaf and blind to the work of the living. In contrast to Morgan, Carver has no “sympathy for guardians, so-called, of sacred flames” (Conversations 181). Alarming also is one who knows all about the manipulatory “power of the pen and all that” and urges the writer to “use” it. Ever threatened by the invisible unconscious forces he muffles within him, Morgan is “scary” by virtue of being scared of his own…double. Too busy venerating the masters, Morgan, finally, did not see that doubleness transcended boundaries of literary schools and that it was far from unknown to realists like Henry James9 or even to his own model, Tolstoy, who wrote: “In a writer there must always be two people – the writer and the critic” (cit. Wallace 170). Having learned the lesson of the masters, Carver knew that Myers could not have unveiled his new narrative without Morgan remaining fixed in his blind devotion to the ancients: he provided Myers with the resistance and opposition he needed for his creative act. Together they constitute a couple of stasis and movement, reactionary forces pitted against the creative urge to explore new grounds. As tempting as it is for the reader, therefore, to put Carver solely in the shoes of Myers, the explicit writer in “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” s/he must not forget his/her function of being “friends” with both men, of knowing that each contains and is contained by the other, that the whole writer is to be found in a dizzying process of dédoublement and embedding of one man’s story within the other’s. Toward that end, it may help to keep in mind that it was Carver (and not Morgan) who said: “Tolstoy is the best there is” (Fires 207).

36 If, in Pirandellian fashion, we persist in seeing the story’s “[Four] Characters in Search of a [single] Author,” we will not find Carver in the shoes of either man – or his spouse – but in the oscillating movement of taking off one pair and putting on another – half of him “knowing,” half of him ignoring the ground they are treading. For consciousness, as he suggests in Conversations, is in the act of writing: “When I start writing…. I don’t always know what I’m doing.... Sometimes I’m quite surprised, even when I read the story in longhand and am typing it up. Sometimes I won’t know what’s coming next.

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I’m quite surprised to see what I’ve written. I’ll be reading something, and think, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. What’s going to happen now?’” (144)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Barthes, Roland. Essais critiques. Paris: Seuil, 1964.

---. Leçon inaugurale. Collège de France. Paris. 7 Jan. 1977.

Bonnefoy, Yves. Leçon inaugurale. Collège de France. Paris. 4 Dec. 1981.

Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. New York: Vintage, 1989.

---. Fires. New York: Vintage, 1983.

---. No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings. Ed. William L. Stull. New York: Vintage, 1992.

---. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? New York: Vintage, 1992.

Gentry, Marshall Bruce and William L. Stull, eds. Conversations With Raymond Carver. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

Coetzee, J. M. Foe. New York: Penguin, 1987.

James, Henry. Preface. The Portrait of a Lady. Ed. Robert D. Bamberg. New York: Norton, 1975. VI – IX.

Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987.

Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.

Skenazy, Paul. “Life in Limbo: Ray Carver’s Fiction.” Enclitic 11 (1988): 77-83.

Valéry, Paul. Cahiers II. Paris: Gallimard, 1974.

Wallace, Martin. Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1986.

NOTES

1. Anagrammatic “tinker[ing]” (Carver’s word for Jakobson’s bricolage) with Morgan’s first name, E-D-G-A-R, also indicates his function to be that of G-A-R-D-E, the French word for “guardian.” 2. Carver also saw himself as an “instinctual writer” (Conversations 199). 3. Similar “matches” are uncannily found in other Carver stories such as “The Train,” one of his most mysterious narratives whose multi-fractured or irrevocably “broken” mimetic surface is best understood if seen as a rebus or a dream. Oniric thus is the description of the story’s protagonist as an “old man…without shoes” waiting at a train station as well as his obsessive search for “matches” throughout the story. After stepping outside temporarily, he returns to tell his female companion: “I found some matches…. There they were, a book of matches right next to the curb. Someone must have dropped them” (emphasis added). If “repetition is in itself a sign”

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(Riffaterre 49), the above “matches,” which rupture rather than cohere with the diegetic flow of the story, are also signs pointing to how we should read Carver’s own “book of matches”: by matching or connecting parts “dropped” from the writer’s unconscious so that they might elucidate an otherwise incoherent narrative. 4. “Literary parody of dominant novel-types” according to Bakhtin, “plays a large role in the history of the European novel. One could even say that the most important novelistic models and novel-types arose precisely during this parodic destruction of preceding novelistic worlds” (309). 5. A cryptogram for R-A-Y-ders, A-R-D-R-E-Y-S can be RAY-mond Carver’s way of inscribing himself in his text. The double window would thus permit one part of the writer to take a distance from the first story which Morgan has just told in order to view it from the window “across the way.” The “neighbors’” window, moreover, may also serve as a loge for the R-E-A-D-[Y]-R-S, the word that results from further tinkering with the same letters. 6. According to Roland Barthes, for whom “Il n’y a pas de fait divers sans étonnement” ‘there is no fait divers without astonishment’ (Essais 197), Mrs. Morgan’s reaction would appear the only honest response one can have to an act committed by a person whose deep motives escape us, as do those of a stranger like Mrs. Attenborough. 7. A similar reflexion on “paper” as eponymic of a certain kind of writing is also seen in “Cathedral” when the blind man asks the implied writer, “go get us a pen and some heavy paper. … So I went upstairs. My legs felt like they didn’t have any strength in them. They felt like they did after I’d done some running. In my wife’s room, I looked around. I found some ballpoints in a little basket on her table. And then I tried to think where to look for the kind of paper he was talking about.” 8. Buzzy’s status is raised to that of a character by Mrs. Morgan, who “announced” him to the Myerses: “‘His name is Buzzy.’ Hilda Morgan announced….” 9. In this issue, see Charles May’s note on döppelganger figures p. 38.

ABSTRACTS

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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AUTHORS

VASILIKI FACHARD Vasiliki Fachard studied French and Comparative Literature in the U. S. and at the Sorbonne. After writing her PhD on Paul Valéry and teaching at the State University of New York at Albany, she moved to Switzerland, where she first started writing on Carver, focusing on his fiction as self-reflexive. Her other articles for JSSE are on “Fat,” “Vitamins,’’ and “Collectors.” She is currently working on a book entitled In the Shoes of Raymond Carver: Where to Look for the Writer in His Fiction.

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Dreams and Other Connections among Carver’s Recovered Stories

Randolph Paul Runyon

1 Of the three dreams recounted in detail at the beginning of “Dreams,” the third of the five newfound Carver stories published in Call If You Need Me, only the last seems at first glance to have any relevance to the story’s principal event, the disaster that befalls their next-door neighbor, whose two children perish from smoke inhalation in a fire. In real life of course one does not expect dreams to predict the future, but in a well- crafted story it is not unreasonable to expect that a story-within-the-story told at the outset will have some connection to subsequent events. Dottie is in the habit of recounting her dreams to her husband before writing them down in her notebook. In this third dream, she tells him, “…we were on a ship, a big ship, a cruise ship, I guess. We were in bed, a bunk or something, when someone knocked at the door with a tray of cupcakes. They came in, left the cupcakes and went out. I got out of bed and went to get one of the cupcakes. I was hungry, you see, but when I touched the cupcake it burned the tips of my fingers. Then my toes began to curl up – like they do when you’re scared? And then I got back in bed but I heard loud music – it was Scriabin – and then somebody began to rattle glasses, hundreds of glasses, maybe thousands of glasses, all of them rattling at once. I woke you up and told you about it, and you said you’d go to see what it was. While you were gone I remember seeing the moon go by outside, go by the porthole, and then the ship must have turned or something. Then the moon came by again and lit up the whole room. Then you came back, still in your pajamas, and got back in bed and went back to sleep without saying a word. The moon was shining right outside the window and everything in the room seemed to gleam, but still you didn’t say anything. I remember feeling a little afraid of you for not saying anything, and my toes started curling again. Then I went back to sleep.” (42)

2 The cupcakes that were so hot that they burned the dreamer’s fingers anticipate the burning that will take place in Mary Rice’s house next door. There are some other, less obvious, connections as well:

3 (1) The moon lights up the room twice. The first time, the dreamer simply notes it, but when it reappears, the moon is brighter than before, and frightens the dreamer. The

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moon’s first appearance through the porthole corresponds to the light that comes through the next-door neighbor’s window. “At night,” the narrator recalls, “I could see the glare of the TV in their bedroom window.” Mary Rice, the children’s mother, worked at night, leaving a babysitter in charge, “and all night the lights burned over there” (43). The moon’s second appearance, brighter and malevolent, corresponds to the fire. The dream and the surrounding context of the fire next door curiously parallel one of the most famous dreams recounted in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams: A father had been watching day and night beside the sick-bed of his child. After the child died, he retired to rest in an adjoining room, but left the door ajar so that he could look from his room into the next, where the child’s body lay surrounded by tall candles. An old man, who had been installed as a watcher, sat beside the body, murmuring prayers. After sleeping for a few hours the father dreamed that the child was standing by his bed, clasping his arm and crying reproachfully: “Father, don’t you see that I am burning?” The father woke up and noticed a bright light coming from the adjoining room. Rushing in, he found that the old man had fallen asleep, and the sheets and one arm of the beloved body were burnt by a fallen candle. (367)

4 It is tempting to imagine that Carver knew of this dream, and that he has retold it here, separating it into two interrelated stories. The first is the dream about burning (the cupcakes) and a strong light through the window (fire from next door); the second, the story of how Mary Rice’s children Susan and Michael perished from the fire that ravaged her house. As Freud explains, the light from the burning boy was the somatic stimulus that triggered the dream: “The bright light shining through the open door on to the sleeper’s eyes gave him the impression which he would have received had he been awake: namely, that a fire had been started near the corpse by a falling candle. It is quite possible that he had taken into his sleep his anxiety lest the aged watcher should not be equal to his task” (368). To this interpretation Freud adds that “the speech of the child must have consisted of phrases which it had uttered while still alive, and which were associated with important events for the father. Perhaps the complaint, ‘I am burning,’ was associated with the fever from which the child died.” Freud further argues that, despite what one might think, even this dream is an instance of wish-fulfillment, as he argued that dreams generally are: The dead child behaves as though alive; he warns his father himself; he comes to his father’s bed and clasps his arm, as he probably did in the recollection from which the dream obtained the first part of the child’s speech. It was for the sake of this wish-fulfillment that the father slept a moment longer. The dream was given precedence over waking reflection because it was able to show the child still living. If the father had waked first, and had then drawn the conclusion which led him into the adjoining room, he would have shortened the child’s life by this one moment. (368)

5 “Dreams” is one of a number of stories and poems in the Carver canon in which the hostility of a father toward his children is thematic, including “The Compartment,” “Elephant,” “The Child,” and “On an Old Photograph of My Son” (“Oh, son, in those days I wanted you dead / a hundred – no, a thousand – different times” [All of Us, 276]). Certainly the narrator of this story bears no enmity toward poor Michael and Susan; yet in the context of all those other texts it presents itself as a dream motivated by an unconscious desire for wish-fulfillment. Carver, one could well say, is playing with fire here. Think in particular of “Fires,” the essay in which he says that “the greatest single influence on my life, and on my writing, directly and indirectly, has been my two children” (Call, 97), and then goes on to show that he meant that with bitter irony. Because of the constant disruptions his children imposed, he was constrained to write

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only short stories and poems – nothing that required long periods of quiet and concentration, like novels. His children killed off what “fires” of inspiration he had. Just when he started to achieve some literary success with the acceptance of “Neighbors” and then of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, “my kids were in full cry…and they were eating me alive. My life soon took another veering, a sharp turn, and then it came to a dead stop off on a siding.... If there’d once been a fire it’d gone out” (Call, 105-6). The only other appearance in the essay of the fires to which its title alludes was in his recollection of his writing teacher John Gardner saying of his students that “as far as he could see none of us had the necessary fire” (Call,103; italics in the text). The story “Dreams” looks like wish- fulfillment because the two children, a boy and a girl like Carver’s Chris and Vance, are destroyed by that which his own children stole from him.

6 (2) In the dream, Dottie recalls hearing “loud music – it was Scriabin.” By contrast to the moon’s second appearance, which prophetically foreshadows the fire next door, this element of the dream could simply be the result of what Freud called a somatic stimulus on the body of the dreamer, like the bright light of the fire in the room next door that shone on the eyes of the sleeping father in the dream of the burning child. For Dottie could well have heard classical music coming from Mary Rice’s phonograph while she was sleeping. In fact, the moon’s first appearance through the porthole could also have been the result of a physical stimulus experienced as she slept, because light as well as classical music came into Dottie and her husband’s house from the house next door. Mary Rice worked at night, returning at five in the morning, when “the lights would glow over at Mary Rice’s for the rest of the night. Sometimes, if her windows were open, like now, I’d hear classical piano music, and once I even heard Alexander Scourby reading Great Expectations” (40). Dottie does not say whether the Scriabin she heard was for piano or orchestra, but the letters the composer’s name shares with “Scourby” suggests a connection there as well; in addition, fire plays a role in that particular Dickens novel (in chapter 49, when Miss Havisham’s wedding dress bursts into flames and Pip manages to put out the fire at some risk to himself). Freud maintained that the words the burning child pronounced in the dream “must have consisted of phrases which it had uttered while still alive”; the recycling of “Scourby” into “Scriabin” suggests that Carver is following Freud in his treatment of this aspect of the dream.

7 (3) Dottie continues: “and then somebody began to rattle glasses, hundreds of glasses, maybe thousands of glasses, all of them rattling at once” (42). This detail of the dream may foreshadow the breaking of glass in the firemen’s attempt to rescue the children: “The bedroom window was broken out, and in the bedroom I could see a man moving around in the room carrying something that could have been an ax” (44).

8 (4) The dreamer is struck by the fact that when the moon makes its second appearance her husband remains silent: “but still you didn’t say anything.” That silence is repeated at the scene of the fire: “But none of the people watching were saying anything” (44).

9 The first of Dottie’s dreams is about impending disaster: I dreamed I was a boy going fishing with my sister and her girlfriend.… I was supposed to drive them fishing, but I couldn’t find the car keys. Then, when I found the keys, the car wouldn’t start. Suddenly we were at the fishing place and on the lake in a boat. A storm was coming up, but I couldn’t get the motor started. My sister and her friend just laughed and laughed. But I was afraid. (38)

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10 This dream, too, anticipates the fire, if not as strikingly as the third dream. A policeman recounts what happened: “I guess one of those space heaters caught on fire… A couple of kids were in there. Three kids, counting the baby-sitter. She got out. The kids didn’t make it, I don’t guess. Smoke inhalation” (44). Rosemary Bandel, the baby-sitter, was the only one of the three who was aware of the fire; the other two had passed out from smoke inhalation. In this regard she resembles the dreamer, who of the three people in the boat is the only one aware of the danger presented by the impending storm. The dreamer’s change of gender results in there being one boy and two girls on the boat, as there were one body and two girls in the burning house.

11 The second of the three dreams recounted in the beginning of “Dreams” has, as far as I can tell, no connection to the fire. That may be because Dottie dreamed it before she married the narrator, and thus before she was living in the house next door to Mary Rice. Once Dotty told me she’d had a dream right before we were married when she thought she was barking! She woke herself up and saw her little dog, Bingo, sitting beside the bed looking at her in what she thought was a strange way. She realized she’d been barking in her sleep. What did it mean? she wondered. (38)

12 Carver would return to this dream in “Slippers,” a poem in Ultramarine. Two couples are taking turns telling their dreams. A woman (not, as in the story, the narrator’s wife) tells “[h]ow she woke up / barking this one night. And found her little dog, / Teddy, beside the bed, watching” (221; emphasis in the text). The narrator doesn’t have a dream to tell, but considers telling in place of a dream the story of how his wife lost her slippers when a quilt fell off the bed and covered them while she was sleeping, looked for them everywhere the next morning, and was delighted at last to find them. It’s not much of a story, which may be the reason he decides not to tell it to the company after all. “Nevertheless, / it has moment” (222), he comments to the reader.

13 Indeed it has moment in the sequence of poems in which it appears. For the burial of the slippers beneath the quilt repeats the burial motif begun in the immediately preceding poem “The Rest,” whose narrator cleans a big silver salmon, cuts off the head, and then, “I bury what needs burying / and keep the rest” (221). In Reading Raymond Carver I argued that the stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, What We Talk About When We Talk about Love, and Cathedral (and the poems in Ultramarine as well) each repeat elements of their immediate predecessor as dreams, according to Freud, recycle day residue from the events of the day immediately preceding the dream, using it as raw material for the disguise with which the unconscious will clothe its suppressed wishes. Each story and each poem are like a dream, and then become the equivalent of day residue for the next. In “Slippers” this is particularly the case since the story of the buried slippers is presented as a substitute for a dream. The dog who hears its mistress barking, and is “beside the bed, watching” becomes day residue to become recycled in the next poem, “Asia,” in the form of horses that stand on the beach and stare at sailors passing by on a freighter, “Watching the ship as it passes” and thinking the same thought as the sailors. “I know what they’re thinking,” the narrator says of the sailors; they’re thinking of their destination, Asia. Likewise, “in the mind / of the horses…/ it is always Asia.” It is not clear why the horses should be thinking of Asia (do they want to jump on the ship and go there?), but they do. This strange situation parallels the equally strange one of the dog hearing its mistress bark, as if she had become a dog, or were having the same thoughts as one.

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14 Similar connections may have eventually arisen between “Dreams” and some of the other newfound stories had Carver lived to complete them and the book their collection would have made. Yet their actual arrangement in Call If You Need Me is quite interesting and suggestive, whether because Tess Gallagher intuited Carver’s intentions, because she arranged them according to her own principles, or simply by chance. One thing we know is that they do not appear in the book in the order or the category of their discovery, since Gallagher found “Kindling,” “Dreams,” and “Vandals” in March 1999 in Carver’s desk in Port Angeles, Washington, and William L. and Maureen Stull found “What Would You Like to See?” and “Call If You Need Me” in midsummer 1999 at the Ohio State University Library. But the order in the book is: “Kindling,” “What Would You Like to See?,” “Dreams,” “Vandals,” and “Call If You Need Me.”

15 Thus in the book, the immediate predecessor to “Dreams,” a story found in Port Angeles, is “What Would You Like to See?” a story found in Columbus. In this story, the narrator, Phil, and his wife, Sarah, are preparing to leave the house they had been renting from Pete Petersen, who owns a restaurant next door. Petersen and his wife, Betty, invite the couple over for dinner the night before their departure. Pete talks about buying 150 pounds of salmon at a good price and storing it in the freezer behind the restaurant. He shows his guests slides of his and Betty’s trip to Lebanon and Syria, and then, since Sarah requested it (in response to his asking the question in the title), of a trip to Alaska. “The first slide showed a tall, trim red-haired woman standing on the deck of a ship…. ‘That’s Evelyn, Pete’s first wife,’ Betty said. ‘She’s dead now…. Evelyn was a good friend to me,’ Betty said. ‘It was like losing my sister’” (33, 34). After the Alaska slides, Phil and Sarah decide it’s time to call it a night. Fond and heartfelt goodbyes are exchanged: “I really have a hard time thanking you enough,” Sarah tells their hosts. “This has meant a good deal to us.” Pete responds, “No, it’s us who should be thanking you.... It’s been a pleasure knowing you.... You’re both good people. We like you” (34, 35). At the beginning of the story, the narrator had remarked that from their rented house at the edge of the parking lot behind the restaurant, “we lived with the hum of the big freezer fans in back of the restaurant, a sound we grew used to” (21). Now as they walk back home, he notes the humming again. But once he’s in bed and his wife has fallen asleep, “I heard something. Or, rather, something that I had been hearing I didn’t hear anymore” (36). At first, he didn’t know what it was, but finally realizes that the humming is gone: “The generator burned out” (37) and all of Pete’s salmon and other foodstuffs are ruined. The next day Phil tries to return the keys for the rented house to his landlord, but a distracted Pete curtly tells him to give them to his daughter, who “takes care of the rentals.” Sarah later asks Phil, “What’s wrong? What’s happened? It looked like Pete didn’t have the time of day for you” (37). It’s as if all those friendly farewells were never exchanged.

16 A similar moment occurs in “Dreams” when the narrator tries to comfort Mary Rice after the loss of her children. “She whirled on me and said, ‘I don’t know you, what do you want?’ She brought her hand back and slapped me in the face” (45; italics in the text). She did know him, for they had spoken on at least one occasion, when the narrator had been installing his storm windows (41-42). But her grief, like Pete’s in the other story, was too strong to allow her to relate to the narrator in the way she had before. Though their respective losses were by no means equivalent in real terms,

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Carver makes them so, not only by this parallel but also by creating certain associations between them.

17 In the heat of August, the narrator had left all his windows open, “and the windows next door, they were open too. I sat at the table listening to Mary Rice next door.... She was humming, and she kept it up while I listened and drank coffee.” Her children came down for breakfast, and then she told them to get dressed for school. “She began to hum as she cleaned a dish.... I have a woman next door who sings or else hums all day long. All in all, I felt quite lucky” (39). Mary Rice and her children were a constant presence in his life, as were the humming freezer fans for the narrator of “What Would You Like to See?”: “always, day and night, we lived with the hum of the big freezer fans in back of the restaurant, a sound we grew used to” (21). When that humming stopped, it signaled disaster. One could presume that, after the fire, Mary Rice’s humming stopped, too. “Dreams” concludes with the narrator and his wife reaching out to Mary Rice by inviting her to dinner three months after the fire. Thus, in a symmetrical reversal, the invitation to dinner in one story precedes the non-recognition scene (that is, when Pete seems to have forgotten, in his grief over the loss of the salmon, that he had been so friendly to Phil the night before); in the other story, it follows it.

18 As the humming next door wafts in through the open windows so, too, it seems, does the humming from one story find its way into the other, as if both stories had their windows open. In addition to the humming and its cessation, and the scenes of non- recognition, Dottie’s first dream shares several elements with the other story: (1) The failure of the car’s and the boat’s motors to start parallels the failure of the generator motor; (2) there are connections in both between keys and motors: Dottie first had to find her lost key before she could try to start the car whose motor was reluctant to start, while Phil’s disappointment (at Pete’s cold response) when he tried to return the house keys was caused by the failure of the generator motor; (3) in both there is a sister on a boat: Dottie dreamed she was going boating with her sister and another woman, while pictured “on the deck of a ship” is, to Phil and Sarah’s surprise, Pete’s first wife, whom his second wife, pictured in the previous slides, thought of as “my sister” (34); (4) the slides, collectively considered, present a man and two women (Pete Petersen and his two wives), while in Dottie’s dream there is a man and two women, too, since in the dream, she recalls, “I was a boy” (38).

19 Dottie’s third dream, too, has its echoes in the other story. Dottie is hungry and wants to eat the cupcakes, but they are too hot; likewise, the food in the freezer, having thawed, became inedible – too hot, in a sense. The moon through the porthole resembles the light from the slide projector. Both fill a darkened room with light. The moon appears, disappears, and returns; so does the light from the slide projector, as Petersen turns it off after the first set of slides (from his trip to the Middle East) while they enjoy dessert, then turns it on again for the Alaska set. He turns it off again after the Alaska slides, saying, “It’s heating up. I’ll have to turn off the projector for a little while to let it cool off” (34). Within this story, Carver has set up a doubling effect between the slide projector and the freezer. Both have fans for cooling: “Light beamed onto the screen, and a little fan in the projector began to run” (31); “we lived with the hum of the big freezer fans in back of the restaurant” (21). Both are in danger of overheating (“The generator burned out” [37]). The projector is to the freezer as the moon in the dream is to the fire next door, as in both stories the first event foreshadows the second. The two dreams in “Dreams” appear to predict what will

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happen later in the story (an idea Freud would reject were we talking about real life), at the same time they seem to look backward (if for a moment we adopt the fiction that one story somehow precedes the other), as if recycling day residue from “What Would You Like to See?”

20 When Phil finally figures out that the sound he is not hearing is the hum from the fans in his host’s freezer, he says, “I stood there a while longer wondering what I should do, if I should call Pete. Maybe it would take care of itself in a little while and switch back on, but for some reason I knew this wouldn’t happen” (36). In the next sentence, he sees lights come on in the restaurant, which shows that Petersen has become aware of the problem. But for that moment, one can wonder if he should have done something that might have saved the salmon. It wouldn’t have done any good, of course, yet the twinge of guilt is felt. In “Dreams,” when the fire broke out and the children died, why didn’t the narrator, who was almost constantly aware of what was going on next door, do anything? He couldn’t have, because he and Dottie were at a New Year’s Eve celebration (clinking glasses, one imagines, like the ones Dottie heard rattle in her dream).

21 But in “Vandals,” once again there is a house on fire in the neighborhood, and this time the protagonists are clearly guilty of not responding in time. Robert and Carol, with their daughter Jenny, have stopped for breakfast at the home of Nick and Joanne. Jenny and a friend go out skateboarding and in a while rush back to announce that somebody’s house is burning down the street. The adults refuse to believe it, saying they didn’t hear any fire trucks. So the girls go out again and after some time has passed, during which the two couples tell stories and reminisce, Nick happens to look out the window and see people hurry by on the sidewalk. He remembered what the girls had said about a fire, “but for God’s sake, if there were a fire there’d be sirens and engines, right? He started to get up from the table, and then he didn’t” (58). More time passes and more stories are told. Joanne then notices all the people going down the street and wonders out loud where they all are coming from. Nick recalls that the kids had said something about a fire. But Joanne still refuses to believe. Nick opens the front door, looks down the street, and sees that it’s true. They follow the crowd to the scene, where it is apparent that the house is far gone. The narrator does not explicitly say so, but I think one could conclude that the house might have been saved had the adults taken the girls’ announcement seriously. The girls seem to have been the very first to notice that the house, whose inhabitants were out of town, was on fire. There were, it appears, no fire trucks in front of the house when the girls first saw the flames.

22 Had he lived to complete these stories and the collection in which they might have appeared, would Carver have kept both stories about the same event, a house on fire within sight of the protagonists? We do not know, and cannot even know if the two would have appeared in the same collection. All the same, it is of great interest to see the same motifs reappear from one story to another. Car keys, for example, play a role in Dottie’s dream (where she can’t at first start her car), and also play one in an anecdote told while the house down the street is burning in “Vandals.” A husband and his wife were having a fight at a party, the husband accusing her of being drunk and of making eyes at another man. Then “she threw her car keys on the living-room floor and said, ‘You drive, then, if you’re so goddamn safe, sane, and sober’” (56). They had come in two cars. He drives both cars home, by driving hers two blocks, parking it, returning to his, driving his two blocks past hers, and so forth, taking two or three

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hours to get home. It is a marvelous image, almost a puzzle, above all a microcosm of the situation into which Carver keeps inviting his reader to enter, that of switching back and forth continually between one story and another, like the husband between the two cars, in order to keep track of an element strangely present in both. It’s a complicated way of advancing the narrative that seems to lie hidden between the stories.

23 Thus another dream Dottie has in “Dreams” – “She was in a house in the country and a white horse came up and looked in through the window at her. Then she woke up” (47) – returns, but not as a dream, in “Call If You Need Me”: The narrator is in a rented house in the country. “When I looked out the window again, something moved in the fog and I saw a horse grazing in the front yard” (71). (The horses in the front yard also appear in “Blackbird Pie” and the poem “Late Night with Fog and Horses.”)

24 And thus the protagonists of both “Kindling” and “What Would You Like to See?” are invited to dine with their landlord. Myers in “Kindling,” renting a room from Sol and Bonnie, declines, though he’s asked more than once, while Phil and Sarah accept. Myers and Phil and Sarah also have in common the fact that they do work for their landlord that they were not obliged to do. Myers saws and splits a truckload of firewood for Sol; Phil and Sarah clean the house so thoroughly that they “leave it in better condition even than we had found it” (24), washing the windows, cleaning the woodwork, scouring the fireplace bricks with a wire brush. In both stories this extra work is connected to the protagonists’ alcoholic past. Tess Gallagher describes Myers as “a man desperately splitting a cord of wood” (actually, he split two [20]) in order “to clarify his will toward going forward after alcoholism and the breakup of a marriage” (“Foreword,” XII); Phil remarks that “we had neither of us had anything to drink now for nearly a year” and that it was because “[w]e’d left too many houses in a hurry in the past and left them damaged or in a shambles” (23), back in their drinking days, that they were trying to make up for that now. Myers, whose principal action in “Kindling” is to saw up that truckload of wood, seems present in microcosm in Phil and Sarah’s story in the form of “[a] little wooden lumberjack [that] was nailed to the banister that ran around the porch. When the wind blew, the little man began sawing his log” (27; emphasis added). The phrase “began sawing” is an echo from “Kindling”: “Myers took the saw, nosed the blade into the cut Sol had started, then began sawing” (17; emphasis added).

25 All three characters in “Kindling” dream, but by contrast to the dreams Dottie recounts, these seem to be instances of undisguised wish- fulfillment. Myers, a recovering alcoholic, dreams that someone is offering him “a glass of Scotch, but just as he is about to take it, reluctantly, he wakes up in a sweat, his heart racing” (12). Sol, whose arm is withered from an accident with blasting caps that happened in his teenage years, “dreams that he is changing a tire on a truck and that he has the use of both of his arms.” Bonnie, who is childless, “dreams that she is taking two – no, three – children to the park” (13). Unlike Dottie’s dreams, these seem, as far as I can tell, to have none of the connections to the rest of the story (or to other stories) that were characteristic of those in “Dreams.” But what might have happened in a later version? As Gallagher points out, “Ray would sometimes take a story through thirty rewrites. These stories had been put aside well short of that” (XI). Had he returned to “Kindling” before he died might not Carver have enriched these dreams with something like the resonance of those in “Dreams”?

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carver, Raymond. All of Us: The Collected Poems. New York: Knopf, 1998.

---. Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose. William L. Stull, ed. New York: Vintage, 2001

Gallagher, Tess. Foreword. Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose. By Raymond Carver. 2000. New York: Vintage, 2001. IX-XV.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. A. A. Brill, trans. New York: Modern Library, 1950.

Runyon, Randolph Paul. Reading Raymond Carver. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992.

ABSTRACTS

The three dreams recounted early on in “Dreams,” one of five posthumously discovered stories by Raymond Carver collected by Tess Gallagher in Call If You Need Me, resonate with events to come in the story. One of them as well seems to evoke the “burning child” dream in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (and with it the theme, pervasive in Carver’s writing, of a father’s hostility to his child). More strangely, the events and dreams of “Dreams” also appear to resonate with events in other stories in the collection, especially the immediately preceding story “What Would You Like to See?” and the immediately following “Vandals.” In this way, the connections between dreams and events in “Dreams” parallels the connections between the stories. Such echoes are a persistent feature of Carver’s writing, particularly evident in his poetic collection Ultramarine.

AUTHORS

RANDOLPH PAUL RUNYON The author of Reading Raymond Carver, (Syracuse University Press, 1992), Randolph Paul Runyon (PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 1973) is Professor of French at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA. Other books include In La Fontaine’s Labyrinth (Rookwood Press, 2000), The Art of the Persian Letters: Unlocking Montesquieu’s “Secret Chain” (University of Delaware Press, 2005), and Ghostly Parallels: Robert Penn Warren and the Lyric Poetic Sequence (University of Tennessee Press, 2006).

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Symbolic Significance in the Stories of Raymond Carver

Daniel W. Lehman

1 Raymond Carver’s literary reputation to date illustrates a rather common critical problem: the misreading of an author’s message for his underlying aesthetic theory. Because so many Carver short stories present spare glimpses of characters snared in a tattered web of relationships and events whose significance they cannot understand, critics have often assumed that Carver, the artist, also refuses to endow the facts and events in his fiction with underlying significance. Much Carver criticism, therefore, finds in his minimal style evidence of postmodern distress, the refusal of the artist to bring a pattern-making vision to the debris of contemporary life (Chénetier 189; German and Bedell 257; Saltzman 9-10).

2 A second strain of Carver criticism grows out of that misreading and argues that Carver rejected his postmodern vehicle after he published What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (Facknitz, “The Calm” 387-388; Shute 1; Stull 6). These readers suggest that Carver, with Cathedral, somehow traded in a rather battered minimalism for a shiny new humanist realism guaranteed to add new mileage to his writing. One recent commentator, in fact, even posits a rather curious sort of “postmodern humanism” by which Carver is supposed to reject referential significance for a surface-bound postmodern fiction while at the same time he manages to reveal to his characters (and readers) not only “what a cathedral means,” but even the awareness of “spiritual being” (Brown 131, 136).

3 A careful examination of Carver’s underlying theory of facts suggests an antidote to the current critical confusion. This examination shows that while Carver may have deepened his characterization, plots, and themes during his career, his rhetorical rein over objects and events – as well as over the destinies of his characters – has always been significant and deeply controlling, an aesthetic that is anything but either postmodern or humanistic.

4 In fact, if a more humanistic Carver emerges in his later writings, the change does not come between the spare, tightly managed pessimism of “The Bath” and the almost

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sentimentally optimistic, but just as tightly managed, “A Small Good Thing” – which, like “Cathedral,” differs from its predecessor in tone and theme but not in aesthetic principle. Only in “Where I’m Calling From” does Carver seem to surrender his overt rhetorical control and free his characters and his readers to grope together toward less tightly controlled themes.

5 Typical of those critics who have read Carver as a representative of postmodern distress are Marc Chénetier, who devoted a chapter to Carver in his collection of contemporary European criticism, and Arthur M. Saltzman, who has published the only book-length criticism of Carver to date. Chénetier speaks of Carver’s “refusal of metaphor” in charting a resolutely post-modern course for Carver. He contends that Carver’s texts “retain a flatness and an indeterminacy, an untranslated quality of experience that at the most allows for illustrative similes but will not resort to metaphorical mutation” (186-187). Similarly, Saltzman argues that Carver’s fiction, and indeed all minimalism, properly belongs in “another post-modern tributary” because it suspects “the referential adequacy of words” (9-10). Saltzman contends that Carver’s fiction “parallels the notorious distrust of totalization observed by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh in The Mythopoeic Reality and evident throughout the terrain of postmodern fiction” (14).

6 By invoking Zavarzadeh, Saltzman relies on a post-structural theorist of the non-fiction novel, an advocate of the experimental “recorded transcript” fictions of Andy Warhol, of Tom Wolfe’s psychedelic cadences in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, as well as of other journalistic experiments of the 1960s. A hybrid “fact-fiction,” Zavarzadeh argues, creates a “fictual” world that “exterminates as far as possible the pattern-making mind of the artist” (47). Moreover: “facts are not used to establish or unveil an order but are allowed to enact, in their totality and entirety, the ambiguity, unpredictability, and disorder – in short, the entropy – of the actual” (66).

7 Carver’s characters might on occasion face facts that way, but their creator never does. With virtually no exceptions, even the most minimally developed fictions of Carver reveal a meticulously crafted order in which facts offer reliable symbolic guideposts for the reader. In fact, his symbolic strategy resolves ambiguity rather than creating it: an exactly contradictory movement to the phenomenon observed by Zavarzadeh within the experimental non-fiction novels (66).

8 “Preservation” is one story often cited as representative of Carver’s post-modernism: most likely because its bare-bones language explores the theme of entropy, which has been well-trod postmodern turf at least since the early writings of Thomas Pynchon. But Carver’s symbolic structure in the story is unambiguous and carefully developed. Symbolic facts have fixed referents; their use is consistent and reliable. The characters may not understand their significance, but Carver expects his ideal reader to make sense of those symbols. Why else would Sandy’s out-of-work husband come home and announce that he has been “canned” in a story called “Preservation” (Cathedral 35)? Why else would Carver cause the husband to find a book, Mysteries of the Past, and open up the book to the exact page that summarizes his dilemma – a petrified man with shriveled hands and feet who is discovered lying in a peat bog (36)? Peat is partly decayed, moisture-absorbing plant matter found in ancient swamp (Webster 994). Why else would Carver mention Sandy’s husband’s feet in the context of a pool of leaking water no less than three times in the last paragraph of the story (46)? Why else would Sandy burn a pork chop until it looks like the piece of charcoal her husband will

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become (46)? Why else, indeed, would she be named Sandy if not to distinguish her, at least temporarily, from the peat bog that is enclosing her husband?

9 The symbolic images are far more than occasional similes (Chénetier 186-187); they are metaphorical structures that reinforce the story’s thematic patterns of swamp and entropy. Things are leaking everywhere – the refrigerator’s Freon, melted ice cream, cole slaw and hamburger, the exhaust from Sandy’s father’s car (39). The once-frozen packages on the table are leaking onto the husband’s soon-to-be-shriveled feet. The once-meaningful form of the pork chop is leaking into the form of a man’s shoulder blade or a digging instrument such as that used to unearth a petrified man (46). The husband’s waking hours are leaking into his sleep and his sleep into his waking. In fact, everything is leaking but the story’s symbolic structure; the characters fairly swim in meaningful symbols. Although the story’s theme explores how the will to live and prevail can leak toward entropy, the story’s symbolic structures are fixed.

10 Similarly, in “Chef’s House,” another so-called “minimal” tale from the Cathedral collection, the symbolic structures are as neat as carefully arranged bookends. The reader who observes the story’s meteorological signs suspects that Wes and Edna’s new lease on life is in trouble the moment that “clouds hung over the water” (29) as Chef comes to revoke their lend-lease. These meteorological signs are contrasted to those moments when Wes and Edna are happy and fishing in fresh-water lagoons. Then, the last thing Edna will remember “would be clouds passing overhead toward the central valley” (29) away from their coastal paradise. But when Wes signals his resignation to her near the end of the story, clouds, not surprisingly, “are building up” (31). In fact, symbols of nature assail the reader from the story’s first paragraph, when a hopeful Wes boasts that “you can see the ocean from the front window” (27). Then, in the final paragraph, “Wes got up and pulled the drapes and the ocean was gone just like that” (33). Edna, who as narrator seems attuned to many subtle signs in her relationship to Wes, never questions the significance of the weather patterns in the story; they remain under Carver’s control. Nor does Carver encourage the reader to believe that Edna might be mistaken about either the weather or its significance. If he did, if he encouraged the reader, however subtly, to question the tyranny of symbolic significance over his characters’ lives, then “Chef’s House” could be read as postmodern semiotic critique. But that irony is never developed. Ultimately, then, the theme of “Chef's House” may concern disintegration, but the symbolic structures with which Carver conveys that theme certainly are in no danger of collapse.

11 Although there is ample evidence of tightly managed symbolic structures in even the most spare, pessimistic stories of Cathedral, the collection, admittedly, is Carver’s most expansive book. Yet What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the collection that many critics believe represents the apex of Carver’s minimalism (German and Bedell) as well as his “post-modernism” (Salzman; Chénetier), reveals rhetorical strategies that are just as tightly controlled.

12 Even in “Popular Mechanics,” Carver’s morbid tale in which two nameless characters play tug-of-war for their child, Carver keeps a steady hand on the rheostat that illuminates his symbolic structure and uses that structure to establish underlying significance. From the first paragraph onward, snow melts, water runs down the windows, and the cars spew slush (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 123). It is getting dark outside, Carver is careful to tell us, then adds in what is certainly a symbolic comment on his character’s moral dilemma: “But it was getting dark on the

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inside too” (123). As the man and woman scuffle for the baby, they knock over a flowerpot, which seems to contain no flower (124), even as their house will contain no baby. Not surprisingly, as their struggle threatens to rip the infant apart, Carver shrouds their violence in darkness: “The kitchen window gave no light. In the near- dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the other hand he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder” (125).

13 Although “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” the story, presents more developed characters and narrative, its symbolic structure works in virtually the same way. The four characters are introduced as sunlight “filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink” and ice is neatly contained in a nearby ice bucket (137). We learn that what the characters talk about when they talk about love is bungled suicide, physical suffering, drunken driving, revenge, recriminations. The only remotely hopeful theme, that of the old couple whose love is challenged by an automobile accident, is discarded in drunken babble (151-152) as surely as the flowerpot tumbles in “Popular Mechanics.” As the two couples talk about everything but love, ice melts, glasses overturn, liquid splashes from containers and seeks its level. Meanwhile, the light that at one point “was like a presence in this room, the spacious light of ease and generosity” (144) soon is draining out of the room, going back through the window where it had come from” (152). When the gin runs out, human noise is all there is: “not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark” (154). But even as the scene devolves toward darkness and his characters’ significant speech collapses toward noise, Carver maintains and underscores the continuing significance of the story’s symbolic structure. Without question, he expects his ideal reader to catch the rhetorical significance of that fixed and meaningful structure.

14 That impulse, of course, runs exactly counter to Brown’s contention that “there is no resource of significant events” (131) or to the postmodern aesthetic that Saltzman relies on Zavarzadeh to explain. Facts in Carver’s fictions are used to create referential meaning, even if that meaning is bleak. Ambiguity, at least on the symbolic level, is resolved. The stories’ themes might be entropic; their structures are not.

15 Even the two most seemingly surreal stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love – “Why Don’t You Dance?” and “Viewfinder” – reveal consistent and interrelated symbolic structures. Both stories are about how a man will respond when his home, indeed his life, is under attack. The two men react in very different ways: one story ends in stasis, the other in at least potentially meaningful action.

16 In “Why Don’t You Dance?” an unnamed man hauls his furniture and an extension cord out into the driveway. A boy and girl, who are furnishing their own small apartment, happen by and begin to sample the man’s belongings: significantly, the boy turns the man’s blender to “MINCE” (4), then later “for no good reason” turns on the reading lamp (5). There is “no telling” in the artificial light surrounded by darkness whether the younger couple is nice or nasty (8), but when the girl dances with the man she correctly recognizes the man’s desperation, and it fills her with a dread that eventually drives her to silence (10).

17 But while the characters may be reduced to silence, Carver’s rhetoric is clear. Without a meaningful home to surround them, the domestic items arranged in the driveway lose their significance and disintegrate. The girl who is just starting to furnish her own apartment (and life) understands this at some level: “There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out” (10). Carver won’t furnish her with the words, but he does

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furnish his reader with the symbolic structures that will make sense of that silence. Artificial light (the lamps) or pictures (television) or sound (the record-player) or intimacy (the bed and couch), Carver seems to be saying, can’t hold back the darkness, even as the objects of a relationship can’t create or sustain the relationship or stave off the despair of its dissolution.

18 “Viewfinder” poses perhaps the greatest challenge to this case for Carver’s structured and meaningful symbolism. Certainly its plot details – a photographer who has no hands, a narrator who ends up on the roof throwing rocks at nameless targets for no apparent reason – are the stuff of surrealism. Similarly, its images – an instant camera that can reduce the man’s suffering into an instantly created commodity or the narrator’s voyeurism in which he betrays interest in the photographer only to commodify the photographer’s handicap – are the stuff of postmodern alienation. But the test of the story’s underlying aesthetics is whether Carver undergirds the story with sufficiently reliable symbolic structures to reinforce, rather than deliberately frustrate, the story’s theme. Carver’s symbolic objects do seem to point to a consistent pattern. The narrator is desperately trying to make a connection with the photographer because both men are the casualties of absent families. The narrator has been alone and is distressed because the camera’s viewfinder has pinned him inside his suffering (12). He emerges to objectify his rage in response to the photographer’s offer of sympathy (14), then tries to stave off his alienation by posing for a series of pictures. Ultimately, the narrator is able to share one significant thing about his story: “The whole kit and kaboodle. They cleared right out,” he tells the photographer (14). That admission leads him to the roof, where he finds it “okay” (15) and he summons further strength to confront his suffering. There, he acknowledges evidence of attack (rocks that the kids have lobbed into his chimney) and responds to that attack by throwing “the son of a bitch” (a rock, though certainly a significant choice of epithet seeing as how it has lain in a “nest” on his roof) “as far as I could throw it” (125). Carver seems to suggest that the narrator’s throwing the rock frees him, at least temporarily, from the status of impotent object. “I don’t do motion shots,” the photographer shouts in an ironic salute to the narrator’s potency (15). But the narrator is no longer pinned by the camera’s viewfinder (15), no longer a motionless loner trapped inside an edifice of alienation.

19 If “Viewfinder” resists the kind of simple symbolic structure characteristic of a “Popular Mechanics” or a “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” the objects in the story (the rocks, the camera, the house itself) clearly are endowed with significance that points toward, rather than deliberately frustrates, the story’s overall theme. And, when evaluated in the context of a writing career in which story after story is built around meaningful symbolic structures, “Viewfinder” is hardly convincing evidence that Carver spurns metaphor (Chénetier 186) or, as Saltzman suggests, treats objects in his fictions as sources of “ambiguity, unpredictability, and disorder” (Zavarzadeh 66).

20 Carver, not surprisingly, would have told us this all along had we listened to him. As early as 1981, the year he published What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver spoke in “A Storyteller’s Shoptalk” of how he tried to use objects and details in his fiction. His definitions underscore the evidence he left us in his stories; his underlying theory sounds nothing like Zavarzadeh’s theory of “ambiguity, unpredictability, and disorder.” The correct uses of facts, Carver contends:

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bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right, they can hit all the notes. (9, 18)

21 In his essay, “On Writing,” collected in 1983 in Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories, Carver makes much the same point: It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things – a character, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring – with immense, even startling, power. (15)

22 Finally, Carver, in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 1986, which he collected and co-edited, reveals his predilection for the unambiguous, referential fact: I’m drawn to traditional (some would call it old-fashioned) methods of storytelling: …I believe in the efficacy of the concrete word, be it noun or verb, as opposed to the abstract or arbitrary or slippery word…. I tried to steer away from…stories where the words seemed to slide into one another and blur the meaning. (XV)

23 The consistency of Carver’s theoretical management of facts is rather striking. Similarly, his stories – from the What We Talk About When We Talk About Love collection to the Cathedral collection – evidence no radical shift in Carver’s theory of factual symbolism.

24 These conclusions shed light on an oft-quoted Carver remark that can, at first, be confusing. In 1983, Carver told Paris Review interviewer Mona Simpson that his short story “Cathedral” was totally different in conception and execution from stories that have come before…. There was an opening up when I wrote the story. I knew I’d gone as far the other way as I could or wanted to go, cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Any farther in that direction and I’d be at a dead end – writing stuff and publishing stuff I wouldn’t want to read myself, and that’s the truth. (210)

25 We may quarrel with Carver’s use of the term “totally different” since both what came before this change and what came after clearly are recognizable as Carver stories. Certainly, “Cathedral” is a vastly different story from any that are collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but not because its theory of significant facts has changed. The distinction is that characterization and plots are expanded, while Carver, on occasion, allows himself an optimistic vision that seemed impossible fo him to express earlier.

26 Many critics (Bugeja, Facknitz, Lohnquist, Saltzman, Shute, Stull) have detailed that change, normally by contrasting the spare, pessimistic “The Bath” with its expansive, optimistic revision published in Cathedral as “A Small, Good Thing.” Of these critics, Stull perhaps offers the most provocative reading of the two stories. He argues that “The Bath” represents Carver as an artist “absent from the world, which is discontinuous, banal, and, by definition, mundane” (7), while in “A Small, Good Thing,” Carver uses “a subtle but persuasive pattern of religious symbols…concerned with the two most basic Christian sacraments, baptism and communion” (11-12).

27 Although there is much to recommend Stull’s analysis, his and other critics’ underestimation of Carver’s earlier symbolic commitment to his work leads to over- correction in the Cathedral-era stories. The artist was never “absent from the world” – to borrow Stull’s words (7). Theme, as well as depth of characterization, may be changing between his earlier and later work, but Carver has always been willing to

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charge into a story symbolic lance at the ready. For example, in “The Bath,” Ann Weiss and her husband are led on a symbolic path toward miscommunication and unwashed gracelessness just as surely as they are led toward the healing communion and grace of fresh-baked bread in the subsequent “A Small, Good Thing.”

28 In “The Bath,” Ann Weiss and her husband both come home from the hospital at separate times to take a bath after their “birthday boy” lapses into a coma. Besides endowing the bath with the significance of a title, Carver tells us straight out in the What We Talk About When We Talk About Love version that for the father, “fear made him want a bath” (49). The bath is signaled as a powerful healing symbol in a story about accidental injury and the limits of healing power. In this story, neither the husband nor Ann Weiss experiences the symbolic regeneration of a completed bath. Her husband’s bath is delayed by one vaguely threatening telephone call from a baker who has baked the “birthday boy” a cake and wants to be paid (49); moments later his actual bath is curtailed by a second anonymous call (50). When Ann Weiss comes home later, her bath is delayed by yet another call – this one as cryptic as the ones which have interrupted her husband. She never bathes, and the story ends in the midst of yet another seemingly meaningless cycle of interruption and despair (56).

29 To argue that Carver endows the bath with no significance or that the significance is not clear is to miss entirely the point of the story. If the bath has no symbolic significance, then it doesn’t matter if the characters bathe or not. But, of course, it does matter. The very alienation and misunderstanding that occasions the telephone calls will deny Ann Weiss and her husband the ritual healing that they most need. Carver is deeply involved here, down to managing symbolic details as small as the Weiss’ dog running “in circles on the grass” or the car’s engine “ticking” in circular, decaying motion (56). These details, together with the repetitive telephone calls and the doctor’s mismanagement of healing language, combine to advance the story’s theme.

30 Similarly, in “A Small, Good Thing,” Carver never releases the Weiss family from its relentless march toward the story’s moral conclusion. Here, a hit-and-run driver has been added to the plot, creating yet a third possibility for the source of the telephone messages. In this version, Scotty dies and the Weiss’ need for healing is even more explicitly drawn. In his perceptive analysis, Bugeja wonders why the Weiss family never contacts the police about the calls they believe might emanate from a hit-and-run driver (76). The answer, of course, is that Carver is after far more here than a police investigation might provide, and thus it does not suit his purpose to burden his story with realistic detail. It is the big, symbolic finish he is after, and he creates it as surely as he did in “The Bath,” where healing baths were interrupted, where dogs ran in circles, and where engines ticked into inaction and decay. Here, in “A Small, Good Thing,” the couple confronts the baker, who apologizes for his harassing telephone calls. As in other Carver stories – both early and later, both spare and expansive – the amount and quality of symbolic light is significant. In the Cathedral version, the baker moves in “white, even light” (84); when healing comes it is “like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light” (89). Ultimately, as the characters munch the baker’s molasses and grain bread, the “high, pale cast of light” shines in the window from a now-lit world, and “they did not think of leaving” (89), not even with their child in the hospital morgue and his hit-and-run killer on the loose.

31 While Carver’s use of symbolic structures remains consistent between his earlier and later work, the more fully realized plots and character development create a rhetorical

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problem for which there has not yet been sufficient critical analysis. Both Bugeja and Gorra are correct to complain about the heavy-handed rhetoric in some of Carver’s Cathedral stories. Neither, however, quite pins down the problem. Bugeja dislikes endings that spring from unwieldy shifts in narrative pattern (73), while Gorra complains that Carver’s style dictates, rather than shows, his characters’ predicaments (256). Of the two, Bugeja seems to sense the problem without finding its cause. It is not that Carver’s rhetorical control has been too narrow, as Gorra suggests (156-157), but that the rhetoric has controlled its characters too broadly, often in a way that creates the unwieldy endings of which Bugeja complains.

32 For example, Gorra argues that “Where I’m Calling From” in the Cathedral collection succeeds because Carver’s density of detail turns his alcoholic narrator into an Everyman (157). On the contrary, the story succeeds because Carver, for once, allows his characters to live and breathe, to grope toward hesitant recovery rather than bulldozing them toward Everyman status with tightly managed symbols. The issue is not how much detail is rendered, but how tightly it is managed. A contrast of the highly successful “Where I’m Calling From” with the much less successful “Feathers” reveals this distinction.

33 If density of detail (Gorra 157) were the benchmark of Carver’s success, one could easily argue that “Feathers” presents a cast of finely detailed, compelling characters unequaled in his fiction: a farmer’s shy wife who plops a set of plaster chompers on her television set, the world’s ugliest baby with a stack of chins, and – most particularly – an unruly peacock named Joey, who, by turns, swoops like a vulture, cries “may-awe” in an unearthly wail, rubs people’s legs and gets in their way, stalks around on the roof while people are trying to eat, rattles its train like a shuffling deck of cards, and ultimately, bobs its head right under the pajama of the world’s ugliest baby and tickles him on the stomach (24).

34 The problem of “Feathers” is not surfeit of detail but what Carver does with that detail. Continuing the propensity for tightly managed symbolism that has typified his fiction from its beginnings, Carver is interested in Joey, not as a character, but as a representation of desire. The moment the representation has delivered its usefulness to Carver’s rhetoric, it is discarded. Thus, the peacock – which arrives in the story, unforgettably, “big as a vulture,” wailing, preening, stalking, wild, possibly dangerous, unfanning a rainbow tail (8-9) – is ushered out of the story in an aside: “Joey’s out of the picture,” the narrator says diffidently. “He flew into the tree one night and that was it for him. He didn’t come down. Then the owls took over” (26).

35 Carver’s point, of course, is that anything wild or beautiful has long since been squeezed from the narrator’s life and marriage by the time he tells us the story. To make that point, Carver reduces Joey – arguably one of the most vital characters he ever created – to the same level as the rest of the story’s symbolic aviary: the metaphorical buzzard (7), the swan ashtray into which the narrator discards his match (11), the Old Crow whiskey that his wife swills (12), and the benighted owls that are Joey’s (and the narrator’s) fate (26).

36 Bugeja correctly senses the problem as one of endings, but misreads its cause as reader “confusion about the moment of narration” (78). What really happens is that as Carver has expanded the scope and detail of his narrative, he has begun to raise expectations in his readers that can no longer be satisfied with the overt management of symbolic meaning that had characterized the stories of the What We Talk About When We Talk

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About Love collection. There, much of the symbolic manipulation had seemed stark and effective. But when we are asked to consider characters in all their slippery possibilities – be they a peacock or a birthday boy – we no longer are willing to dismiss them so easily as but markings on the rheostat of Carver’s symbolic rhetoric. We witness the birthday boy’s death; we care about him and want to find his “hit-and-run” killer. We wonder who will tickle the ugly baby now that Joey is gone.

37 Although Carver tells us in his Paris Review interview that “Cathedral” was his breakthrough story, the story also seems to subject its characters to a symbolic encasement that, despite Brown’s reading, is neither postmodern nor humanistic. Whether the narrator of “Cathedral” prepares us for his eventual change is at best questionable; the story’s ending in sudden epiphany still strikes many careful readers as too good to be true. Is it really possible for the narrator, after a life-time of symbolic blindness, to be endowed with healing vision in a single night? And if he receives that “healing vision,” why would he still sound like an unredeemed narrator for the bulk of what is clearly a retrospective narrative? Is such epiphany best generated by a televised image, even a televised image redeemed by human touch? Isn’t a cathedral at the very least a curious metaphor, given its complex, and often exploitative, role in medieval society? Because the story is more fully drawn than Carver’s earlier fiction, we are tempted to ask those questions even though Carver’s story does not encourage an ambiguous reading. His narrator, who at first describes cathedrals as “Nothing. Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV” (226), is able to term his discovery “really something” after guiding the blind man’s hand (228). Where is the rhetorical irony to undercut the narrator? Where is the televised image of medieval exploitation contested or even explored? The change that has been wrought by the narrator’s symbolic experience with the cathedral is nothing if not a “universal referent” (Brown 131). And if Carver’s rhetorical strategy cannot stand up to its own symbolic weight, it is certainly not because Carver’s aesthetic refuses metaphor (Chénetier 186).

38 By contrast, precisely because he frees his characters from such heavy-handed rhetorical control, the Carver story that does hold up to more fully realized characterization is “Where I’m Calling From.” Here, Carver manages to make the reader care about the narrator and J.P. while resisting the urge to tie everything up in a symbolically resolved ending. Several contrasts with “A Small, Good Thing” are illustrative. In the latter story, Carver merely tells us that the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation,” but in “Where I’m Calling From,” Carver endows J.P. with a voice. We hear his story in its peculiar detail filtered through the narrator’s consciousness. We learn about J.P.’s fall into the well, what J.P. learned from it: “nothing fell on him and nothing closed off that little circle of blue” (130). J.P. still isn’t sure whether it would have been better for him to have drowned in the well (130); the narrator is even less sure what to make of it all. The characters seem to be getting stronger; then they see their breakfast-mate “on his back on the floor with his eyes closed, his heels drumming the linoleum” (128) in a seizure. We care about these characters, but Carver refuses to resolve our anxiety with an easy symbol. Unlike “Cathedral” or “A Small, Good Thing,” the human touch here is tentative and real, not resolved in closed symbolic structures. A kiss is something to be cherished, something that might bring luck (143), but nothing is certain. After all, even an artist like Jack London, who could create the symbolic significance of a warming fire, died the alcoholic’s death, apparently not learning enough from his own carefully wrought symbolic structures. And even after the narrator’s cherished human contact with J.P.

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and Roxy, he has to admit: “I’ve got the shakes. I started out with them this morning. This morning I wanted something to drink. It’s depressing….” (144). It seems, finally, that all the narrator can tell us for sure is that Roxy “loves this man who has her by the arm” and that the narrator has earned J.P.’s true friendship (142). The rest is all too uncertain to count on, though it might suggest the route toward healing. The narrator decides to make no resolutions; he’s not even sure which woman he’ll call. All he can know for sure is that he’ll say, “It’s me” (146).

39 Here, at last, in “Where I’m Calling From,” Carver presents a narrative so multi-leveled that the authorial presence seems, at last, to surrender. Is it J.P.’s story? J.P.’s interpretation of his own story? The narrator’s recognition that a good story couldn’t save Jack London? The narrator’s decision not to rely on the easy symbolic movement of New Year’s resolutions (146), but to wait for real movement, to assert his own worth in the here and now?

40 “It’s me,” he’ll say (146). Carver can tell us no more. This, finally, is the “practical recognition of the irresolutive nature of the text,” which Chénetier wants to argue is typical of all of Carver’s fiction (199). This, even, is the sort of world in which facts enact “ambiguity, unpredictability, and disorder” (Zavarzadeh 66). Rejecting the easy myth-making of a tightly managed symbolic structure, Carver, for a change, will leave the significance to the reader’s best lights, as the artist unhands his rheostat of symbolic control.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brown, Arthur A. “Raymond Carver and Postmodern Humanism.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 31.2 (1990): 125-136.

Bugeja, Michael. “Tarnish and Silver: An Analysis of Carver’s Cathedral.” South Dakota Review 24.3 (1986): 73-87.

Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. New York: Vintage, 1984.

---. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. Santa Barbara, CA: Capra, 1983.

---. “A Storyteller’s Shoptalk.” New York Times Book Review 15 Feb. 1981: 9, 18.

---. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Knopf, 1981.

Chénetier, Marc. “Living On/Off the ‘Reserve’: Performance, Interrogation, and Negativity in the Works of Raymond Carver.” Critical Angles: European Views of Contemporary American Literature. Ed. Marc Chénetier, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1986. 164-90.

Facknitz, Mark A. R. “‘The Calm,’ ‘A Small, Good Thing,’ and ‘Cathedral’: Raymond Carver and the Rediscovery of Human Worth.” Studies in Short Fiction 23.3 (1986): 287-296.

---. “Missing the Train: Raymond Carver’s Sequel to John Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight.’” Studies in Short Fiction 22.3 (1985): 345-347.

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German, Norman, and Jack Bedell. “Physical and Social Laws in Ray Carver’s ‘Popular Mechanics.’” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 29.4 (1988): 257-260.

Gorra, Michael. “Laughter and Bloodshed.” Hudson Review 37.1 (1984): 151-164.

Lohnquist, Barbara C. “Narrative Displacement and Literary Faith: Raymond Carver’s Inheritance from Flannery O’Connor.” Since Flannery O’Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story. Ed. Loren Logsdon and Charles W. Mayer. Macomb: Western Illinois UP, 1987. 142-150.

Revenel Shannon, and Raymond Carver, eds. The Best American Short Stories: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1988.

Shute, Kathleen Westfall. “Finding the Words: The Struggle for Salvation in the Fiction of Raymond Carver.” The Hollins Critic 24.5 (1987): 1-9.

Stull, William. “Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond Carver.” Philological Quarterly 64.1 (1985): 1-15.

Webster’s New World Dictionary of American English. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.

Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud. The Mythopoeic Reality. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1976.

ABSTRACTS

As the Reagan-era 1980s began to leak into the 1990s, literary theorists were finding shimmering traces of postmodernism across nearly every literary page. Suddenly it was fashionable to sniff out postmodernism in the unlikeliest places – even in the narratives of writers working squarely within the traditions of realistic fiction. One such writer was Raymond Carver, whose work excited something of a stir when contemporary critics began to assure each other that Carver had been a true postmodernist all along. Though I was as enamoured by the aura of postmodernism as anyone else at the time, I was not convinced that the label described Carver well. My resulting essay is presented here virtually as it originally appeared and should be read within that specific critical context – a snapshot in a debate within Carver criticism that seemed terribly important at the time. And, most of two decades later, I stand by its conclusions.

AUTHORS

DANIEL W. LEHMAN Daniel W. Lehman is Trustees’ Professor of English at Ashland University (OH). He is the author of two books, Matters of Fact: Reading Nonfiction over the Edge and John Reed and the Writing of Revolution. He is co-editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative and the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize book series for the University of Nebraska Press. He recently returned from a Fulbright year in Cape Town, South Africa.

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Now This Is Affirmation of Life: Raymond Carver’s Posthumously Published Stories

Arthur F. Bethea

1 For some scholars, 1983’s Cathedral represents a major shift in Raymond Carver’s sensibility. Marc Chénetier asserts that Cathedral signals “a movement away from threatening ambiguity, a working towards hope rather than horror” (170). According to Ewing Campbell, “Truncations vanish; where once the narrative halted in emotional tumult, the story continues, and equilibrium is restored. Despair becomes redemption; the alienated are reconciled” (9). John Alton asserts that “most strikingly” the tone of Cathedral “seems much more optimistic” (167), while Arthur Brown claims that Carver “leave[s] behind the themes of dissociation and alienation” (126).

2 In Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver, I reject this interpretation as grossly overstating thematic change, agreeing with Arthur Saltzman’s observation that “the majority of the [Cathedral] stories dispute any claim to a fundamental break from the tenor” of the “preceding collections” (124). Published individually in Esquire, Granta, and Guardian in 1999 and 2000 and then collected in Call If You Need Me, an expanded edition of No Heroics, Please, Carver’s posthumously published stories are a different matter, however. Although critics such as Paul Gray see the posthumous stories “set unmistakably in Carver country and populated by Carver people,” this fiction in fact demonstrates an amazingly expanded world with characters much more economically, intellectually, psychologically, socially, and even spiritually capable than what was previously seen in Carver’s work.

3 The first chapter of my monograph analyzes unreliable narration in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, a technique evident in “Dreams,” whose articulate and compassionate narrator misperceives his and his wife’s lives significantly. Eschewing Carver’s typical avoidance of the sensational, “Dreams” includes heartbreaking references to the deaths of two young children and their mother’s wild torment. That this story with a self- deceived narrator and, more significantly, overt human tragedy is not nearly as bleak

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as Carver’s typical work is quite telling about the attitudinal shift in the posthumous fiction.

4 In “The Bridle,” dreams are pleasing but not obtainable; in the posthumous story, dreams are strange, illustrative of discontent, and menacing. The first dream positions the narrator’s wife, Dotty, as a boy who can start neither a car nor a motorboat. A dog in her second dream, from which she awakes barking, in the third dream, she is burned by cupcakes and frightened by her husband’s silence. After this nightmare, when Dotty tells him that her dreams are getting “pretty weird” (43), he replies, as he has before: “Put it in your book” (43). She thus creates a written narrative, as in the past, yet searches for no meaning, for “[s]he didn’t interpret her dreams” (38). Her next dream occurs the night Mary Rice’s children die of smoke inhalation. In the morning, her husband “didn’t ask her what she’d dreamed, and she didn’t volunteer anything” (46). All the dreams suggest that Dotty both dislikes her life and fears that she cannot improve it. In the first dream, for instance, like Bill Miller before her, she seeks escape through gender transformation, a desire extended in the second dream when she imagines herself as nonhuman. She unconsciously questions her capacity to act, however, thus imagining a failure to start vehicles. Overall, the progression is increasingly negative in its implications about her life and marriage. On a cruise trip in the third dream, unwittingly seeking a sweet escape, she fears her husband, and after the next dream, she devolves from the status of at least telling him her dreams, if not understanding them.

5 Much impressed by Mary Rice’s singing to her children and by his wife’s dreams, the narrator sees himself as “a rich man” (39), but is he? To earn much needed money after their father deserts them, Mary’s children sell packets of seeds. Although he purchases some, the narrator offers this startlingly bleak description filled with symbolical implications for this childless (and symbolically infertile) man: “We didn’t have a garden, of course not – how could anything grow where we lived?” (40). When Mary finds her children dead, he describes the person who drove her as “a scared-looking kid” with “no right” to “witness Mary Rice’s grief” (45). This cannot be Raymond Carver’s opinion if the powerful theme of comfort wrought by the shared anguish of strangers in “A Small, Good Thing” means anything. In fact, the narrator tries to console Mary, yet the agonized woman snaps, “I don’t know you” and slaps his face (45). The next evening, he sees the event on TV, concluding his narrative of the TV narrative: “Then, as the stretchers are being put into the ambulance, Mary Rice whirls on somebody and screams, ‘What do you want?’” (46). The point is not merely a critique of TV journalism’s nauseating penchant for insensitive close-ups of human grief or its distortion of the reality it purports to represent. The narrator seeing “somebody” on the screen and not himself underscores his lack of self-knowledge. Indeed, his self- myopia is underscored by the tale’s never revealing his name, a point the conclusion emphasizes. Months after the tragedy, Mary accepts his dinner invitation, observing: “I don’t even know your name” (48).1

6 So in this story of self-ignorance and devastating personal loss, what factors nonetheless create a reasonably hospitable environment? Cultural reference in “Dreams” is unusually broad for a Carver story, as characters not only know that classical music exists but enjoy it. After her husband deserts her, Mary enrolls in two university correspondence courses to expand her intellectual horizons. Indeed, the posthumous fiction seems to refer more frequently to higher education than all of

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Carver’s previously published stories combined. For Christmas presents, the narrator receives “a globe” and “a subscription to Smithsonian magazine”(43). Although his voyeuristic tendencies speak to dissatisfaction or yearnings that he does not grasp – a subject analyzed by David Boxer and Cassandra Phillips regarding Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? – at least his bills appear paid and he has a wife to sleep with, if not a soul mate. What is missing is the passionate love that Mary shows her children, whom she typically greeted, “Good morning, children. Good morning, my loved ones” (39). Her howls of anguish upon witnessing their lifeless bodies reinforce not just the tragedy of their deaths but also the depth of their mother’s love. All the children in the posthumous stories are loved, a fact constituting a remarkable change in Carver Country. To a great extent, the stronger, loving bonds between parents and their children explain why this fictive universe is much more generous.

7 In its affirmative implications, rivaling the vastly improved familial relations is the posthumous stories’ inclusion of God. “Dreams” is about not only death but also resurrection, perhaps even in a Christian or eternal sense. The mother of the dead children shares the name of Jesus’ mother, while her last name links her with a crop that, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, approximately “one-half of the world population” is “wholly dependent upon”: both literally and symbolically, rice is life. The text refers to the Russian mystical composer Scriabin (42), who, while not Christian, believed in the human return to the Divine. As in several other posthumous stories, the Divine’s aid is consciously sought. Dotty says, “God, that poor, unfortunate woman. God help her. And us, too” (46). Furthermore, Carver again refers conspicuously to three, a number associable with the Holy Trinity and the three-day period involving Christ’s death and resurrection: the Rices moved into the neighborhood “three years ago”; Dotty notices that Mary’s deserting husband has not been home “in three days” (41); three “kids” are in the house when the fire starts, only the babysitter escaping (44); most conspicuously, because the detail is so odd, Mary “always picked” up the phone “on the third ring” (40). Although Carver’s numerical references frequently suggest the Divine’s absence even while elevating human worth2, what is different about “Dreams” is his greater sympathy to a religious sensibility. The deaths’ timing and the story’s closing imagery are clearly associable with resurrection. The narrative refers to Christmas, the mythological birthday of Jesus, whose promise is the gift of eternal life, and then to the children’s deaths, which occur on New Year’s Eve. Correlating the year’s last day to their corporeal death, we are encouraged to associate New Year’s Day with the beginning of their everlasting life – especially when they have a mother named Mary Rice who listens to audio books like Great Expectations. Finally, in the beginning of spring, the season of rebirth, Mary speaks of planting the seeds her children sold the previous year. She may in fact plant them and is, in any event, rebuilding her life; she is one of Carver’s survivors. The conclusion is ambiguous, though, for the narrator speaks of Mary “trying to spade some dirt” (48), never actually says that she plants the seeds, and finishes his tale emphasizing absence: “The next time I looked out, Mary Rice had gone in from her garden” (48).

8 After “Dreams” suggests the possibility of renewal, both human and eternal, rising from the ashes of the most devastating of losses, the story immediately following it, “Vandals,” likewise threatens children. The story is strongly comparable to “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (“WWTA”). Both tales position couples talking, one in Albuquerque, the posthumous story in Aberdeen; each story has a central image – the movement from light to darkness in “WWTA” and fire in “Vandals”; an ex-lover

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not in the present story factors significantly, as do the subjects of love and alcoholism. “Vandals” proves both more menacing and more affirmative of human potential than the titular story of Carver’s earlier, breakthrough collection.

9 The key number in “Vandals” is not three but four. Nick – this repeats the name of one of the four onstage characters in “WWTA” – says of salmon fishing: “[I]f you’re lucky, you’ll land one out of every four fish” (50). This is an apt detail from an apt teller, as Nick is the proverbial odd man out. His wife (Joanne) and the other married couple (Roger and Carol) lived together as graduate students years earlier with Joanne’s husband at that time, Bill Daly, a figurative ghost comparable to Ed in “WWTA.” The second group of four has been getting together every six months for years “never, not once, talk[ing] about Bill Daly in Nick’s presence” (52). The story implicates four vandals: most obviously, unnamed and unseen characters who burn down a house in Nick and Joanne’s neighborhood; terrorists in the Middle East, the paradox of reference to what is societally or globally harmful affirming the positive fact that the posthumous figures live in an expanded world; alcoholism, which in Nick’s case helped to destroy a familial relationship; and Nick himself, who feels accused of vandalizing Joanne’s first marriage.

10 In “WWTA,” Mel ponders the change of his feelings for his ex-wife, whom he loved passionately but grew to hate to the point of fantasizing about murdering her. “Vandals” likewise shows that love can change, but here the emotion becomes saner: Once [Nick] would have killed for her. He loved her still, and she loved him, but he didn’t feel that obsessive now. No, he wouldn’t kill for her now, and he had a hard time understanding how he’d ever felt that way in the first place. He didn’t think that she – or anybody, for that matter – could ever be worth killing somebody for. (54)

11 In conjunction with the story’s emphasis on terrorism, Carver implies that terrorists are motivated by excessive love.

12 “Vandals” might be Carver’s scariest story. Although “WWTA” references domestic abuse and death in the past, its present action consists of nothing more than couples getting drunk and talking. The posthumous story, conversely, intertwines reference to prior deaths, accidents, or images associable with danger, implicating in the present an immediate threat to life. The tension begins with an edgy discussion of terrorism, with Nick referring to “all those bodies lying in pools of blood in the airports” (53). Jenny (Roger and Carol’s daughter) and a friend say that a neighborhood house is burning, a statement that seems curious, for Nick sees nothing out the window and hears no warning bells or sirens. In response to Nick’s tale of alcohol abuse, Robert observes that his “kid brother” was “nearly killed by a drunk driver” (57), a detail paralleling the old couple in “WWTA” hospitalized by a drunk driver. Nick sees cars passing outside and people hurrying, recalling what the girls had “said about a fire, but for God’s sake, if there were a fire there’d be sirens and engines, right?” (58). If there is no fire, what’s wrong? Nick tells a story involving an alcoholic seizure that left him wearing a “big bandage round [his] head” like “a turban” (58). The reference to “turban” skillfully links alcoholism and Nick’s alcohol-related injury to terrorism, which the American mind strongly associates with turban-wearing Arabs. The next story regarding alcoholism illustrates a familial relationship’s demise. Nick asked to use his brother’s spare house “for a week or two” to sober up, yet the brother refused because an alcohol-related accident “might burn the place down,” and the men “haven’t seen each other in about five years” (60). Immediately after this admission, Joanne asks: “Where

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are all these people coming from?” still finding the idea of a fire “silly” (60). With fire seemingly ruled out but a problem nevertheless implicated, a post 9-11 American audience petrified by tales of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction cannot help but fear that terrorists are attacking Aberdeen, and maybe with chemical or biological weapons.

13 The narrative reverses, for, when the couples step outside, they indeed see a fire at the Carpenter house.3 “Why didn’t we hear anything?” Joanne asks. Just as the couples ignored the fire, they have closed their eyes to the problems associable with Nick’s usurpation of Bill’s position. Tension is still great, moreover, because Carol fears that Jenny and her friend “might get too close” to the fire and that “[a]nything could happen” (60). Because the story immediately preceding “Vandals” involves the death of two children, the menace could scarcely be greater.

14 In fact, the girls are not harmed, but damage has been revealed, and not just to a vacant house. Much more aware than the typical Carver figure, Nick senses “that Robert, if not Carol, still blamed him for breaking up Joanne’s marriage with Bill and ending their happy foursome” (51). He associates the fire with Robert accusing him: “Robert’s face was flushed, his expression stern, as if everything that had happened – arson, jail, betrayal, and adultery, the overturning of the established order – was Nick’s fault” (62). Unquestionably linked in Nick’s mind with the collapse of Bill and Joanne’s relationship, the burning house does not necessarily adumbrate, however, the eventual failure of his marriage. In a story in which four is so important, the final four paragraphs deserve full quotation, as they illustrate, even while imaging destruction, that Bill and Joanne’s marriage is strong: “What are you thinking about?” he asked her. “I was thinking about Bill,” she said. He went on holding her. She didn’t say any more for a minute, and then she said, “I think about him every now and then, you know. After all, he was the first man I ever loved.” He kept holding her. She let her head rest on his shoulder and went on staring at the burning house. (62)

15 Undoubtedly Joanne feels sorrow over her lost love, yet she is physically connected to her husband, and, more importantly, communicatively connected. Bill Daly had been a taboo subject, but they are now discussing it, while in the gloomier “WWTA,” discussion of Teri’s former loves widens the emotional divide between her and Mel. The burning house seems less correlated to Nick and Joanne’s marriage than to Daly’s ﬁgurative ghost, which, though the process is painful, is being exorcised.

16 Strongly evocative of “What’s in Alaska?,” “Preservation,” and, to a lesser extent, “A Student’s Wife,” as well as several Where Water Comes Together with Other Water poems, “What Would You Like to See?” is probably the darkest posthumous tale, yet a contrast with the aforementioned works and a few others indicates that, however troubled the lives in this story, Carver Country has illustrated far worse. All the posthumous couples are well above the poverty line; indeed, many are white-collar figures. This story has Phil, the narrator, a college teacher, and Sarah, his wife, a secretary for a university History department. After renting a house for almost a year, they are now splitting, Phil heading east to teach in Vermont, as Raymond Carver himself did at Goddard College in 1978. Like the couples in Where Water’s “Anathema,” “Next Year,” and “Our

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First House in Sacramento,” Phil and Sarah have “left too many houses in a hurry,” “left them damaged or in shambles,” “left owing rent,” and left “in the middle of the night” (23). Typically, Carver’s fiction suggests a present manifesting decay from a happier past. This story, however, reverses the trend. “[T]his is a switch, isn’t it?” observes Sarah. “Getting invited to dinner instead of having to skip town and hide out somewhere” (25).

17 In multiple instances, the posthumous stories refer to actual tragedies that, however terrible, expand the world in which the characters live, preventing the claustrophobic atmosphere often created by Carver’s fiction. With a daughter living on a commune, Phil and Sarah were terrified by the Jonestown massacre, not knowing if she had been there. In fact, she had not but some of her friends were; altogether, this incident, occurring before the story’s present, brought daughter and parents closer through collective sorrow. The story subsequently refers to the Lebanon War. These characters do not live in the typical Carveresque intellectual and cultural enclosure. Although the Lebanese carnage was horrible – for Americans, most notably the loss of 241 Marines in a suicide bombing – Phil at least knows that Lebanon was once “the most beautiful country in the Middle East” (32).

18 Pete shows slides of an Alaskan vacation he took with Evelyn, his first, now deceased wife, while Sarah indicates that she and Phil “were all set to go to Alaska” but did not “at the last minute” (33); in “What’s in Alaska?,” Mary has been offered a job located in Fairbanks. In the Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? story, Mary is sleeping with her husband’s best friend; in the posthumous tale, details intimate that Betty and Pete may have had an affair while Evelyn was alive. Betty’s conspicuous blushing reveals her discomfort (24, 25, 31, 32). Although she feels socially inferior to Sarah and Phil, this explanation does not adequately explain why she feels the need to insinuate that her relationship with Pete began after Evelyn’s death. Betty waitressed in Pete’s restaurant while Evelyn was alive and married him only a “few months” after Evelyn’s premature death from heart stoppage (24). Is the manner of death symbolic of a broken heart caused by adultery? The issue of an affair is indeterminate, unlike the certain affair in “What’s in Alaska?”; nevertheless, the vacuity of Pete and Betty’s marriage, despite Phil’s claim that “they were happy” (24), is pronounced. Like Bill Daly, Evelyn is an omnipresent ghost, her presence repeatedly acknowledged by awkward, unintentionally comedic remarks: “That’s Evelyn again”(33); “That’s Evelyn again” (34); “These were taken before Evelyn died” (34). At the very least, the slideshow indicates that, despite their world travels, Betty and Pete live banal lives. At worst, they are uncomfortable because Evelyn’s image rouses guilt for having betrayed her.

19 Sarah and Phil “had talked and talked and talked” (27) about their troubled relationship and the sagacity of his solo move East, and while this detail hits a more optimistic note than “A Serious Talk” and its complete absence of serious talk, the discussion does not help much, or enough. Sarah’s drinking after having avoided alcohol “for nearly a year, almost the amount of time” she and Phil “had been living in Pete’s house together” is a menacing turn of events (23). Sarah drinks throughout the evening, first wine and then brandy, Phil doubtlessly worrying even while he suppresses his concerns: “Sarah said she’d have a glass of white wine. I looked at her. I asked for a Coke” (28). As if readers of Raymond Carver needed reminding that alcohol can destroy, Pete observes that both Evelyn’s father and brother died from alcoholism. After dinner, having returned to spend the last evening in the rented house, Sarah

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invokes the aid of the divine for her daughter, her husband, and herself. She also asks Phil to hold her until she falls asleep, a detail harkening back to the early story “A Student’s Wife” in which Nan asks for similar assistance from her husband and concludes the tale, insomniac, alone, and desperate, imploring the aid of a deity that is, in that story at least, absent. Sarah is so much better off than Nan. Unlike the earlier boor, Phil is compassionate and helpful. More significantly, as in “Dreams,” God seems a possibility with Betty also requesting divine assistance (for her departing tenants) and Pete’s recovery from alcoholism self-characterized as miraculous. Nevertheless, Phil and Sarah’s marriage seems doomed. Natural imagery, which so powerfully adumbrates an improved future for the protagonist of “Kindling,” is quietly ominous here. A threat to life or a harbinger of death in “After the Denim” and the poems “A Squall” and “Late Afternoon, April 8, 1984,” repeated references to wind suggest that danger approaches. In the conclusion, repeating the technique of “Preservation,” a mechanical failure underscores human failure: Pete’s generator breaks, his freezer “shut[s] down,” and much of his meat is “spoiled” (37). Sarah having taken off her wedding ring “in sadness” (26) and resumed drinking, she and Phil associated with leftovers (a doggy bag of fish) and a menacing wind, it seems inescapable that their marriage is shut down and spoiled too.

20 Like the couple in “What Would You Like To See?” Nancy and Dan in “Call If You Need Me” are trying to revive a shaky marriage. They have been having affairs, though unlike Eileen of “Fever,” Nancy has not run off with her paramour, one of her husband’s colleagues. After sending their son to his grandmother for the summer and leaving their house with another couple, like Edna and Wes of “Chef’s House,” they drive to a rented house in Eureka to revitalize their relationship. On the way, they see a car whose damaged muffler sparks, scraping against the pavement. A dominant motif in the posthumous stories, here the reference to fire signifies ambiguously: the sparks symbolically parallel the couple’s effort to rekindle their love, yet their relationship, like the car ahead, is damaged. After several weeks of effort, Nancy declares the endeavor a failure. Before she leaves, however, the couple plays with horses on the front lawn (an image clearly evocative of Where I’m Calling From’s “Blackbird Pie”), listens to music, and has sex.

21 Despite the marriage’s collapse, in several ways “Call If You Need Me” is more life affirming than the many Carver stories it echoes. In What We TalkAbout’s “Why Don’t You Dance?” a middle-aged man, numbed by the destruction of his marriage and alcoholism, fails to connect with a young couple, the girl with whom he dances considering his gift of records – a symbol of his past and better times – “shit” (WICF 161). The posthumous story has a young couple house-sitting for the protagonists; they are graduate students in math, presumably much more capable of communicating, connecting meaningfully with others, and making sense of their world. Another positive aspect is a grandmother who cares for Nancy and Dan’s college-age son offstage. This loving grandmother is a unique character in Carver’s fiction.

22 Dan’s relationship with his son harkens back to the loving bond in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please’s “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarets,” but neither relationship is typical in Carver. More representative is Cathedral’s “The Compartment,” in which father and son brawl with a knife, sundering their relationship forever, or the poem “On an Old Photograph of My Son,” whose speaker admits that he once desired his son “dead” (All 276). The posthumous story, conversely, has an exceptionally close father-son relationship. Dan

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communicates honestly and sensitively about the state of his marriage, and then he “embraced” his son and “kissed him on the cheek” (64). In “Bicycles,” the son is a young child; the kiss between men is both more conspicuous and more powerfully suggestive of love.

23 A contrast of the horse and fog imagery and related character actions and thoughts in “Blackbird Pie” and “Call If You Need Me” further demonstrates the latter’s far greater affirmation of human potential.4 In the formerstory, fog parallels the narrator’s questionable mental state and his obsession with facts yet inability to create out of them a larger, sustaining vision. He describes the horses as if they leap suddenly out of fog and later compares their trailer to “a big portable oven” (WICF 503). Indeed, the horses initially appear to be a hallucination. The encounter with the horses and fog, if it accomplishes anything, helps the narrator see his wife’s importance, yet he realizes this too late to save his marriage, and at least one critic thinks that he might commit suicide (Matsuoka 432, 436). In the posthumous story, their reality never in doubt, the horses are linked both to Nancy’s emotional vulnerability, wounded by her husband’s adultery (“I don’t want to get bitten,” she says [72]), and to the significant damage created in the wake of their marriage’s dissolution (“There were deep impressions in the grass, and gashes, and there were piles of dung” [74]). When Nancy overcomes her fear to pet the horses, this act symbolizes her capacity to love again. Fog correlates neither with confusion nor insanity but with a protective barrier that helps the couple to suspend their problems temporarily and “make love” one more time as sunrise nears (73). This phrasing to describe sex occurs repeatedly in the posthumous stories, yet other Carver fiction mentions it only once – in a disturbing juxtaposition to voiding bodily wastes in “Neighbors” (WICF 89). While Arlene Miller is desperately afraid at the end of that squalid tale, Nancy announces: “I’m glad for last night…. Those horses. Our talk. Everything. It helps. We won’t forget that” (74). Sex is part of healing, not violation, a theme Carver had not used in his fiction since the mid-1960’s in “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?”

24 In “Cathedral,” Carver’s narrator quips atheistically at the dinner table, “Pray the phone won’t ring and the food doesn’t get cold” (WICF 364). While the fiction published during Carver’s life suggests an agnostic or atheistic vision, the narrator of “Call If You Need Me,” like so many of the posthumous characters, is a man of faith. Moreover, he recognizes the moral squalor of his and his wife’s lives, understanding their affairs are “tacky”(65) and lamenting that he had rented the house while traveling with his paramour: “I even used the phrase “second honeymoon” to the realtor, God forgive me, while Susan smoked a cigarette and read tourist brochures out in the car” (66). When Nancy boards her plane, Dan thinks: “Go, dearest one,and God be with you” (74). None of the major characters in the fiction published in Carver’s lifetime expresses a religious belief so confidently; the posthumous stories, conversely, repeatedly manifest sincere religious conviction. Undoubtedly, this motif helps to account for why critics such as Toby Mundy see “the possibility of redemption” so conspicuous in these stories.

25 “Call If You Need Me” ends ambiguously, the narrator, “without even taking off [his] coat,” dialing his girlfriend’s number (74). Not waiting to remove his coat possibly conveys his eagerness to call Susan and his love for her, or wearing a coat indoors might image constriction suggesting an inability to connect passionately with another. He calls, though; he acts. In the ending of “Where I’m Calling From,” a less decisive narrator wonders whether he should call his wife or paramour. Hopefulness resonates in

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details as small as Dan’s call or his vision of Nancy’s departing plane as a “speck” (74), which echoes an earlier Nancy and what she thinks people in a passing airplane would see on the ground, only “I Could See the Smallest Things” is a squalid story in which slugs symbolically assess human value.

26 Positioned first and the most affirmative of the stories in the posthumous collection, “Kindling” will remind Carver aficionados of “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” one of the more affirmative Will You Please? stories in which Myers overcomes writer’s block through an encounter with a strange academic couple, the Morgans. The Myers of “Shoes” is “between stories” (WICF 96); according to the posthumous story’s first line, Myers is “between lives” (7). If he is the same character, he has degenerated into alcoholism and split with his wife nastily; she “wouldn’t even talk to him, let alone have him anywhere near the house” (7). Ultramarine’s “The Phone Booth” adds likely details omitted: […] the phone begins to shout, “I told you it’s over! Finished! You can go to hell as far as I’m concerned!” (All 214)

27 Like Myrna in “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit,” the estranged wife has taken up with another drunk. Fresh out of rehab, Myers is struggling with his writing, for in his first night in the room he rents from Sol and Bonnie “he wrote the words Emptiness is the beginning of all things. He stared at this, and then he laughed. Jesus, what rubbish!” (10). The sentence is rubbish because it sentimentalizes; emptiness is emptiness, a fact that Myers tacitly admits with his next entry: “Nothing” (13). One of the affirmative themes for Carver’s fiction here is writing’s therapeutic value. Myers improves himself by writing – or, at the very least, writing illustrates his emotional revival, Carver’s technique and theme, in a vastly more condensed form, reminiscent of Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in which a writer’s honest mental narratives are rewarded with the illusion of flying to Heaven.

28 Precision, honesty, and concreteness in expression are the key values associable with Myers’s better writing. Here are the remaining passages of his writing as they occur in the text: I would get down on my knees and ask forgiveness if that would help. (15) I have sawdust in my shirtsleeves tonight.... It’s a sweet smell. (18) The country I’m in is very exotic. It reminds of someplace I’ve read about but never traveled to before now. Outside my window I can hear a river and in the valley behind the house there is a forest and precipices and mountain peaks covered with snow. Today I saw a wild eagle, and a deer, and I cut and chopped two cords of wood. (20)

29 The first passage evokes Where I’m Calling From’s “Intimacy” in which a Raymond- Carver-like narrator kneels in front of his ex-wife, a figure clearly comparable to the author’s first wife, Maryann. Indeed, Myers of “Kindling” is physically similar to Carver: “tall, stooped,…curly headed” with “sad eyes” (11). Although the wife in “Intimacy” experiences a cathartic release, the story’s narrator is not similarly freed, with the closing images of leaves, symbolic of memories, clinging everywhere in the conclusion. More evidence of the posthumous stories’ greater hopefulness is Myers’s clear gain from his experience. The story’s penultimate paragraph, the third and final passage quoted above, is by far the longest of his writings, its very length concretizing a renewal of his writing that is itself a synecdoche illustrating a larger renewal. This

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passage’s imagery, too, speaks to newness (a place Myers has “never traveled to before”), freedom (“wild eagle”), and great possibilities (“mountain peaks covered with snow”). Echoing a persistent motif, the sound of water, the passage impresses with its vigor and life, while the previously published What We Talk About’s“So Much Water So Close to Home” relentlessly associates water with rape, death, and madness.

30 Elements of the grotesque in “Kindling” invite comparison to Cathedral’s “Feathers” in which a decidedly odd family thrives, if anything, because of its strangeness. A key point about “Feathers” is that the encounter with the odd family helps the narrator and his wife only temporarily, their marriage degenerating, after their son’s birth, into a loveless stasis. The odd couple in “Kindling” is Myers’s landlords, Bonnie and Sol. As the names imply – bonny with its association with fairness, fineness, and excellence; Sol, a Roman sun god – this is not our typical Carver pair, though to be sure, they have their limitations. A blasting accident in Sol’s youth severed “nerves and cause[d]” his “arm and fingers to wither” (12). A “fat girl,” “fat all over,” “huff[ing] when she breathed” (8), Bonnie reminds us of the obese restaurant patron in “Fat.” In his wedding picture, “Sol’s good strong left arm reached around Bonnie’s waist asfar as it would go” (8; emphasis added), a phrasing tacitly recognizing larger limitations. He might be an insomniac, she can be as trite as Mrs. Morgan,5 and they are childless, a fact Bonnie regrets. Indeed, she is anything but bonny or fair when, despite the hours and hours of free manual labor that Myers performs, she insists, “No refunds on the rent” when he is leaving weeks before the month is up (20). Nevertheless, she is not enslaved like the fat man compelled to eat, while Sol is spared the mental terrors plaguing prior Carver insomniacs such as the narrator of “The Idea,” the cuckolded husband in “What’s in Alaska?,” or Hughes in “Menudo,”6 and they are vastly more alive than the impotent, caricatured academic couple that Myers faces in “Shoes.” Sol explicitly declares his love for Bonnie and that same night “loved her up” and she “loved him back” (12). Although the sexual encounter is not ideal – for instance, Bonnie worries about Myers walking in on them – it is just that, a love encounter exceedingly more affirmative of human potential than, say, the quasi marital rape in “Fat” or a similar misdeed about to occur as the What We Talk About version of “So Much Water So Close to Home” ends.

31 Myers has been in a bad way. Evoking the poem “Yesterday, Snow,” he wakes up sweating after a nightmare in which he was about to resume drinking. Just watching Bonnie prepare his bed “almost caused Myers to weep” (9) presumably because of a connection to his own, irretrievably lost marriage. Yet his capacity for feeling and determination to stay sober elevate him above a character like the man in “Why Don’t You Dance?” who lives in an alcoholic-numbed world after his wife’s departure. What is most distinctive in regards to Myers’s optimistic future is that “Kindling” shows him benefiting from manual labor. As Bill Mullen observes, Carver’s fiction rarely refers to characters in the workplace and never creates the impression of them gaining emotionally or psychologically, to say nothing about financially, from labor, this absence or disconnect underscoring their generally disconnected lives. Although the early story “What Do You Do in San Francisco?” mentions work emphatically, Robinson the narrator used work to deaden the pain caused by a Dear John letter, uses it in the present to avoid recognizing his life’s vacuity, and encourages another character, deserted by his life partner, to similarly anesthetize himself. In a much later story, “Menudo,” the insomniac narrator, his life in disarray because of his adultery, is obsessed with raking his neighbors’ lawn, an act symbolizing his desire to order his life.

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By no means, however, is it clear that Hughes will succeed, since the story defines him as one who will never eat menudo, a Mexican dish associable with restorative powers. In “Kindling,” Myers likewise feels obsessed with a task symbolic of creating order: “He decided that he would cut this wood and split it and stack it before sunset, and that it was a matter of life and death that he do so” (19). What is absurd in “Jerry and Molly and Sam,” Al’s sudden belief that he must find the dog he deserted or his life is ruined, is very earnest here. Al is not rewarded, while Hughes nearly breaks down in front of his neighbors. Conversely, when Bonnie and Sol watch Myers work, all three feel joy: “[Myers] felt good suddenly, and he grinned. Sol and Bonnie were taken by surprise at first. Sol grinned back, and then Bonnie” (18). They are surprised because they have seen their tenant smile for the first time.

32 In splitting the wood, Myers is subconsciously coming to terms with an infinitely more important split, his marital separation. By repeatedly referencing two,7 the text links Myers’s labor to his marriage now severed irrevocably. Besides Myers’s assertion that he feels “okay” and the story’s reiteration of this word in the final line (20) – “okay” is, Kirk Nesset has cleverly observed, Carver’s downsizing of Hemingway’s “good” place (35) – natural imagery and an image of openness powerfully intimate that the labor will help. After the first day of cutting, “sweet, cool air poured in” Myers’s room (18), and then, on the second day, having finished the job, he sees “no clouds now, just the moon, and the snowcapped mountains” (20) which are earlier associated with the majesty and freedom of “an eagle soaring” (15). In “Chef’s House,” gathering clouds foreshadow Wes’s recapitulation to his alcoholic demons; in “Kindling,” conversely, the clear view of the mountain speaks to Myers’s much more optimistic prospects. The posthumous story ends, moreover, with a sense of openness, as Myers leaves “the window open” (20), an image reversing the symbolic enclosure evidenced in previously published, far more pessimistic stories such as “Careful” and “Collectors.”

33 Raymond Carver’s fiction has so many breakups, which are normally devastating. Each posthumous story, conversely, has at least one functioning marriage, while the breakups (with the exception of “Kindling”) avoid the evisceration of warm feeling. Despite their problems – and in some cases such as Mary Rice’s, the hardships are extreme – the characters are not nearly as pressured, a point neatly illustrated by a contrast of structure. The radical minimalist version of “So Much Water So Close to Home” is shorter than any posthumous story, yet its contents are divided and squeezed into nine terse sections, structure underscoring disconnection and incompletion. “Kindling,” the much longer tale so insistent in reference to water, has only four sections; indeed, the posthumous collection averages just fewer than three sections per story, a structure girding the greater cohesiveness within the minds and hearts of the characters and their greater connectedness to others.

34 In his review of Kirk Nesset’s short monograph, Marshall Gentry observes that Nesset “is careful not to claim that the final stories reveal Carver” to be “an optimist” (134), “final stories” encompassing the last seven tales in Where I’m CallingFrom, which was published more than a decade before Call IfYou Need Me. Although I too reject the label “optimist” for Carver, in contrast to his previous collections, the posthumous fiction cogently affirms human capacity for endurance, for friendship, for love, for redemption; indeed, they frequently manifest intellectual and spiritual dimensions rarely seen in his prior books. While the posthumous stories’ quality seems undeniable – Daniel Garret describes them as “mature,” the “work of a man in command of his

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talent and in touch with his emotions” – they do not prove that Carver was moving toward optimism in his very last years. The distinguished poet Tess Gallagher, Carver’s second wife, reveals in the foreword to Call If You Need Me that the titular story and “What Do You Want To See?” were written in the early 1980s (XII); thus Carver wrote the more affirmative “Call If You Need Me” before the gloomier, related tale “Blackbird Pie.” The compositional time of the other stories is not indicated, and Gallagher clearly insinuates that only some stories in manuscript were published (XI). Besides making money, the posthumous collection seems designed to direct critical attention to that part of Carver’s work more greatly affirming human potential. I believe that Carver stories from both the pool of optimistic tales and the ocean of despair will survive, that future readers will treasure “Cathedral” as well “Why Don’t You Dance?” The stories of Call If You Need Me add silver and gold, emphasizing again that American letters lost a giant far too early.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alton, John. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Literature: An Interview with Raymond Carver.” Conversations with Raymond Carver. Eds. Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. 151-68.

Bethea, Arthur F. “Carver’s ‘Collectors.’” The Explicator 61 (2002): 54-55.

---. “Carver’s ‘Wes Hardin: From a Photograph’ and ‘A Small, Good Thing.’” TheExplicator 57 (1999): 176-79.

---. Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Boxer, David, and Cassandra Phillips. “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: Voyeurism, Dissociation, and the Art of Raymond Carver.” Iowa Review 10 (1979): 75-90

Brown, Arthur A. “Raymond Carver and Postmodern Humanism.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 31 (1990): 125-36.

Campbell, Ewing. “Ramond Carver’s Therapeutics of Passion.” The Journal of the Short Story in English 16 (1991): 9-18

Carver, Raymond. All of Us: The Collected Poems. New York: Vintage, 2000

---. Call If You Need Me: The Uncollecred Fiction and Other Prose. New York: Vintage, 2001

Fontana, Ernest. “Insomnia in Raymond Carver’s Fiction.” Studies in Short Fiction 26 (1989): 447-51.

Gallagher, Tess. Foreword. Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose. By Raymond Carver. New York: Vintage, 2001. IX-XV.

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Garret, Daniel. Rev. of Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose, by Raymond Carver. World Literature Today (Summer-Autumn 2001): 143-44. Expanded Academic ASAP. Infotrac. Becker C lib, 4 Nov. 2004.

Gentry, Marshall Bruce. Rev. of The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study, by Kirk Nesset. Studies in Short Fiction 34 (1997): 134-35.

Gray, Paul. “More from a Master: Five Previously Unpublished Short Stories by the Late Raymond Carver Attest to His Lasting Genius.” Time 15 Jan. 2001: 131. Expanded Academic ASAP. Infotrac. Becker C lib, 4 Nov. 2004.

Matsuoka, Naomi. “Murakami Haruki and Raymond Carver: The American Scene.” Comparative Literature Stories 30 (1993): 423-38.

Mullen, Bill. “A Subtle Spectacle: Televisual Culture in the Short Stories of Raymond Carver.” Critique 39 (1998): 99-114.

Mundy, Toby. “Simply True.” New Statesman 4 Sept. 2000: 41. Expanded Academic ASAP. Infotrac. Becker C lib, 4 Nov. 2004.

Nesset, Kirk. The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Survey. Athens: Ohio UP, 1995.

Saltzman, Arthur. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1988.

NOTES

1. For more analysis of Carver's use of names, see my article “Carver's ‘Collectors’” and Technique and Sensibility (12-13, 67, 69, 90, 148, 174). 2. My article “Raymond Carver’s ‘Wes Hardin: From a Photograph’ and ‘A Small, Good Thing’” addresses Carver’s symbolical use of 3 and 33; see also Technique and Sensibility for more examples of Carver’s symbolic use of numbers (72-73, 91, 137, 164, 180-81, 253, 254, 270-71, and 282-3). 3. Jesus is associated with the profession of carpentry, while the fire at the Carpenter house is indirectly associated with terrorism, which the American mind, if not actual fact, most frequently correlates with Islam. The reference to “Carpenter” may indicate that Carver was considering linking his domestic story to the Christian-Islamic struggle. 4. “Call If You Need Me” was apparently written before “Blackbird Pie”; in this essay’s conclusion, I say a few more words about the stories’ dating. 5. Bonnie’s poor writing describing Myers’s arrival on “ onefateful night” (11) echoes Mrs. Morgan’s insistence that “Fate” directed a woman “to die” in her presence (WICF 109). 6. For more on Carver’s treatment of insomnia, see Ernest Fontana’s “Insomnia in Raymond Carver’s Fiction” and Technique and Sensibility (15, 16, 49, 62, 119). 7. Consider “two sawhorses” (17); repeated references to two pieces of wood after an act of sawing or splitting (17, 17, 18, 19); and Myers’s statement in the penultimate paragraph that he “chopped two cords of wood” (20).

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ABSTRACTS

Frequently Raymond Carver has been associated with a pessimistic sensibility, and rightly so. Published individually for the first time in 1999 and 2000 and then collected in Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose more than a decade after Carver’s death, “Dreams,” “Vandals,” “What Would You Like To See?,” “Call If You Need Me,” and “Kindling” reveal a far more life-affirming Carver. Although this fiction does not prove that Carver was moving toward optimism in his final years – the composition time of at least some of these tales predates the “new” stories in Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories, the last collection that Carver published before his death – the posthumous fiction convincingly depicts a world of greater value. Although the typical Carver problems remain – alcoholism, for example, and marital breakups – in comparison to his previous collections, these stories demonstrate an amazingly expanded world with characters much more economically, intellectually, psychologically, socially, and even spiritually endowed.

AUTHORS

ARTHUR F. BETHEA Earning his PhD in English from Ohio University, Arthur Bethea has taught writing and literature courses at post-secondary institutions since 1984. He has published articles on Raymond Carver, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens; his comparison of Philip Levine and Czeslaw Milosz will appear shortly. Published in 2002, Dr. Bethea’s Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver was the first monograph to examine Carver’s poetry in detail. Dr. Bethea is currently working on a composition text for first-year college writers.

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Women and Violence in the Stories of Raymond Carver

Sandra Lee Kleppe

1 Raymond Carver’s short stories frequently depict scenes of emotional menace at the heart of domestic and working-class America. Verbal violence and psychological abuse are the most common forms of animosity in Carver Country. There are, however, scattered episodes of physical violence throughout Carver’s stories, and more often than not these involve a woman either as perpetrator, victim, or narrator/witness to the scene. In one of the most blunt depictions of a violent woman, Carver has her perform a ritual act on her husband in which “she cuts out his heart and holds it up to the lustrous sun” (No Heroics, Please 52). In another story, two women are the victims of a random act of male violence: “Jerry used the same rock on both girls” to kill them (What We Talk About 56). In most cases, however, women are depicted within a domestic world where family tensions end in violence, such as when a husband hits his wife when he suspects she has cheated on him: “‘Where were you all night?’ he was screaming, standing over her, legs watery, fist drawn back to hit again. Then she said, ‘I didn’t do anything. Why did you hit me?’” (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? 232).

2 This article examines the role of women characters who are involved in such violent passages. The first and middle sections provide an overview of Carver’s development of the motif of violence from his formative years through his minimalist and later phases. The final section concentrates on an analysis of one story, “So Much Water, So Close to Home,” and how it reflects the specific social trauma of the rape and murder of young women in Carver’s native Washington State by serial killers in the 1970s and 1980s. By considering passages from different periods in which Carver yokes the representation of women to violence, the aim is to establish how the cumulative effect expresses something about Carver’s idiomatic rendering of a violent world. What links the various parts of this paper is the attempt to see the violent episodes involving women as meaningful in the larger context of their status in contemporary America. The theoretical scope of the discussion will be limited to the few perspectives that seem particularly relevant to a reading of how Carver depicts women in a violent era.

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3 I have chosen to include considerations of two studies that are sensitive to three aspects of the topic which seem paramount in Carver’s case: 1) how violence relates to gender, 2) how violence is connected to women’s worlds in a very real way, and 3) how literary realism is a vehicle for expressing such a contemporary condition. In an illuminating article on violence and representation, Teresa de Lauretis analyzes how “the representation of violence is inseparable from the notion of gender” and argues that the “real, the physical world and empirical reality” are crucial in understanding depictions of gender and violence (1989 240; 246). Josephine G. Hendin argues in her recent book, HeartBreakers:Women and Violence in Contemporary Culture and Literature, (2004) that “[v]iolent women in literature return the empirical energies of realism, the reach of emotions, and the narrative richness and meaning of language to center stage” (25). She considers specifically how women who commit violent acts in contemporary American literature and culture are performing communicative gestures that are ultimately not an indication of the breakdown of society but rather symbolic of a significant process of change taking place in the roles of men, women, and families. Since nearly all of Carver’s violent women are portrayed in a marital or family context, his stories are particularly interesting in light of the concept of communicative violence as an expression of or wish for change.

4 Both de Lauretis and Hendin provide a critique of a number of current theories of representation that they find inadequate to an analysis of women and violence in literature.1 Hendin, for example, holds that “American literature of violent women constitutes an assault by realism on postmodern unreality and nihilism” (51), and de Lauretis locates blind spots in current ideologies that fail to take into account women’s experiences, “events and behaviors [that] weigh in the constitution of subjectivity as much as does language” (249). Carver occupies a curiously paradoxical position on the contemporary literary scene. Producing his most characteristic neo-realistic fiction at the height of the postmodern era (What We Talk About When We Talk About Love appeared in 1981), a minimalist among maximalists, Carver had a relentless faith in the power of words to evoke the experiences of everyday Americans in an age when language play and experimentation with technique reigned. At the same time, the meta-textual and hyper-real aspects of Carver’s production nevertheless make it characteristic of the era.

5 Carver’s portrayal of women and violence changed subtly over the course of his career. In the early years, he was struggling with literary models, and produced parodies of others’ work in which women are both victims and perpetrators of violence. When he moved to his more idiomatic style in the 1970s, we see frustrated women performing violent gestures that seem to produce no changes in their lives. By the final years, however, women start achieving an amount of control over their lives as violence seems to move them from one phase to another in the direction they wish to be going. There is thus a parallel between the analyses of Hendin and de Lauretis and the development of Carver’s portrayal of women. These scholars are sensitive to examining the nexus of gender and violence as women have experienced it in the postmodern world and find that the discourse surrounding this nexus has moved from private (i.e. the home) to public (e.g. the establishment of battered women’s centers; the use of the concept “domestic violence” in court), and also that women who use violence do so ultimately in attempts to make real personal and political changes. In addition, the fact that Hendin and de Lauretis both give so much emphasis to the empirical realities of

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women makes their methods for reading women and violence especially relevant to a writer who was intensely pre-occupied with the possibilities of literary realism.

The Formative Years

6 In three early stories written during the 1960s, there are accounts of violence rendered in three distinct literary modes that Carver was imitating on the road to finding his own style. “Furious Seasons” is a Faulknerian tale narrated by using the device of repeating the scene leading up to a murder four times. A brother has a sexual relationship with his sister, and when he learns she is pregnant, he slashes her with his razor, though Carver omits a graphic account of the death scene and leaves it to the reader to fill in the details:

7 He lays down the razor and washes his face, then picks up the razor again… He carries her out to the porch, turns her face to the wall, and covers her up. He goes back to the bathroom, washes his hands, and stuffs the heavy, blood-soaked towel into the hamper. (No Heroics, Please 41)

8 Except for the technique of ellipsis, Carver rarely ever used Faulknerian devices or themes again. The same is true for the experimental tale “Bright Red Apples,” which William L. Stull points out is Carver’s “sole attempt at the self-consuming mode of ‘superfiction’ that swept through American literature in the late 1960s” (Preface to No Heroics 18). In this story a deranged son rides out from his apple farm on a camel into a desert landscape, returns and threatens to kill his family members, then later commits suicide in the orchard. The mother in the story tries to fend off the son’s violence by protecting herself with a dog, as she also tries to dissuade him from shooting: “Rudy, now you wouldn’t do anything now, dear, you’d be sorry for later” (No Heroics 59).

9 “The Aficionados” is a Hemingway parody and the most interesting story with reference to Carver’s further development. Hemingway is the only writer from this period who had a significant influence on Carver’s later work, and in this story he allows physical strength and violence to be the traits of a heroine, rather than a hero. Carver’s title is an allusion to the passage in The Sun Also Rises where Jake explains that “Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull-fights” (135). Carver’s story transforms the bull-fight into a public ritual in which a woman cuts out the heart of her husband in front of a cheering crowd. At every point in the story, Carver parodies some aspect of Hemingway. The woman complains that the other women slayers lack aficion, “They seem so, so unprofessional” (47). On the day of the ceremony the man and woman sit drinking, engaged in a numbing dialogue, and he wonders how many of the previous men she has slain were her lovers: “How many of us have you lived with?” he asks, to which she replies “Why... five or six. I’d have to think” (49). Carver’s woman is a stronger Brett Ashley; she is endowed with physical and not merely emotional power over the men she seduces. In the final scene the two are in the center of a public Arena: “She is standing over him dressed in a white robe, holding the long shiny obsidian knife… she cuts out his heart and holds it up to the lustrous sun” (52).

10 “The Aficionados” is not a mere inversion of Hemingway’s bull-fighting plot. In this parody, in which the woman is powerful and the man is degraded to an animal, Carver ridicules at once heroism, male sports, and stereotypical gender roles. The story has a symbolic, almost mythic character, as the men and women seem types in a ritual

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drama. Hendin has analyzed how specific myths native (indigenous) to the American continent have come to influence the treatment of violence in American realism. She finds central the male myth of the native who cuts out and eats his enemy’s heart in order to assimilate his strength (28). The title of Hendin’s book, HeartBreakers, refers to the phenomena of women who physically attack men, literally stabbing or mangling them in ways that stop their hearts, empowering themselves in the process. The frequency of these taboo phenomena2 in current American film, literature and life is indicative, she believes, of a society in transformation, one in which women’s retaliatory violence is expressive of their refusal to be victimized as the weaker sex. By allowing the woman to take control and perform such a violent act in “The Aficionados,” Carver is contributing to the symbolic transformation in American literature and culture in which violent women metaphorically and literally are allowed to break men’s hearts.

11 Hendin finds another native American myth, a female one, even more interesting. In it, a brother and sister have an incestuous relationship, and the brother kills their baby (30). The sister retaliates by bringing disease into the world. The theme of incest and the fear of (powerful) women is central to Faulkner’s work, and parodied, as we saw above, in Carver’s “Furious Seasons.” In all three of his early stories containing violent scenes, Carver is clearly working through and ridding himself of influences, and thus the violence can also be read as a symbolic slaying of predecessors in order to make way for his idiomatic style3. With the exception of Hemingway, Carver quickly left early influences behind. And Carver’s realism is a much closer rendering of the lives of everyday Americans than Hemingway’s ever was. While Hemingway was preoccupied with war in Europe, Carver portrays the everyday battles that take place on the real home front: in domestic realms of America. Carver’s stories are more often than not about family relationships, especially marriage. The existence of marital violence has become so pervasive in American society that it risks becoming commonplace4, and it is a pervasive presence in Carver’s stories as well.

12 As both Hendin and de Lauretis suggest, a whole cold-war generation of women who experienced domestic violence were not taken seriously by health professionals and jurisprudence until the 1980s, as there were no official concepts with which to deal with their situations. In this context de Lauretis has examined a theoretical fallacy which leaves the empirical reality of violence unaccounted for: “To say that a) the concept of ‘family violence’ did not exist before the expression came into being, as I said earlier, is not the same as saying that b) family violence did not exist before ‘family violence’ became part of the discourse of social science” (246). Such violence is quite frequently recorded in literature and other arts before it reaches public discourse, and realist literature is a particularly well-focused medium that is sensitive to such a world. Both de Lauretis and Hendin agree that representations of women and violence are almost always linked to the relational. All of Hendin’s examples “share three major elements: the affective, communicative and interrelational” (53). Violence committed against women as well as their own retaliatory violence are thus phenomena that grow out of specific social contexts, those of intimate and family life structures. After his formative years, Carver turned his attentions precisely to the depiction of marriage and of family life in America. In many cases, women are portrayed as the perpetrators of violence, and the frequency with which they smash items, hit or slap their family members suggests that their actions are both retaliatory and communicative within the context of officially unaccounted for, yet fictionally recorded domestic violence.

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Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: The Communicative Aspects of Family Violence

13 In Carver’s first story collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), he applies his developing skills as a realist to stories of domestic turmoil at the heart of American families. There are small, violent episodes scattered through the collection and they all have in common a communicative aspect. In three stories, frustrated women resort to violence when talk and other measures do not improve their life situations. The first of these, “Nobody Said Anything,” is narrated by a boy who constantly hears his parents bickering. At one point in the story, the mother relates to the son her worry that the father is trying to break up the family. In the final scene, the boy finds his parents screaming at each other in the kitchen. The tension reaches its height when the mother performs a violent gesture that spoils the family dinner: “She pushed her chair back and grabbed the pan by its handle and threw it against the wall over the sink” (60). Though it does not resolve their conflict, the woman’s rash action shows her unwillingness to accept the status quo by continuing the futile verbal battle.

14 In “Jerry and Molly and Sam,” another story of domestic unrest, an adulterous and frustrated husband describes how his wife can suddenly resort to violence: “She could go along with [the children], let them get away with just so much, and then she would turn on them and savagely slap their faces, screaming, ‘Stop it! Stop it! I can’t stand any more of it!’” (157). When abusive mothers are portrayed in literature, Hendin has argued, they present a challenge to conventional notions of feminine behavior, stereotypes that would have us believe that women are inherently nurturing and passive. The realism of Carver’s passages with violent women in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? shows all of them in contexts where they are caught in tense family relationships, and their violence can therefore be read as acts of communicating their dissatifaction with roles and norms prescribed to men and women. In the third story depicting a violent woman, “What Is It?” the wife’s shame and humiliation leads her to attack her husband. The couple are going bankrupt, and the story suggests that she ends up prostituting herself by selling her car and her body in order for the family to gain access to cash. After the night of the sale the drunk wife returns home to her husband and “lunges, catches his shirt, tears it down the front. ‘Bankrupt!’ she screams. She tears loose, grabs and tears his undershirt at the neck. ‘You son of a bitch,’ she says, clawing” (216).

15 In these stories, in which women express themselves through violence, their actions do not seem to resolve any of their problems. In two other stories where men have violent outbursts while a woman witnesses or is the victim, there is, on the contrary, a sense of resolution and closure. In “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarets” two fathers get in a fight over their sons’ vandalism, and a mother of a third boy looks on in horror. The narrator, Hamilton, attacks the other father, “pound[ing] his head against the lawn while the woman cried, ‘God almighty, someone stop them’” (203). Hamilton then takes his son home, where his wife expresses her disapproval of the fight, yet the father and son have a moment of emotional connection over the episode at bedtime the same night. Hamilton “moved to kiss his son, but the boy began talking. ‘Dad, was grandfather strong like you? When he was your age, I mean’” (206). The violence establishes a masculine bond between father and son, a closeness the mother does not share.

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16 The title story of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is the tale of the husband Ralph’s violent, physical and emotional reaction to his wife Marian’s adultery. She takes the initiative of bringing up an episode that had happened a few years earlier, when the couple attended a drunken party, and Ralph had beaten her when he suspected she had sex with another man, something she denied at the time: “Where were you all night?” he was screaming, standing over her, legs watery, fist drawn back to hit again. Then she said, “I didn’t do anything. Why did you hit me?” (232)

17 The fusing of violence and sex is, according to Hendin, one of the most common factors in the occurrence of domestic strife, or what she terms “the politics of intimacy” (6). Ralph later recalls some of the bloody details of battering his wife, which he fuses with imagining her and the other man: He thought of Marian…on the floor, blood on her teeth: “Why did you hit me?” Then Marian reaching under her dress to unfasten her garter belt! Then Marian lifting her dress as she arched back! (240)

18 Even Marian, in her narration of the sex episode to Ralph in an attempt to gain his forgiveness, strikingly fuses violence with her choice of imagery. Mitchell, the man she had sex with, said “something about Norman Mailer stabbing his wife in the chest…. He said he’d hate to think of me being stabbed in the breast. He said he’d like to kiss my breast” (237).

19 The plot is resolved through gesture, which is a communicative act that is a hallmark aspect of Carver’s work. It is especially when words fail that characters resort to gestures as a means of connecting with their surroundings. In three stories of this collection, as we have seen above, women vent their emotional frustration and humiliation by using violent gestures: one woman smashes a frying pan, while another slaps her children and a third attacks her husband. In “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarets” it is a father who attacks another father in a neighborhood clash, then has a moment of reconciliation with his son. “Will You Please be Quiet, Please?” also closes with reconciliation, as the estranged couple find their way back to each other through sex. The story ends with the lines, “And then he turned to her. …he was still turning, marveling at the impossible changes he felt moving over him” (251, emphasis added). The motifs of change and transformation link all of the stories containing violent scenes in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? However, it is only in the stories where men commit violent acts that there is any sense of reconciliation between characters. Women’s violence in this collection is portrayed as sudden and futile, a clear expression of frustration and wish for change, but with no outlets for a positive resolution of the situation. Carver did not return to communication and reconciliation as major themes again until his later work.

What We Talk About: Minimalist Ellipsis and Extremity

20 What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) is considered a seminal book in what came to be known as literary minimalism, a pared-down style Carver developed as a sort of extreme form of Hemingway’s telegraphic realism. Though Carver moved quickly beyond the minimalist aesthetic of this volume in his next works, the treatment of women and violence bears the characteristic traits of this movement. Carver made massive cuts to the stories in this volume while preparing it for publication5, replacing

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some violent episodes with ellipsis, and leaving much to suggestion. Some of the stories take domestic situations similar to those in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? to absurd ends, providing compressed, dark humor in the place of narrative exposition. In the title story of What We Talk About When We talk About Love, two couples get drunk while discussing the nature of love, and debate, among things, whether a husband who beats his wife then kills himself can really feel love for her. The fusing of the themes of sex, love and violence reaches no conclusive resolution, as the gin runs out and the lights dim on the characters. This story sets the tone for a collection in which people commit sudden acts of violence that are more extreme than in the previous volume, yet less contextualized and sometimes seemingly random.

21 In an episode of the four-page story “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit” we learn that the narrator’s rival “walked with a wound from a gunshot his first wife had given him…for not meeting his payments” (18), a more serious outcome than the wife’s attacking her husband for bankruptcy in “What Is It?” discussed above. In “Gazebo” the plot of “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” is condensed and reversed, as the wife threatens to commit suicide after learning of her husband’s affair. The women in these cases resort to more extreme measures than in the earlier fiction, though some of the stories are so reduced as to seem like vignettes. This is true of the shortest story in the volume, “Popular Mechanics,” which is almost a prose poem and contemporary allegory of the Biblical story of Solomon and his two wives. A husband and wife who are breaking up literally fight over who gets to keep their baby, each pulling at its limbs as the story ends abruptly: “In this manner, the issue was decided” (125). Domestic violence is thus taken to new levels in this volume, at the same time as character development is kept at a minimum. The result is a portayal of contemporary life in which men and women commit violence as a matter of course in order to gain immediate or short-term resolution of a conflict.

22 In the longer “The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off,” narrated by a teenage boy named Jack, there is more character exploration, yet no clear explanation of why his father’s mute friend Dummy “[d]id in his wife with a hammer, then drowned himself” (102). The narrator’s father simply blames the wife: “That’s what the wrong kind of woman can do to you, Jack” (103). The story “Tell the Women We’re Going” contains the volume’s most horrific account of violence; in it the male perpetrator moves outside the family sphere and into the world at large. The protagonist Bill and his friend Jerry decide to take a Sunday afternoon off from their families. On their way driving home, the men encounter two women biking, and later follow the women onto a hiking trail. Jerry presumably kills them both, though the concluding scene is elliptic: “Jerry used the same rock on both girls, first on the girl called Sharon, then on the one that was supposed to be Bill’s” (66). This random act of violence is shorn of any cause- and-effect explanation. Another story that is connected to “Tell the Women We’re Going” through the theme of the random and/or serial murder of young women in the Northwest outdoors is “So Much Water So Close to Home,” discussed at length in the final section below. The complexity of Carver’s treatment of this theme does not become clear until his post-minimalist work. Almost immediately after the publication of this minimalist collection, Carver began revising and expanding several of its stories for inclusion in later volumes.

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The Later Work

23 In Carver’s final writing phase, the stories he gathered in Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (1983), Cathedral (1983) and Where I’m Calling From (1988), contain fewer violent scenes at the same time as the fiction becomes longer in its exploration of old and new themes. There is, however, a momentary escalation of violence in the expanded version of “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit,” retitled “Where Is Everyone?” in Fires. The narrator recounts how his son has beaten his own mother, and then comments on how the violence has been passed on to the next generation: the teenage children “seemed to thrive on the threats and bullying they inflicted on each other and us – the violence and dismay, the general bedlam” (157). Overall, however, the violent scenes involving women in the later stories are similar to those in the earlier ones, yet with the significant difference that women achieve a degree of control in changing their lives. Women who are caught up in frustrating lives are not portrayed as victims of those situations. They occasionally vent their anger in sudden verbal and physical outbursts that are almost exclusively aimed at men, such as the final scene in “The Pheasant,” in which a woman slaps her boyfriend when he decides to leave her (Fires 152).

24 In a few of the dozen stories in Cathedral, family violence is still a central topic. In “The Compartment” a father recalls how years earlier his son had attacked him while his wife stood “dropping one dish of china after the other onto the dining-room floor” (47). In “Where I’m Calling From” the protagonist is in a dry-out facility for alcoholics and befriends J.P., who tells him how his wife Roxy had broken his nose in a fight. The couple make up at the end of the story, which is the beginning of a new year. In the expanded version of the minimalist “The Bath” (retitled “A Small, Good Thing”), the child who remained in a coma-like state at the end of the shorter version dies in the longer one. The mother Ann has violent feelings for the baker, who has been harassing the parents on the phone for forgetting to pick up the child’s birthday cake: “I’d like to kill him, I’d like to shoot him and watch him kick” she says (83), though they become friends at the closing of the story. The violence in Cathedral thus shows women engaging in outbursts that seem necessary catalysts to move from one phase of life to another.

25 An interesting story that connects Carver’s formative and final writing years is “The Train.” Carver picks up the plot of John Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight” in which a woman stalks and threatens a man who has mistreated her. In Cheever’s story the woman, carrying a gun, forces the man to lie down and put his face in the dirt: “He fell forward in the filth…. He stretched out on the ground, weeping…. Then he heard her footsteps go away” (Cheever 247). Carver makes her a notch more violent in his version: “she put her foot on the back of his head and pushed his face into the dirt. Then she put the revolver into her handbag and walked back to the railway station” (Cathedral 147). In this realist story, Carver has come a long way from the early “The Aficionados” both in his use of influences and his portrayal of women and violence. The woman of the Hemingway parody figures as a mythical embodiment of female empowerment and wrath, whereas here we have a literally down-to-earth scene in which a woman takes control of her life and feelings, refusing to be the victim of a man’s abusive behavior: “She tried to make him see that he couldn’t keep trampling on people’s feelings” (147). The woman then moves on with her life, and the rest of the story is a portrayal of the passengers she encounters in the waiting room and on the

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train. Cheever’s story ends with the woman’s violence, but in Carver’s the violence comes at the beginning of a tale that leads her back into ordinary life.

26 In the six new stories gathered in Where I’m Calling From, women also take charge as they move into new life phases. In “Menudo” a wife hits her husband when she learns he has cheated on her (339), and “Intimacy” is almost completely constructed on a woman’s verbal violence directed at her ex-husband, a writer who exposes ugly material from their marriage years in his work. In “Blackbird Pie” a woman is leaving her husband, and the deputy-sheriff who is at the scene warns the couple against violence, commenting that “Statistics show that your domestic dispute is, time and again, potentially the most dangerous situation a person, especially a law-enforcement officer, can get himself involved in” (377). By putting these words in the mouth of the officer, Carver shows an awareness of the ubiquitous menace of domestic violence in contemporary America, and stories from this period show how women do not accept the status of victim. Hendin has analyzed how both verbal skills and physical retaliation are methods frequently used by women in their fighting back against a system which they transform in the process. These stories depict such strong women who take their lives in their own hands, making both men and the general public aware that they do not acquiesce to playing the role of the weaker sex.

27 In “Blackbird Pie” the woman peacefully leaves her husband, but the public nature of the departure scene, when the husband, wife, rancher, and officer are gathered on the couple’s lawn, indicates Carver’s burgeoning preoccupation with the larger consequences of private violence. In the manuscripts gathered in the posthumous Call If You Need Me, violence almost ebbs completely out, but there is also a public scene in “Dreams” in which a woman who has just lost her children in a fire vents her shock on her neighbor. The whole neighborhood is gathered on her lawn as firefighters carry out the dead children. When the narrator addresses her, “She whirled on me…. She brought her hand back and slapped me in the face” (45). The story ends on a note of reconciliation that is characteristic of Carver’s later work, as the narrator invites the bereaved woman to dinner and she accepts. In his later phase, Carver thus moves women’s violence out of the privacy of the core family and makes it a publicly acknowledged spectacle, and his realism in such scenes depicts a world in which women are taking charge, and one in which the legal system begins to appropriate the terminology to deal with what the deputy-sheriff in “Blackbird Pie” had named “domestic dispute.” As de Lauretis has shown in her analysis of gender and violence, the reality of domestic violence preceded the concepts for which to name it in official discourse. Carver’s various phases of realism from early to late work parallel the actual paradigm shift from private to public concern with family violence from the 1970s to the 1980s, as most of the earlier works portray violence within the walls of the home, and the later ones carry it out into public. The final section will examine what happens to the topic of violence both inside and outside the home during the transition from Carver’s middle to late phases.

The Contemporary Trauma of the Violated Female Corpse

28 The minimalist version of the story “So Much Water, So Close to Home” published in What We Talk About (1981) is a mere nine pages; Carver revised it to twenty pages for

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inclusion in Fires (1983)6. A paraphrase of the story in both versions is fairly simple: a young woman’s corpse is found in a river by a group of men who are camping and fishing; they wait until their trip is over to report it to the local sheriff, then return home. As I hope to show, however, Carver expanded it into one of his most complex stories about gender and violence. It is narrated by a woman, Claire, who is the wife of one of the men who discover the corpse. “So Much Water” is also one of several stories in Carver’s canon that is set in his native Pacific Northwest. This is Green River Killer Country: a place of tall forests and gushing rivers, where one can drive through miles of mountainous roads without meeting another car, where series of women can be raped, murdered, and abandoned with little risk of being discovered. The Green River Killer case was not solved until 2003, though the 49 or more murders of young women took place two decades earlier, between 1982 and 19847. The perpetrator, Gary Leon Ridgway, sexually molested and killed his victims, in most cases leaving their naked bodies in or near the Green River south of the Seattle-Tacoma area of Washington State.

29 Though the details and locale of the Green River killings are similar to those in “So Much Water, So Close to Home,” Carver was not necessarily modeling it specifically on that case, as the story’s genesis suggests it is prior to this murder spree. During the 1970s, however, there had been several similar rape/murders of young women in the same region, at least four of them committed by another notorious serial killer, Ted Bundy, in Lake Sammamish State Park south of Seattle. Lake Sammamish, Green River, and the north tip of the Naches River, which is the setting of both “So Much Water” as well as “Tell the Women We’re Going” discussed above, are all within a fifty-mile radius. In “So Much Water,” a young woman’s corpse is found in the Naches, while in “Tell the Women” two young women are (presumably) stoned to death hiking near its banks. While following the two women in the latter story, Bill looks down from the path to see “a strip of the Naches like a strip of aluminum foil” (55).

30 The murder of women in the great Northwest outdoors was an ominous phenomenon in Carver’s day, having reached its most horrific dimensions by the time of the Green River case. Carver’s story is therefore a fictional recording of the contemporary trauma of the pervasive threat of the rape/murder of young American women in non-urban settings. Carver’s expansions to the story underline this threat and deal with two main areas: 1) the exploration of the consciousness of the female narrator with emphasis on her traumatic reaction to the corpse, 2) a foregrounding of the danger to women in domestic, community, as well as outdoor spheres. In the longer version, which is the focus of this discussion, we see Claire struggling to make sense of her life in the context of this triple level of menace, and Carver contextualizes this as specifically gendered and linked to the positions of men and women in his contemporary society. The naked female corpse becomes a symbol of the state of that society, and the protagonist clearly identifies with the dead woman’s plight.

31 “So Much Water” is a story narrated in an expansive realism. Carver applies the techniques of juxtaposition and suggestion he had honed in his minimalist phase, at the same time as he adds depth to character exploration. The main juxtaposition in the story is between the men’s inability to elicit any affective response to the corpse they find, which is the opposite of Claire’s intense emotional reaction when she later learns about it. The discovery of the corpse is related in Carver’s characteristic cold and blunt

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realism, but filtered through the mind of Claire who gets the information from her husband Stuart: One of the men, I don’t know who, it might have been Stuart,…took a piece of nylon cord and tied it around her wrist and then secured the cord to tree roots, all the while the flashlights of the other men played over the girl’s body…. The next morning, Saturday, they cooked breakfast, drank lots of coffee, more whisky, and then split up to fish, two men upriver, two men down. That night, after they had cooked their fish and potatoes and had more coffee and whisky, they took their dishes down to the river and rinsed them off a few yards from where the body lay in the water. (169)

32 The men continue to fish near the corpse, and do not report the body to the local sheriff until Sunday afternoon. Stuart then drives home to Claire, but does not tell her of the find until the next morning, as he is eager to have sex and sleep.

33 In the 1981 shorter version, Claire acquiesces to all of Stuart’s sexual advances, but in the longer one she refuses twice, angering him (177; 185). In his revisions Carver includes passages that make clear how Claire is disturbed by the fact that Stuart had wanted sex the same day as he left the corpse, as well as every day after. When he tells her of the find, she “looked at his hands, the broad fingers, knuckles covered with hair, fingers that had moved over me, into me last night” (171). In both versions, the final section includes a sex scene between the couple, but in the longer one Claire fights Stuart off: “Not now, please,” Claire says, which Stuart repeats in a mocking tone, then slips one of his hands under her bra, to which she reacts, “‘Stop, stop, stop,’ I say. I stamp on his toes” (185). In both stories, Stuart is portrayed as brutal and insensitive, but only in the longer version does Claire refuse to have sex, after which Stuart throws her to the floor and exclaims, “I hope your cunt drops off before I touch it again” (185). The parallel between the sexually abused corpse that Stuart finds (the police believe she had been raped) and Stuart’s brutal sexual advances is suggestive of the threat to women both inside the home and out, and it is particularized in the consciousness of Claire who makes such connections.

34 The story is narrated in retrospect after Claire learns of the corpse, and in both versions, she has a violent outburst near the beginning of the story because Stuart does not accept that the incident is of any importance: “Despite everything, knowing all that may be in store, I rake my arm across the drainboard and send the dishes and glasses smashing and scattering across the floor” (168). Like the women who perform such gestures in Carver’s other stories, Claire’s act is clearly communicative, coming as it does when words between the husband and wife fail. This does not elicit any immediate response from Stuart, though he tries throughout the story to prevent his wife from internalizing the drama of the dead young woman. At one point in the story Claire remembers a specific case from her Northwest youth that resembles the current find and she infuriates Stuart when she shares it: “The Maddox brothers. They killed a girl…cut off her head and threw it in the Cle Elum River. She and I went to high school together. It happened when I was a girl.” “What a hell of a thing to be talking about,” he says, “Come on, get off it. You’re going to get me riled in a minute” (173).8

35 He does get angry, and she loses control and slaps him, then regrets it as he raises his fist at her. The couple is clearly having a communication crisis, something Claire articulates to herself in several passages in the longer version: “Something has come between us” (167); “you are really undergoing a crisis” (175).

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36 Claire also feels specifically threatened by the general danger of being a woman in a community of macho fishermen, mechanics and truckers. In both stories, she makes the decision to drive the 120 miles to the community of Summit to attend the young woman’s funeral. In the longer version, her journey is expanded to include more detailed episodes of menace to Claire. When she stops for gas and to ask for directions, she feels the mechanic’s and attendant’s eyes on her, and they try to stall and keep her there, and offer to drive her to Summit themselves (180-181). There is an intense scene which follows and in which Carver is acutely aware of and records the very real threat to women’s bodies that was a fact of his contemporary world. She is on a long stretch of mountain highway alone, bordering the Naches River, when a green truck with a male driver starts trailing her. When she slows to let him pass, he stays behind her, but finally does pass, tooting his horn and waving at her. Shaken by the episode, she pulls over and parks, but he comes back, and tries to force her car open: “Come on, roll down your window…. It’s not good for a woman to be batting around the country by herself.” He shakes his head and looks at the highway, then back at me…. “Open the door, all right?”…. He looks at my breasts and legs. The skirt has pulled up over my knees. His eyes linger on my legs, but I sit still, afraid to move. (182)

37 Luckily for Claire he leaves, but the man in this scene could easily have been a Ted Bundy or the Green River Killer, could easily have broken the car window, raped, murdered and abandoned Claire without being discovered. And Claire has learned from the news that the suspect of the murder drove a green car and had likely raped his victim; though this is a truck, the symbolism in the identical color of the vehicles is suggestive. Claire also knows that the woman died of strangulation (a method of operation common to factual Washington State serial killers), and the driver’s choice of words to coax her to open the door, “You’re going to smother in there,” adds another eerie touch to the scene (182).

38 In the longer version of “So Much Water,” Carver thus takes pains to contextualize Claire’s crisis on the triple level of domestic strife, community gender roles, and the larger and dangerous world of violence that specifically targets women. He also allows Claire to explore the meanings of her own situation by expanding the passages where we follow her stream-of-consciousness. Most conspicuously, we learn that Claire has earlier had a stay in a mental institution precipitated by inexplicable headaches (176). Claire’s disturbed mental state, however, is not presented as insanity but rather as clairvoyance (hence perhaps the choice of her name) and omniscience. In the course of the story she comes to identify so completely with the dead young woman that she imagines that she is the woman: “I look at the creek. I float toward the pond, eyes open, face down, staring at the rocks and moss on the creek bottom” (173). The following related passage is absent from the short version; while she is at the funeral she imagines the journey down the river, the nude body hitting rocks, caught at by branches, the body floating and turning, her hair streaming in the water. Then the hands and hair catching in the overhanging branches, holding, until four men come along to stare at her. I can see the man who is drunk (Stuart?) take her by the wrist. Does anyone here know about that? I look around at the other faces. There is a connection to be made of these things, these events, these faces, if I can find it. My head aches with the effort to find it. (184)

39 Claire’s efforts at articulation reach the reader but are time and again brushed off by her husband. She is trying to make sense of her place in the family as well as in the

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larger community, and by being so concerned with the dead woman, her efforts extend to the lot of women in general and more specifically to the fate of women who are victims of random or serial killings.

40 Marshall Bruce Gentry, in an article on women’s voices in Carver’s work, believes that Carver’s “fiction regularly shortchanges women by making their minds seem less complex than men’s minds” (88). In his discussion of “So Much Water,” he writes that “the husband’s silence [is] more menacingly mysterious and complex than the wife’s relatively explicit anxiety” and that the “mystery and complexity of Claire’s thoughts are deflated somewhat by a simple, stereotypical explanation: she is crazy” (91). On the contrary, I hope to have illustrated that the complexity of Claire’s thoughts and anxieties is not mysterious, but rather portrayed within a specifically gendered context in which she is caught up in role pressures at every level in her life from private to public. “Craziness” and its many synonyms, such as the 19th century “hysteria” and the 20th century “neurosis” are terms central to women’s history and most frequently analyzed in women’s studies as precisely connected to pressures exerted on women that are inextricably connected to period gender roles9.

41 A brief comparison with a story that has a similar protagonist, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), published almost a century before “So Much Water,” should bring out some of the gender and health issues that the stories share despite their distance in time. Both are narrated by a married American woman with one child who has been diagnosed with mental illness. Both husbands have patronizing attitudes toward their wives, and will not listen to their worries, which are expressed in strikingly articulate terms in both texts. Finally, both women identify and in their minds fuse with another woman who is the symbol of their contemporary society’s ill treatment of women in general. The protagonist of “The Yellow Wallpaper” imagines there is a woman imprisoned inside the paper, shaking the bars to get out. We also learn that the protagonist feels trapped and infantilized in her room, which is a former nursery described as a prison with a bolted-down bed and barred windows. In the final scene, the protagonist believes she is the woman behind the paper: “I’ve got out at last,” she says to her husband, “And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (36).

42 In “So Much Water,” as we have seen, Claire identifies with the dead woman, though her story ends on a milder note, as she continues her efforts to get her husband to understand the magnitude of the situation: “For God’s sake, Stuart, she was only a child” (186; the female victim is identified as being between 18 and 24 years old, 171). The short version, on the other hand, ends with a scene in which she acquiesces to having sex with Stuart. The revised story thus underlines in its closure Claire’s independence and concern with the issue of women’s brutalization. In Gilman’s story, the “hysteria” of the protagonist is contextualized within 19th-century norms that expected women to stay within the domestic sphere. Gilman, in her non-fiction, had radical proposals for the restructuring of domestic life not based on the traditional core family10. A century later, Carver’s Claire is in an almost identical situation as Gilman’s narrator in terms of her (mental) health and family status as a stay-home mother.

43 In 1985, the U.S. Surgeon General identified domestic violence as a major health problem; in 1988, the year of Carver’s death, the Surgeon General declared domestic abuse as the leading health hazard to women. By 1984 serial killers in Carver’s home State had molested and killed dozens of young women, abandoning them in areas

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within an hour or two’s drive of the setting of “So Much Water, So Close to Home.” The multiple threats to women’s health and lives in the domestic, public, and outdoor spheres is vividly portrayed in Carver’s story by using a woman, Claire, as narrator. At every level, in the home, at the gas station, and on the mountainous road, she experiences threats that are specifically gender-related. As a woman in a rural community – the place where Carver grew up – she is not free to move anywhere without the fear of harassment, not even into her own extra bedroom, the door of which Stuart breaks open when she locks herself in (185). Moreover, this symbolic imprisonment which she shares with Gilman’s 19th-century narrator is taken to an extreme form in the symbol of the woman’s molested corpse in the river, representing women’s status as not only unfree but as sex objects in their homes or as victims of sex predators at large. Unfortunately, the symbol was factually a horrific reality of Carver’s time and place, one which he boldly transforms into a realistic woman’s encounter with the gendered trauma of contemporary violence in America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bethea, Arthur. Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver. New York and London: Routledge, 2001.

Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Major Short Story Writers: Raymond Carver. Broomall, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002.

Carver, Raymond. Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose. New York: Random House (Vintage Contemporaries), 2001.

---. Cathedral. New York: Random House (Vintage Contemporaries), 1984.

---. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1983.

---. No Heroics, Please. New York: Random House (Vintage Contemporaries) 1992.

---. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Random House (Vintage Contemporaries), 1989.

---. Where I’m Calling From. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.

---. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? New York: Random House (Vintage Contemporaries), 1992.

Cheever, John. The Stories of John Cheever. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.

De Lauretis, Teresa. “The Violence of Rhetoric: Considerations on Representation and Gender” in The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence. Edited by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. London and New York: Routledge. 1989. 239-258.

Gentry, Marshall Bruce. “Women’s Voices in Stories by Raymond Carver.” The CEA Critic 56.1 (Fall 1993): 86-95.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Women and Economics. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994; 1898.

---.“The Yellow Wallpaper.” Afterword by Elaine R. Hedges. New York: The Feminist Press, 1973.

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Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927.

Hendin, Josephine Gattuso. HeartBreakers: Women and Violence in Contemporary Literature and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Romon, Philippe. Parlez-moi de Carver. Paris: Agnès Vienot, 2003.

Runyon, Randolph. Reading Raymond Carver. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992.

Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1985.

NOTES

1. It is not possible to do justice to their elaborate critiques here. Hendin, for example, finds that “Baudrillard’s voice erupts from a dark well of misogyny in which woman is in the passive, immobilized position of the abstract linguistic category of the feminine” (20), and in one of de Lauretis’s examples she examines how “sexuality, not only in general and traditional discourse, but in Foucault’s as well, is not construed as gendered (as having a male form and a female form), but simply as male” (245). 2. Hendin notes in this context that “Fear that discussing violence by women is politically bad for women is widespread and has inflamed denials that violence by women exists at all or is meaningful if it does exist” (9). See also note 4 below. 3. Harold Bloom attempts to apply his theory of anxiety to Carver’s works in Bloom’s Major Short Story Writers: Raymond Carver, stating that Carver “wisely fended Hemingway off by an askesis” in his later career (10). Yet he goes on to reduce Carver’s worth to one story, “Cathedral,” which he finds a mere imitation of D.H. Lawrence’s “The Blind Man.” Bloom’s conclusion is that Carver “died before he could realize the larger possibilities of his art” (11). Such an approach, however, provides no insight into the complexities of how a contemporary realist like Carver deals with the issue of women and violence. 4. Current statistics estimate that approximately 4 million women are physically abused by husbands or partners every year in the U.S. (http://womensissues.about.com/od/ domesticviolence/a/dvstats1.htm). By comparison, a battered men’s organization estimates that over 800,000 men are yearly the victims of violent women (http://www.batteredmen.com). 5. In a controversial New York Times article (August 9, 1998), D.T. Max has explored the extent to which Carver's editor Gordon Lish wielded influence on the massive cuts that were made to What We Talk About. Though Carver sanctioned the cuts, his later expansions of stories suggest that he was not altogether comfortable with the minimalism of the volume. See also the following note. 6. It is possible that Carver was returning to an earlier, 1970s version in his revisions of this story. The problematic issue of the striking expansiveness of the stories after What We Talk About has been the topic of critical debate concerning the influence of Carver’s editor Gordon Lish. Recent accounts of this debate can be found in Arthur Bethea’s Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver and Philippe Romon’s Parlez-moi de Carver. Bethea suggests that “widening knowledge of the Carver-Lish connection is likely to become an easy explanation for Carver’s ‘minimalist phase,’ with Lish being partially credited (or blamed!) for the minimalism” (263). However, regardless of whether Carver was returning to material or adding new passages, the story in question is an example of his career-long concern with the topic of women and violence. 7. Facts on the Green River Killer case have been gathered from http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/ 428/case03.htm

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8. Randolph Runyon reads the dead girl in the Cle Elum as well as the one in the Naches as Medusa figures (Reading Raymond Carver 121-122). The violence targeting women in this area, however, also has non-mythical sources; one of the Green River Killer’s escaped victims was taken to this very spot; this woman “told police Ridgway took her to a campground near Cle Elum, where he tied her to wooden stakes driven into the ground while he used nylon rope to tie her wrists and ankles to the stakes. She later was released.” (http://www.karisable.com/ crime.htm) 9. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), is a seminal though outdated work in this context. Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s work treats the topics of gender and hysteria relevant for Gilman’s time. See, for example, her Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. 10. See Gilman’s Women and Economics in which she argues that women’s economic dependence on men is the root of ill in society and their roles as houskeepers and child-rearers keep them in a state of quasi-slavery.

ABSTRACTS

This article examines the role of women characters in the stories of Raymond Carver who are involved in violent passages either as victims, witnesses, or perpetrators. The first and middle sections provide an overview of Carver’s development of the motif of violence from his formative years through his minimalist and later phases. The final section concentrates on an analysis of one story, “So Much Water, So Close to Home,” and how it reflects the specific social trauma of the rape and murder of young women in Carver’s native Washington State by serial killers in the 1970s and 1980s. In considering passages from different periods where Carver yokes the representation of women to violence, the aim is to explore how his idiomatic rendering of a violent world can be linked to the larger context of women’s status in

AUTHORS

SANDRA LEE KLEPPE Sandra Lee Kleppe is currently Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Tromsoe, Norway. She has published on American literature in a wide variety of journals, including on Raymond Carver’s poetry in Classical and Modern Literature as well as in Journal of Medical Humanities.

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Houses of Identity: Inhabiting and Emerging from Despair

Hilary Siebert

“Listen,” she goes. “You remember the time we drove out to that old farm place outside Yakima, out past Terrace Heights?… Can you imagine us doing that now? Going up to a house and asking for a drink of water?” Raymond Carver, “Gazebo”

1 The traditional notion of a writer’s “vision” suggests that the body of texts a writer has produced offers readers a particular way of seeing and knowing a particular “world” of interest to that writer. Yet no sooner do we try to define such concepts than the complexity of the matter becomes apparent: what “reality” is it that the writer’s text seems to be signifying, exactly? is it something we might define in historical, social, or psychological terms? and how are we to infer a way of seeing from the presentation of what is portrayed?

In2 the case of Raymond Carver’s short stories, these questions are especially interesting, since Carver was an avid re-writer, a person whose biographical circumstances changed dramatically during his career, and – according to D.T. Max – an author whose name appears not only on the texts he wrote but on those heavily edited and re- written by Gordon Lish. Visions of reality are compounded by versions of reality. The “minimalist” Carver, who Max ascribes to the heavy editorial hand of Lish, seems to be a fairly diﬀerent author from more “generous” Carver, the Carver who emerged after his recovery from alcoholism, his divorce and subsequent remarriage, and the termination of his editorial relationship with Lish.

3 In a classic pairing of Carver texts such as “The Bath” and “A Small, Good Thing,” the two tendencies are apparent. Reality, in the former text, is presented in the form of an individual, existential experience of personal tragedy in a typical white, protestant family; healing and recovery are inhibited by the breakdown of genuine

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communication at all levels between people apparently in a position to help each other, although the ritual cleansing of a bath seems to provide potential for individual renewal, if only there were peace and time enough. The latter text uses what Ewing Campbell has very aptly described as persistent cultural myths of sacrifice and redemption, whereby the characters overcome the Foucauldian “madness” produced by the horrors of daily reality through the expression of therapeutic anger (53-4).

4 “Fear” – which had made the father in the first story “want a bath” (49) – is a reaction to ordinary reality which Carver seemed to champion in his essay “On Writing” from Fires, when he described the importance of creating an imminent “feeling of threat or sense of menace” in a short story (26). Reality in many of Carver’s stories is indeed a fearful experience. But in his later stories such as “A Small, Good Thing,” “Cathedral,” or “Blackbird Pie,” Carver seemed more interested in taking his characters – and readers – not simply into the world of fears but back out across a potential threshold where a character might emerge into something new.

5 How, then, are we to understand the differing kinds of reality and the nature of experience in Carver’s stories? Do they reflect an early alcoholic Carver, mired in pain, and a late redemptive Carver, saved by new opportunities? Or is Lish the advocate of despair, and Carver the advocate of hope, even at the cost of sentimentality?

6 It seems clear that recovery and hope were important forces in Carver’s mind during the final decade of his life, as Carver explained on various occasions, including the late autobiographical poem “Gravy.” And it is also true that Lish appears to be more the advocate of existential fear and Carver the force behind an interest in transformative possibilities; Adam Meyer’s critical analysis of Carver’s story versions from 1989, along with Max’s more recent study, show us that much.

7 Yet, the biographical analysis I have just presented does little to put a finger on just what it is that marks the “reality” and way of experiencing life that Carver’s readers come to know in his stories. Rather, it is the intimacy with which we witness their feelings of hope and despair that particularizes them. My aim in this paper is to show how Carver at all points in his career constructed personal spaces haunted by the harsh facts of failure and isolation – while at the same time these spaces reflect either the desire or the ability of characters to look beyond the world they inhabit, emerging from the trappings of their lives in oblique ways or at unexpected moments. The issue of what characters experience, what reality, with what degree of confinement or emergence, needs to be examined in relation to the question of how characters undergo experience in highly particular physical situations and settings: a house (“Chef’s House,” “Cathedral”), a kitchen (“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”), or a bed (“Chef’s Wife,” “Whoever Was Using This Bed”).

8 Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological explanation of identity provides a useful way to look at human experience in terms of situated being. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard transfigures Heidegger’s “Dasein” and Sartre’s “être-là” from “being-there” to a dynamic notion of movement between structures which house being and those which allow it to expand outward and emerge into new spaces (213). The house, as an intimate space like the body itself, both defines and confines being (5-7); but in order to grow, being must follow an inevitable process of “spiraling” from inside to outside, emerging into new spaces in which to reside (11, 214).

9 While this may all sound very abstract, it is a simple matter to apply Bachelard’s ideas to Carver’s stories by examining concretely the intimately inhabited spaces presented

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in the texts, such as houses. Such spaces reflect a sense of identity to the characters themselves, but one that becomes confining, and that characters aspire to transcend – for reasons which themselves are thematically important, as they reflect to readers the social reality experienced in the storyworld.

10 Houses and interior spaces figure prominently in Carver’s texts. Despite references to local place names in Oregon and Washington state, only occasional stories such as “So Much Water So Close to Home” and “Tell the Women We’re Going” are significant for their outdoor settings; the vast majority present indoor conversations. The point is that the home, for Carver’s characters, is always a vital space.

11 What, then, do the intimate residences of Carver’s stories house? Typically, they house the accumulated pain of the characters who live in them. But as aspects of story texts, they house the dynamic process of establishing and propelling character identity: characters inhabit interior spaces as a way of dealing with the past – which is constructed into the space itself – and facing some kind of horizon within or beyond the space.

12 We can gain an interesting perspective on Carver’s stories by looking first at how the intimate spaces in which they are set establish character identity, and then observing a particular process by which characters move or try to move beyond that world. Sometimes the movements are no more than mental reflections on the past or daydreams of a future, sometimes they are thoughts acted out in words, and at other times characters are propelled physically into other scenes where the possibilities are greater.

13 In applying this notion, we can see why “The Bath” and “A Small, Good Thing” are such different stories. The parents in “The Bath” cannot get beyond their pain, in large part, because they can’t recuperate the stable identity they seek in their house when they return there from the hospital; and thus they can’t “move on” with their lives. Carver’s way of moving them along in “A Small, Good Thing” requires a fairly complicated apparatus of creating new scenes, moving the characters beyond the house and hospital and onto a dramatic stage of reconciliation in the bakery. The story is more “hopeful” not simply because the husband and wife are able to share their grief but because they are lifted out of the scenes of grief into a different kind of emotional environment.

14 The environments in most of Carver’s stories, however, provide transports that are much more seamless, which from my point of view makes them more subtle and convincing. They rely on strategies of metaphoric comparison, for instance, to reflect one setting experienced by a character in relation to an alternative one. “Cathedral,” for example, transforms a typically small-minded, fearful husband’s expectations of his wife’s friend’s visit as a violation of his personal space (“A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to” [266]) into a final sensation of intimacy in an open environment. Tracing the cathedral with the blind man, the narrator knows he is still in his house, “But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything” (279).

15 Focusing on the house as a phenomenological construction of identity, we can observe a variety of ways in which Carver uses interior spaces first to illustrate the housing of being and then the human need to go beyond one’s immediate horizons. The identity of Carver’s characters is defined by their pasts, which surround them, and by their hopes, which lie beyond these immediate spaces. Most characters, as in “Cathedral,” don’t see the serious limitations of their “housing” until they are released from it through no

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intention of their own, due to an event that alters or calls attention to the circumstances of their lives.

16 In fact, what makes Carver’s stories so intimate (or “lyrical,” as I have argued elsewhere), are the ways in which characters are brought before our eyes to an awareness of their limitations: an awareness that is not necessarily realized or articulated, but is revealed by the use of phenomenological images. A related issue which explains much of the controversy concerning Carver’s revisions concerns this very revelation of awareness by the characters. In striving to compensate for the inarticulateness and helplessness of people who inhabit his “minimalist” texts, in certain later stories such as “A Small, Good Thing” and “Fever,” Carver seems to go overboard in making the narrator articulate realizations his characters have achieved; the penultimate paragraph of “Fever” provides one such example (247). “Cathedral” and “Blackbird Pie” work differently – despite being from roughly the same, later period – because they contain highly limited extensions of story time and story space, and therefore must resort to image and suggestion rather than to an assertion or dramatization of awareness.

17 The question of character identity, then, is something we can study on intimate terms by focusing on images of housing in stories of limited time duration and restricted settings. Among Carver texts there are at least three ways in which character identities are modified phenomenologically, through an actual or imagined “re-housing” of identity. These types of modification are not mutually exclusive, and in each case the resultant change may be positive or negative, temporary or permanent.

18 1) Transformative Houses: in these texts, as in “Cathedral,” story events alter the way a character views the space in which that character resides, implicitly changing the character’s way of seeing, thinking, and being, e.g., seeing one’s house as an open cathedral rather than as a closed, private space. Examples include “Neighbors,” “What We Talk About,” “Feathers,” “Chef’s House,” and “Fever.” In “Neighbors” and “Feathers,” an alternative residence inspires the transformation in the characters’ way of residing in the usual residence, for better or for worse, just as in “Chef’s House” the alternative residence begins to create a character transformation, only to finally highlight the failure of this possibility and an awareness of the life that must be lived without this house.

19 2) Past and Present Houses: in these texts, the situation of character identity in a present residence is contrasted strikingly with identity in a past residence. The contrast reveals a grotesque situation by putting images of abnormal residence in the present up against parallel images of apparent normalcy in the past. Examples include “Gazebo,” “Why Don’t You Dance?” and “Put Yourself in My Shoes.”

20 3) A Glimpse Outside: in these texts, circumstances bring characters suddenly to consciousness of a world outside the domain of their daily lives. Examples include “The Ducks,” “The Student’s Wife,” “I Could See the Smallest Things,” and “Blackbird Pie.”

21 Looking briefly, then, at each of these ways in which Carver’s characters potentially transcend their limitations, the first category presents the most obvious changes. Not all these “Transformations” are of the same magnitude, nor do they all move characters in equally positive directions. “Fever” is similar to “Cathedral” in providing the protagonist with a new way of residing within his own house, within his own identity, as the result of the visit of an outsider. “Neighbors,” “Feathers,” and “Chef’s

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House” provide potential transformations differently, since in these cases characters inhabit an alternative residence and thereby experience a new way of being.

22 In “Neighbors,” the temporary, vicarious experience of other people’s lives in the apartment next door reinvigorates first the husband and then the wife, both sexually and in more general terms, as each one tries out and tries on the lives and the very clothing of the neighboring couple. Their final state of apparent exile when they are locked out of the apartment leaves these characters in a suspended state of identity, as though posing a question as to how they will maintain the identity they have discovered next door, since their identity till now has been rooted in different premises.

23 “Chef’s House” is a more open-and-shut case of an assumed identity in an alternative residence. Wes, a recovering alcoholic, is able to achieve a recovery of all the old romance with his ex-wife – but only so long as they inhabit the idyllic summertime space of the house Chef lets them live in. Once Chef reclaims his house, Wes abruptly loses hope, as though without the place his identity could only be the bitter one of loss known to an alcoholic, left to his own premises.

24 “Feathers” too is temporary, in the sense that it presents the experience of a larger, more hopeful self which the narrator achieves empathetically when he and his wife visit a friend’s house. The visit seems to inspire the husband and wife to the point where they make love and conceive a child, but this larger vision is lost to them thereafter.

25 “What We Talk About” portrays no actual alternative residence at all but rather the conditions in which one is being shaped emotionally. The four characters are all in a state of transition, both in terms of residence and identity. They are in Albuquerque temporarily but were “all from somewhere else” (128), as well as from different past romantic relationships. Sitting in a kitchen, drinking gin and debating the horrors and truths of “love,” they reach a sudden stasis at the end, in which the room goes dark and no one moves to turn the light on or speak. The end of the story brings them into a point of inward reflection in which they seem called upon to take stock of who they are in relation to the question of “love” and somehow redefine themselves.

26 The second category of story exemplifies texts which illuminate the present as a grotesque reflection of the past. Though these stories do not necessarily indicate a way out, they are constructive in bringing characters to the end of a path that is leading them nowhere. At the end of “Gazebo,” the image of green “crud” which fills the pool of the motel the alcoholic couple is supposed to be managing is held up against the idyllic image of “dignified” life of a married couple at a farmhouse that the protagonists had once visited. In “Why Don’t You Dance?” a man transports and transforms the bedroom of his marriage into a yard sale, where a couple of young lovers try out the furniture, as though trying on the space of married life in the form of a parody.

27 “Put Yourself in My Shoes” portrays the housing of present and past identities with a masterful complexity. On the surface the story presents a seemingly polite “visit” by a couple to the house they once rented, with the purpose of getting to know the owners. A series of conversations reveals almost surrealistically, between the lines, the extent to which the visiting couple abused the house as renters, and the latent anger of the owners. Just at the point in which the story seems to be revealing the true identity of the visiting couple, however, it becomes clear that the owners of the house are far from

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“normal” themselves, both in the repression and the expression of their anger. The visiting man is an apparently alcoholic writer looking for a story, and the visit becomes the story. The house of the past reveals, on the one hand, the man’s despair and depravity, while on the other hand, the story in an ironic way becomes a metaphoric housing for the man’s aspiring identity as a writer. The story “exposes” all of the characters for what they are. But Myers, the story’s center of consciousness, is in the end not merely an alcoholic writer, living apparently alone in an apartment, but a successful writer of short fiction, capable of transforming the grotesque facts of these four people’s lives into the “house of fiction,” which is where he resides.1 In this sense, this story too is a transformation, in which a visit to an emotionally haunted house of the past fills the protagonist’s empty life, where he aspires to write but only vacuums his apartment, having apparently failed as a spouse and as an employee.

28 The final category provides characters with an unexpected glimpse outside the domain of their identities. In “The Ducks” and “The Student’s Wife,” the central character in a young couple experiences insomnia, caused by a feeling of oppression from a stifled existence. In the first story, the male character says, “I think I want to get out of here. Go someplace else.” As his wife sleeps on, he is focused outside the window. “‘Wake up,’ he whispered, ‘I hear something outside’” (182). In the second story, the glimpse outside at an all-illuminating sunrise after a night of insomnia terrifies the female character, as though revealing more to her than she can bear of the grim facts before her in her apartment (32).

29 “I Could See the Smallest Things” is another story of insomnia in a couple’s life. Here the woman finds herself outside the house in her nightgown, reflecting on her relationship with the neighbors, while the neighbor, in his pajamas, is sprinkling poison on slugs in the garden. The story provides an offbeat moment in which the present and past relationships can be sized up and even discussed between the two of them. As the woman goes back to sleep, at least momentarily she is placed in a position of reflection: “I thought for a minute of the world outside my house…” (36).

30 “Blackbird Pie,” also a story set late at night, portrays a male character walking outside the house he sees as his domain, but in this case because his wife is leaving. The “fog” outside the house represents the dim but growing awareness with which the character must see beyond the normal horizons of his life.

31 The stories I have discussed here only provide one way to look at the ongoing process of identity in Carver’s characters. Inside and outside their places of residence, these people are necessarily evolving, even as they are stifled. The image Bachelard uses to define the inside and outside of phenomenological existence is the mollusk, living in its shell. Considering Paul Valéry’s essay on shells (“Les coquillages”), Bachelard concludes, “…the mollusk’s motto would be: one must live to build one’s house, not build one’s house to live in” (105-6). The residences in Carver’s stories are filled with his characters’ lives, and since these lives are in flux, the perception of their houses too must change. At times, they expand, as in “Cathedral”; at other times, as in “Nobody Said Anything,” they are too confining, and the central character must finally step outside them; or they have served their purposes for a stage in the character’s life, as in “Collectors,” and are being emptied out.

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NOTES

1. I am indebted to Vasiliki Fachard for her helpful reflections on this story.

ABSTRACTS

The physical settings of Raymond Carver’s stories, in particular the living spaces his characters inhabit, present readers with images of the characters’ intimate identities. By studying the way characters perceive these spaces, readers can observe in detail the ontological “reality” of life in Carver’s story worlds. From this perspective, typical thematic issues such as confinement and helplessness are particularized in ways that demonstrate a phenomenological process of being, rather than the mere facts of isolation and despair. Applying Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological concepts of dynamic being to Carver’s texts, readers can observe the ways in which living spaces define and confine character identities, while at the same time witnessing how the subtlest moments of character perception hold the potential for growth and change. Carver’s stories reveal a variety of strategies for moving characters through their story worlds. Occasionally, Carver helps them along by taking them out of problematic settings, but more typically identities evolve through processes of perception and reflection: a glimpse outside one’s dwelling place; the memory of past residences; or transformative visions of identity, based upon the reenvisioning of one’s own dwelling.

AUTHORS

HILARY SIEBERT Hilary Siebert currently teaches at the University of Vigo and the Official School of Languages in Vigo, Spain. His interests and previous publications on the short story focus on spatial aspects of the story such as setting and landscape, as well as relationships between oral and written storytelling. He has recently completed a manuscript on the phenomenological reading of stories entitled The Poetic Space of the Short Story: A Phenomenological Study of the Genre.

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On Waiting in Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing”

Harold Schweizer

Sobald ein Mensch zum Leben kommt, sogleich ist er alt genug zu sterben. Der Ackermann aus Böhmen “Childhood has no forebodings...” George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss “We’ve been waiting with him until he died.” Raymond Carver, “A Small, Good Thing”

1 The essay examines three temporalities traversed by Scotty’s parents as their child lies in a coma drifting towards his death. In the first temporal dimension, time is sought to be harnessed to human desire; here the parents’ waiting is purposeful, framed by prediction and expectation whose symbolic space is the waiting room. Once these temporal markers prove illusory, Scotty’s parents begin to wait in a dimension beyond measurable time; its locus is the parking lot outside the hospital window where an endless stream of entering and exiting cars performs a temporal fluidity immeasurable and indifferent to waiting and the hope it implies. In a third temporal dimension, symbolized by the space of the cathedral, the futile repetitions of time are miraculously gathered up in an unexpected plentitude, a sudden fulfillment of time, attained in the parents’ meal with the baker.

The Waiting Room

2 Raymond Carver’s story “A Small Good Thing” is full of temporal markers, not only of time and hours but of prepositions and temporal pronouns. As the father drives home from the hospital, his interior monologue of Scotty’s accident traverses the past perfect, the past and the future tenses: “Scotty had been hit…and was in the hospital… he was going to be all right” (282) in order to retrace an order of events, and to align them in a narrative that would predict the son’s recovery. But once arrived at home, the baker’s call implies the irony of Howard’s attempt to harness time to human desire.

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Time is irreversible and thus irredeemable. When he calls the hospital, “the child’s condition remained the same; he was still sleeping and nothing had changed there” (282-83).

3 Despite everyone’s desperate attempts to alter the course of the boy’s mortal destiny, the time in which nothing happens from here on determines the narrative. “They waited all day, but still the boy did not wake up.” The hospital room allegorizes the parents’ waiting. It is as if for the duration of the boy’s deepening coma, their consciousness of time now acquired the shape of a room that the story’s protagonists enter and exit. “Go home for a while, and then come back…” says the husband (283). The room literalizes what Henri Bergson would call a clear, precise but impersonal temporal consciousness (129); it is a time without human dimension, a time indifferent to human desire. Thus the doctor’s assurance, “It’s just a question of a little more time now” (285), rings only with prophetic irony, and the numerous other temporal announcements only indicate the impotence of desire cast into the frame of hours and minutes: “Doctor will be in again shortly” (284); “We’ll know some more in a couple of hours…” (285); “We’ll know more when he wakes up” (285); “I was gone exactly an hour and fifteen minutes” (289); “Maybe I will go home for a few minutes” (289); “I won’t be gone long” (289).

4 All of these predictions render time measurable; all of them attempt to curtail time, to subject it to human desire. But as the narrative progresses, time simply runs its course: the parents wait, the doctors come and go. “In an hour, another doctor came in. He said his name was Parsons from Radiology. He had a bushy moustache. He was wearing loafers, a Western shirt, and a pair of jeans” (286). The gratuitous listing of the details of the doctor’s attire opposes powerlessly the vast, other realm into which the child is drifting.

5 Numerous entrances and exits by the parents, doctors, nurses, lab technicians, and orderlies punctuate the boy’s slipping into an intimate, immeasurable time. All of them perform in their activities the temporal increments by which the child’s otherworldly destination, they hope, could be reeled back into their world: He moved to the side of the bed and took the boy’s pulse. He peeled back one eyelid and then the other. Howard and Ann stood beside the doctor and watched. Then the doctor turned back the covers and listened to the boy’s heart and lungs with his stethoscope. He pressed his fingers here and there on the abdomen. When he was finished, he went to the end of the bed and studied the chart. He noted the time, scribbled something on the chart…. (284)

6 The laconic brevity of the sentences and the sequential listing of the doctor’s examination relieves the parents, for a time, from their worry about the development of the boy’s condition. Likewise, the doctor’s appearance – “handsome, big- shouldered…with a tanned face” and, again, the gratuitous “three-piece blue suit,… striped tie, and ivory cuff links” are welcome certainties in the midst of deepening dread. By contrast with such temporary markers of reassurance, the doctor’s subsequent interpretation of the boy’s condition reveals, however, his profounder sense of uncertainty and the disjuncture between their and the boy’s temporal realms: “He’s all right… he could be better.... I wish he’d wake up. He should wake up pretty soon” (285). Again, as in the father’s drive home from the hospital, the permutations of

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the temporal modes of the verb to be – he is, he could be, he should be – indicate the doctor’s difficulties to locate the child’s being.

7 His coma meanwhile has removed the boy into a wholly other temporal realm that no one can enter. Only the bath that Ann and Howard hastily take when each of them returns separately to their house might perhaps have intimated a potential for accessing an elusive, otherworldly location similar to the boy’s drifting. The earlier title of the story, “The Bath,” implies the mysterious significance of the bath; its temporality would have been closer to that of the boy’s sleep, placid, leisurely, fluid compared to the parents’ strained and restless waiting in the waiting room. But neither Ann nor Howard can linger in the contemplative state the bath would have allowed, despite Howard’s desire that Ann “just sit for a while and rest” (289).

8 In the baker’s calls the permutations of the modes of the verb to be have been extended to that indicator of eminent futility: the past subjunctive. Scotty should have been eight years old. But the eight candles and the outstanding debt for the cake keep measuring a time that for him no longer passes.

The Parking Lot

9 Memory, Gaston Bachelard has claimed, is localized. So is Ann and Howard’s waiting in the hospital waiting room. Like memory that is something other than the “strange thing it is,” as Bachelard writes (9), the strange thing that waiting is, is also something other, or more than, what is visible in the waiting room. Like memory whose essence is not the “determination of dates” but the “knowledge of intimacy” (9), waiting for a child’s recovery or death is not experienced in such phrases as “We’ll know some more in a couple of hours…” (285); nor is it measurable as “exactly an hour and fifteen minutes” (289) that Howard claims he was gone before he returned to his son’s bed. Just as memory is the knowledge of intimacy, such knowledge of intimacy is experienced when Ann “understood he wanted to be by himself for a while, not have to talk or share his worry for a time” (289).

10 “Duration,” as Emmanuel Levinas paraphrases Bergson, “is experienced by a descent into self” (55). The “time” that is here allowed for Howard’s descent into his self intimates that deeper sense of time recalled in memory or endured when waiting is no longer for something. “The state of unfulfillment lasts unchanged,” Hans Jost Frey writes, “but the hope of putting an end to it has been imperceptibly eroded and the waiting has become empty, a mere opening onto infinite lack” (57). This lack, this falling inward and away from the expectations and promises entertained on this side of time – this lack now necessitates a descent into a deeper, more desperate waiting.

11 Just as deep memory is involuntary, such deeper waiting comes about through the renunciation of the superficial consciousness of time. “Maybe,” says Ann “if I’m not just sitting right here watching him every second he’ll wake up and be all right. You know? Maybe he’ll wake up if I’m not here” (289), as if withdrawing her vigilance would appease the dying child, or as if in such renunciation of time and consciousness she might intuit his being outside of time, in that realm where nothing needs to be waited for. In their most private moments thus, as when “Ann walked to the window and looked out at the parking lot” (288), Howard and Ann enter the most intimate

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dimensions of waiting, a waiting calibrated to their child’s drifting, marked by the loss of measurable time and the loss of hope.

12 In Carver’s blandly quotidian world, such waiting beyond the dimensions of time and beyond what can be hoped for is entertained in the gaze out of the hospital window onto a parking lot. “It was night, and cars were driving into and out of the parking lot with their lights on” (288). The night scene outside the window reveals the detached, indifferent, immeasurable superfluity of existence. In the cars “driving into and out of the parking lot,” life is generic, mindlessly in motion – markedly unlike the purposeful comings and goings of doctors, nurses, and orderlies. From Ann’s distant perspective, the cars appear anonymous, sliding noiselessly in and out of the parking lot, performing a silent procession of lights, a ritual of endless comings and goings. It is in this encounter with what a phenomenologist would call a plane of emptiness, and which emptiness also implies the despair thinly held back, that Ann “knew in her heart that they were into something now, something hard” (288) – something that would be entirely unresponsive to her and her husband’s waiting.

13 Gazing out of the hospital window, Ann, desperate as Penelope in her nocturnal unweaving, plots to unravel the fatal coordinates of time: “She saw a big car stop in front of the hospital and someone, a woman in a long coat, get into the car. She wished she were that woman and somebody, anybody, was driving her away from here to somewhere else, a place where she would find Scotty waiting for her.…” (288). Ann’s inversion of her and her son’s roles projects each of them into the other’s role. She has momentarily saved him from his aimless drifting in time’s vast fluid motions and assigned him a firm destination where he waits for her. She has imaginatively seized the pure duration in which he was drifting, in order to emplot his enduring, to give it meaning and closure, in order to make their waiting come to an end. Though the allusion is faint, she has undertaken a mythic, lethean passage: Driven by “somebody, anybody…somewhere else, a place where she would find Scotty,” her wish is for a closure of pre-linguistic, pre-temporal dimensions, to collapse her and her son’s times into a time not yet bifurcated into mother and child, life and death, a time where no one would have to wait for the other, where he would “let her gather him into her arms” (288), as if he was profoundly reunited with his mother, as if he was unborn in his mother’s womb. The time of such desire is a time before time, it is the suspension of time. But one cannot, as Levinas points out (quoting Heidegger), “dem Anderen sein Sterben abnehmen” ‘to take on another’s dying’ (39).

14 Ann looks out of the window into a realm devoid of the quotidian dimensions of time. The cars below her window perform the fluid, circular movements of a time in which nothing happens or changes, in which cars will ever enter parking lots of hospitals, a time older and other than the time of the doctors’ predictions or the parents’ waiting. In the tedium of his work the baker endures the same, endless repetition of time, for to be childless, he tells Ann and Howard, is “To repeat the days with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty” (301). For to be childless, he implies, is to live in the indifference and superfluidity of time, a time rendered blind and futile by “hundreds, no thousands” of birthdays and cakes, a time without markers or meaning, a plentitude of nothingness. And yet, at the end of Carver’s story we find Scotty’s parents and the baker huddled together under the “high pale cast of light in the windows” sensing their bond precisely in their common encounter with the empty plains of duration where waiting only opens onto infinite lack.

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The Cathedral

15 For “hope,” as Levinas writes, “is projected nontemporally into the domain of pure nothingness” (67). In Ann’s waiting for her child’s recovery this hope, despite Carver’s light touch, assumes ancient passions. When Ann walks past the black family who was “in the same kind of waiting she was in” (291), the passion of hope is rendered, allusively, in Christian terms. Ann is tempted to ask the older woman whose lips were “moving silently” to share her words. But the allusions to prayer – the passage is predictably deleted in the earlier draft edited by Lish – suggest metaphysical realms that will remain only implicit – but powerfully so – and thus come to bear in the story’s last scene where the parents and the baker come together on a plane altogether removed from the world of time: “They talked on into the early morning, the high pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving” (301).

16 When Howard, back in the hospital room, gets up and “went over to stand beside her at the window” (288), the redemptive closure in the bakery seems yet inconceivable. But Howard’s and Ann’s descent into a waiting beyond the certainties of expectation or beyond the fears of premonition has here begun. He and his wife have entered a liminal space beyond which there is nothing imaginable but from which, out of despair, one projects one’s hope: “They both stared out at the parking lot. They didn’t say anything. But they seemed to feel each other’s insides now as though the worry had made them transparent in a perfectly natural way” (288). Then predictably, “The door opened and Dr. Francis came in. He was wearing a different suit…” But the jolt in the movement of the narrative from a deeper to a surface temporality cannot dispel Howard’s and Ann’s encounter with an intimate, inward sense of a mutuality that has made them wholly transparent to each other.

17 The bakery, whose “high pale cast of light in the windows” recalls Carver’s story “Cathedral,” extends this mutuality. Here the empty planes of duration are suddenly gathered up in an impromptu celebration. Scotty’s birthday cake is replaced by a symbolically wholesome bread “heavy” and “rich”; the baker’s elated deliberateness lifts out of oblivion one of those “hundreds, no thousands” of unclaimed celebrations in which he had mourned his own losses; his servings of cinnamon rolls, “the icing still running,” now arrests the futile repetitions of time where “ovens are endlessly full and endlessly empty.” Carver’s story ends at the felicitous moment of an unexpected plentitude. Once the baker has served Ann and Howard their rolls and butter, “He waited. He waited until they…began to eat” (301) and the plentitude of their meal intimates a newly attained temporality where waiting is no more endured, where time is no longer. Ann’s desperate projection of a time before its divisions into life and death, or mother and child, has here, in Carver’s tenderly implicit style, come true – if only for a time.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will. Trans. F.L. Pogson. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2001.

Carver, Raymond. Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.

Dufrenne, Mikel. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Trans. Edward S. Casey. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

Frey, Hans-Jost. Interruptions. Trans. Georgia Albert. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.

Levinas, Emmanuel. God, Death, and Time. Trans. Bettina Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

ABSTRACTS

The essay examines three temporalities traversed by Scotty’s parents as their child lies in a coma drifting towards his death. In the first temporal dimension, time is sought to be harnessed to human desire; here the parents’ waiting is purposeful, framed by prediction and expectation whose symbolic space is the waiting room. Once these temporal markers prove illusory, Scotty’s parents begin to wait in a dimension beyond measurable time; its locus is the parking lot outside the hospital window where an endless stream of entering and exiting cars performs a temporal fluidity immeasurable and indifferent to waiting and the hope it implies. In a third temporal dimension, symbolized by the space of the cathedral, the futile repetitions of time are miraculously gathered up in an unexpected plentitude, a sudden fulfillment of time, attained in the parents’ meal with the baker.

AUTHORS

HAROLD SCHWEIZER Chair and Professor of English at Bucknell University, Harold Schweizer is the author of Suffering and the Remedy of Art (1997) and of articles on poetry, literary theory, the medical humanities. His recent publications appeared in Literature and Medicine and Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Health, Illness and Disease. He is currently working on a book project entitled On Waiting, chapters of which have appeared in Soundings, University of Toronto Quarterly, and Journal of Modern Literature.

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“Errand,” or Raymond Carver’s Realism in a Champagne Cork

Claudine Verley Translation : William Stull

1 “Errand” is an altogether surprising short story among the works of Raymond Carver. The usual characters and themes are not to be found, nor are the settings, nor even is the so-called minimalist narrative mode or style. The story initially presents itself as a conventional biographical narrative (covering the illness and death of Chekhov), but it is soon transformed by excisions, extensions, and expansions. The writer’s work on the implicit hypotext fictionalizes the biographical facts, to which he adds imaginary episodes.1 These episodes become increasingly detailed, and the last part of the story (there are four parts) has no connection at all with what seemed to be the subject and its treatment at the beginning. Chekhov is dead, and the scene the following day that brings together Olga Knipper and the young bellboy, whom she requests to go fetch a mortician, constitutes an unlikely development. The episode is a temporal “bubble” that soon turns spatial when Olga becomes the narrator and develops her own story within the story. She moves her protagonist, a young bellboy, through time, from the prospective conditional (“would”), to the narrative past, and finally to the present. She also moves him in space, from the hotel bedroom to the street and thence to the mortician’s house. By shifting from hypotext to hypertext, from one narrative level to the other, from the imaginary story to the illusion of reality, Carver for the first time in his career experiments with the richness and complexity of narrative performance and inscribes into his text the fragile boundaries that separate the real from the imaginary.2 In this way, he prompts readers to interrogate the very realism that critics have called the main attribute (or major defect) of his work.

***

2 The hypotext of “Errand” is to be found in and between the lines of the text, contingent on the reader’s perspicacity. It remains implicit or fictive, since no single, identifiable text can be found, as well as multiple. The hypotext stems from many sources of

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information: Suvorin’s and Tolstoy’s diaries, Marie Chekhov’s and Olga Knipper’s memoirs, Chekhov’s words as reported by different people, and the various biographies Carver may have consulted, notably Henry Troyat’s Chekhov. Thus, the story proves unstable and uncertain at its core. It takes root in a hypothetical and nonexistent combination of documents that contaminate each other without leaving traces. Different genres are also mixed (diary, memoir, letter, and press release), and different voices run through the hypertext. These voices express themselves in the direct style of letters or spoken words, in the past-tense narration of memoirs, and in the present- tense narration of diaries or newspapers. There is no single, unifying voice, such as that of an extradiegetic narrator who alone controls the narrative. Rather, there is a constant intertextual contamination, the strains of which we may or may not manage to distinguish. To put the matter more poetically, there is a discreet polyphony.3 The free indirect style that becomes increasingly dominant in parts three and four develops this polyphony, gradually establishing a second narative voice and a second story.

3 All voices in “Errand” speak of Chekhov, of course, telling of his serious hemoptysis of 22 March 1897 and his painful death on the night of the 2 July 1904. These are realities, but reactions and feelings of friends and relatives supplement the easily identifiable objective elements: facts, dates, and places. Thus, a subjective filter is interposed between the supposed reality of a hypothetical biography and Carver’s short story. Reality is transformed at the same time it is transcribed into a fictional story on, as it were, a primary level. Hence, the hypertext can establish only a remote relation to Chekhov’s life in a secondary fictionalization that for a while masquerades as a conventional biography. Here again the text develops through successive shifts and modulates between objective and subjective modes of presentation. “Chekhov,” the opening word of “Errand,” also constitutes the story’s first sentence. The surname suggests an entry in a biographical dictionary, as if Carver were writing a conventional life of the writer. After this, individual viewpoints drawn from various autobiographical sources periodically intervene and introduce subjective viewpoints. Finally, from the middle of the second part forward, exclusive references to Olga Knipper’s Memoirs signal the definitive selection of a single viewpoint and subjectivity. Thereafter, the hypotext is exclusively autobiographical, and the hypertext, in parallel fashion, assumes an openly fictional character. Olga Knipper’s Memoirs are quoted again at the end of the third part of the story. The fourth part, however, opens with an unlikely scene – the long silent confrontation between Olga and the bellboy – which becomes increasingly improbable in Olga’s final speech. At this point, the life and death of Chekhov have dropped out of the picture, the historical facts are abandoned, and we find ourselves in the subjective development of a wholly fictional narrative. Traces of the hypotext in the hypertext thus permit us to highlight features that become increasingly important to the short story: the equal validity of multiple voices that compete with the narrator’s voice, the essentially problematic status of reality in the story, and the primary importance of fictionalization.

4 It is on this last point that I wish to concentrate this study of the open structure formed by the story and its hypotext. How do we move from seemingly objective biographical data to the totally fictional narrative mentioned above? Three stages need to be distinguished in this movement towards “fictivity.”

5 First of all, the text of the story is the product of significant transformations and excisions. Seven years of Chekhov’s life disappear into the space break that separates

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the first part of the story from the second. Chekhov’s marriage and the composition of The Cherry Orchard are later mentioned, but only in brief analepses that reveal the narrator’s work on the text and destroy any illusion of conventional biography. Two moments in Chekhov’s life are highlighted in accord with a definite perspective: the hemoptysis of 22 March 1897 and the agony of the night of 2 July 1904. At the center of the narrative is the man himself and the illness that brings about his death. Chekhov the writer is seldom mentioned, and this eminently personal choice by the narrator marks another variation on the implicit biographical model. Certain modifications of biographical data are relatively minor. For example, Dr. Schwörer, who in the text is moved by sudden inspiration when he orders champagne, in fact ordered it for medical reasons. The champagne was intended to stimulate Chekhov’s weakened heart. The scene depicted in the story is surely the same one as in real life, but the practical motive goes unmentioned. Lyricism triumphs over historical truth. It may be said that this kind of deviation, like the above-mentioned silences, lends a distinctive tonality to Carver’s story without violating its biographical framework.

6 It is Carver’s amplifications that eventually get the better of the framework. Using the terms of Gérard Genette, we may distinguish extensions or additions of one or more episodes unconnected to the initial situation (Palimpsestes 298-306). One example is to be found in the last lines of the story’s second part that evoke the entirely imaginary scene of the bellboy’s rude awakening in the hotel kitchen. There are also expansions of “circumstances” that represent the dilation of a certain detail. For example, when the telephone call is made by Dr. Schwöhrer, we are given superfluous details about how the telephone operates. A third example of expansion (or perhaps extension, if the arrival of the bellboy with three roses is also a figment of the narrator’s imagination) is the entire fourth part of the story. This section is comprised of a development that is undoubtedly fictional, based on a vase of roses. In these three examples the amplifications come from the narrator, the only possible focalizer. In the episode that takes place in the “lower regions” of the hotel, for instance, the simultaneous depiction of the kitchens and the rooms occupied by the Chekhovs could not come from a character’s viewpoint. At the same time, focalization by the characters increases the fictionalization of a narrative that would remain nonfocalized (so-called omniscient narration) were it exclusively biographical.

7 It is not, then, simply a matter of quotations from Chekhov’s relatives, quotations that could well appear in the biographical framework. It is a matter, rather, of short passages in which description comes from a single character’s perspective. For example, it may come from the physician’s point of view: “Dr. Schwöhrer pulled on his big moustache and stared at Chekhov. The writer’s cheeks were sunken and gray, his complexion waxen; his breath was raspy” (Where 518). Or it may reflect the perceptions of the bellboy: “He found a place on the table for the bucket and glasses, all the while craning his neck, trying to see into the other room, where someone panted ferociously for breath. It was a dreadful, harrowing sound… Then this big imposing man with a thick moustache pressed some coins into his hand – a large tip, by the feel of it – and suddenly the young man saw the door open” (519).

8 These narrative transformations logically entail other changes. For example, there is an increasing prevalence of free indirect style to express the focalizing characters’ thoughts: “Dr. Schwöhrer stroked his moustache with the back of a finger. Why not? After all, what difference would it make to anyone whether this matter became known

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now or a few hours from now? The only detail that remained was to fill out a death certificate, and this could be done at his office later on in the morning, after he’d slept a few hours” (521). There is also a shifting sense of space as it is perceived by various observers in different places: “He [the bellboy] cast his gaze about once more. Through an open door he saw that the third glass was in the bedroom, on the nightstand. But someone still occupied the bed! He couldn’t see a face, but the figure under the covers lay perfectly motionless and quiet” (523). Finally, time is increasingly decelerated in scenes and even “stretches” where characters’ thoughts expand the time of the story, as in the penultimate example above and in the abnormally long silence between Olga Knipper and the bellboy (523). These transformations are common narrative devices in fiction. In texts that do not immediately present themselves as fictional, they serve as fictional markers.

9 The most striking narrative transformation remains to be discussed. It is also a transvocalization, since there is a major shift in the source of the narrative in the fourth part of the story. In this section, after addressing the bellboy to request him to fetch a mortician, Olga Knipper drifts smoothly into a second narrative of a quite different type. It is not a metadiegetic narrative recounting an episode that has happened to characters in definite places at definite times. Rather, it involves the development of an imaginary “errand” that places an entirely fictive character in an unknown location and a prospective time, the action bearing no relation to the pseudoreality of the initial narrative. With this development, the ambiguous relationship between reality and fiction grows increasingly complex. After the fictionalization of a biographical and autobiographical hypotext (which has itself filtered factual events), the story within the story necessitates a redefinition of reality and fiction, with each mirroring the other at different levels.

***

10 If the open structure we have examined illuminates the process of fictionalization in the hypertext, the closed structure formed by the two narrative levels compels interest from a different point of view. Olga Knipper, the intradiegetic narrator, constructs a narrative from her immediate experience – not on the basis of other narratives – and thus locates herself in relation to the first level of pseudoreality. She defines the subject matter of her discourse and determines the boundaries of the probable and the improbable. The question of literary creation is thus raised at the second level of the story. For the intradiegetic narrator, reality proves to be what was previously defined as fictional. This turnabout sets the stage for Carver’s brilliant performance in the last two pages, a tour de force that leaves the reader at once delighted and perplexed.

11 For Olga Knipper, reality lies in the fiction of the first narrative, the “errand” she entrusts to the bellboy: “She needed him to go out and bring back a mortician.” The request is straightforward and the instructions accompanying it are precise: “She wanted him to go downstairs and ask someone at the front desk where he could go to find the most respected mortician in the city” (524). Nothing ensues, however, and the order remains unexecuted. What sets things moving, including the bellboy, is the second totally fictional errand of the metadiegetic narrative: “And if it would help keep his movements purposeful he should imagine himself as someone moving down the busy sidewalk carrying in his arms a porcelain vase of roses that he had to deliver to an

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important man…. He was to walk briskly, comporting himself at all times in as dignified a manner as possible. He should keep walking until he came to the mortician’s house and stood before the door. He would then raise the brass knocker…” (525). In this second narrative the young man finds himself face to face with the mortician, who “takes the vase of roses” and pronounces the mission accomplished: “Just a minute and I’ll be with you.” If the shift to fiction proves curiously necessary for the achievement of the “real” project, it is because “reality” has already been suffused with imprecision and repetition. The errand, initially defined with concrete verbs, gets bogged down in increasingly vague and abstract formulations: “I have specifically requested you to perform this duty for me”; “do this for me”; and finally, “he was engaged on an important errand” (524-25, my italics). Paralleling this dilution into the abstract, a reduction to the smallest detail takes place and obliterates the global meaning of the mission. Olga’s order that the bellboy “go downstairs and ask someone at the front desk where he could go to find the most respected mortician in the city” is repeated in three similar forms: “Tell them downstairs . . .”; “tell them downstairs that I insist”; and finally, “Just say that this is necessary, that I request it.” Reality thus degenerates into a sterile repetition of trivialities. Recourse to the fictional appears, paradoxically, as the necessary implementation of an errand that has otherwise lost its substance and meaning. “He was to behave exactly as if he were engaged on an important errand, nothing more. He was engaged on a very important errand, she said. And if it would help keep his movements purposeful he should imagine himself….” (525). The mission or errand is inserted between two imaginary situations (“as if,” “And if…he should imagine”) that seem to justify its existence (“as if he were engaged”; “He was engaged”) and purpose.

12 For the bellboy, it will be a matter of implicitly pursuing the first objective (fetching a mortician) and explicitly delivering the flowers he holds in his hand. The imaginary errand thus combines reality and fiction in a task that is at once different and similar. While the discourse of reality reveals its sterility, the fictional discourse preserves, transforms, and reinvigorates reality. Thus, the narrator who controls her prospective story (“she said”; “She spoke quietly, almost confidentially”) fades away when she shifts into the role of omniscient narrator in the description of the mortician: “He was a man of restraint and bearing.... Long ago he’d acquainted himself with death…” Indeed, the final scene is depicted with absolute immediacy, in present tense: “The mortician takes the vase of roses.... But the one time the young man mentions the name of the deceased, the mortician’s eyebrows rise just a little. Chekhov, you say? Just a minute, and I’ll be with you” (526). Olga’s viewpoint fades out and the reader witnesses a scene that brings together two doubly fictional characters (on the first and second narrative levels) in an imaginary situation that is presented as reality. This narrative transformation explains the reader’s confusion when, after the mortician’s question to the young man, a second question brusquely follows: “Do you understand what I’m saying ?” In both cases, the same character, the bellboy, is designated by “you,” but the speaker of each question is a different person. Olga reenters the story. In fact, it is she who has been speaking all along. The reader is thrust back to the rooms occupied by the Chekhovs at the hotel, to the empty glasses and the bottle of champagne, all of which had been temporarily forgotten.

13 This interplay between the first and second narrative levels – between reality, pseudoreality, and the fictional – may be compared to the movement from hypotext to hypertext discussed earlier. With each shift, the same process occurs: reality yields to

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the fictional, which itself plays the role of pseudoreality at the next fictional level. Verisimilitude lies in this concomitance of the real and the fictional, and in “Errand” it is to be found in the general framework of the story or hypertext that stems from multiple transpositions modifying distant historical facts. Verisimilitude arises, too, in the second narrative imagined by Olga Knipper. We do not see the extradiegetic narrator at work elaborating the fictional narrative, only the textual traces of this fictionalization. But the intradiegetic narrator creates her story and speaks this creation at the same time, thus allowing us to note the shift: “He could even tell himself that the man he was going to see was expecting him, was perhaps impatient for him to arrive with his flowers. Nevertheless, the young man was not to become excited and run, or otherwise break his stride. Remember the vase he was carrying!” (525, my italics). The same bellboy who is Olga’s interlocutor on the level of “reality” (“he could even tell himself”) also serves as a character in the second narrative (“the young man”). The action moves from one narrative level to another as if there were continuity between them. The shift is only a matter of terms, of distance from the character (“the young man”) or the narratee (“remember….”).

14 Must we conclude from this that reality and fiction are confounded? That realism is an artificial concept? Does Carver end his career by thumbing his nose at his admirers as well as his detractors ? The answer is complicated by the last two paragraphs of the story. Olga’s narrative loses its autonomy and reveals its artificiality: “Do you understand what I am saying, Olga said to the young man. Leave the glasses.… Everything is ready now. We’re ready. Will you go?” (526). The bellboy is not the hero who accomplishes his mission. It is not even certain whether he has understood a word of what has been said. The question “Will you go?” remains unanswered. And if, in Olga’s story, the mortician takes the roses, in “reality” the bellboy picks up the cork of the champagne bottle. Hence there arises a retrospective irony regarding the errand as the initiation journey of a young man who will gain knowledge of death. If life and death are intertwined, their connection lies not in the mortician’s gesture but in the gesture of the young man. In one hand the bellboy holds the vase of roses that evokes the new day coming. With the other he picks up the cork of the spent bottle. There is a symbolic meaning, but it is linked to the “real” situation and to its triviality. At the beginning, it was a matter of a simple “errand.” The bellboy, a light-haired youth with round cheeks, could be the object of a request. He could not, however, serve as the subject of a mission, a modern knight errant on an eternal quest. Perhaps it is the actress in Olga Knipper that prompts her to “err” in this incongruous play, a play in which an image born of her subjectivity obliterates the true being of the character: “He would then raise the brass knocker and let it fall, once, twice, three times. In a minute the mortician himself would answer…. This mortician would be in his forties, no doubt, or maybe early fifties – bald, solidly built, wearing steel-frame spectacles set very low on his nose…. An apron. Probably he would be wearing an apron. He might even be wiping his hands on a dark towel while he listened to what was being said” (525-26). But the imaginary scene with its three knocks and detailed stage directions does not hold up against the narrow-minded stubbornness of reality: “But…. the young man was thinking of the cork still resting near the toe of his shoe….” (526, my italics). Everything in the room is tidy except this half-empty bottle of champagne and the cork that catches the eye and draws the gesture: “The young man wanted to bend over and pick up the cork, but he was still holding the roses and was afraid of seeming to intrude even more by drawing any further attention to himself. Reluctantly, he left the cork

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where it was and raised his eyes” (522-23). The bellboy will stay thus on guard in front of Olga until he can finally react, move, and touch; in other words, reestablish contact with reality and life: “To retrieve it he would have to bend over, still gripping the vase. He would do this. He leaned over. Without looking down, he reached out and closed it into his hand” (526). At this point, the edifice of Olga’s drama collapses like a house of cards. Minor concrete details get the last word, and the story ends with the mundane gesture of a secondary character who pursues his ordinary life a few feet from Chekhov’s body. But is this not, after all, an ending worthy of Chekhov?

15 Through imperceptible shifts and uncontrolled slides the narrative has transformed itself, by changing narrators, into a pure creation of the mind. The last page of “Errand” presents a situation that seems more real than reality. Admittedly, as we have seen, the discourse of reality can be vague and repetitive. But artificiality threatens the discourse of fiction. The second narrative produces an inauthentic character (the young bellboy as stock dramatic messenger), involved in an improbable “mission” that involves trumped-up symbolism. The result is a sham fiction whose dependence on the first narrative will shatter the fragile structure. The rupture becomes glaring when Olga loses her status as narrator and becomes once more a mere character. This shift in voice and viewpoint creates a strange feeling of uneasiness. Earlier transformations of hypotext into hypertext were invisible, and the passage from the real to the fictional was imperceptible. At this point, however, the layers of the work can be seen and the joins appear. Our first shock is followed by a second when we return to earth, at floor level, with the champagne cork beside the bellboy’s shoe. The young man’s only goal seems to be to retrieve the cork. The “reality effect” is clear in this pathetic preoccupation of a character who lives in the present moment. In addition, there is the strangeness of the object that draws the eye and the incongruity of ordinary behavior in the face of the tragic death of a man. But is it a man or a writer we refer to when the name of Chekhov is mentioned?

16 We stated earlier that the first word of “Errand” calls to mind an entry in a biographical dictionary. It is thus Chekhov the writer who opens the story, and we are later told he did not believe in anything that could not be apprehended by the senses (514). Nevertheless, in the first part and even more so in the next two parts, Chekhov appears primarily as a man suffering and slowly dying. He also appears (or wants to appear) the opposite: “he continually tried to minimize the seriousness of his condition. To all appearances, it was as if he felt, right up to the end, that he might be able to throw off the disease as he would a lingering catarrh. Well into his final days, he spoke with seeming conviction of the possibility of an improvement” (515, my italics). Later, Chekhov will sit on the balcony of the hotel at Badenweiler (where he may be seen) and ask for information about boat times (an act that may be heard). In fact, he creates a theatrical representation of the good health he knows he has forever lost. Perhaps we may see in this the creation of a fiction that is not at all literary. For a writer who can no longer write, life becomes a fiction. And when Chekhov the man dies, the movement is reversed. There is a return to the ever-living author. When Olga gives her instructions to the bellboy, she says first, “Herr Chekhov [is] dead,” then “Anton Chekhov [is] dead.” Death inhabits the individual as it does the social personage. When the mortician listens to the young man’s request, however, he raises his eyebrows at the mention of the writer’s name: “Chekhov, you say ?” This question shatters the fiction constructed by Olga and recalls the reality of dirty glasses, the champagne cork, and a bellboy who is Chekhovian without knowing it. At this point, we reencounter the

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first word of the story: “Chekhov.” In contrast to Chekhov the man, who represents appearance and death, Chekhov the writer asserts himself as being and life. The three yellow roses, held firmly by the bellboy until the last line of the story, evoke the totality of existence, from birth to death (the symbol of three). The roses are also associated with the green of the bellboy’s jacket, suggesting the regeneration of Chekhov, who is seen as both mortal man and immortal writer.4 The real Chekhov is the writer, and the man appears as his fictive image, an image that may be the passing object of the fiction but does not constitute its subject.5

17 Discussing “Errand” with an interviewer, Carver said, “There’s that story of mine that came out recently, a tribute, an homage to Chekhov. It has something to do with Chekhov’s last days and his death. It’s different from anything I’ve ever done” (Applefield 213) In “Errand,” Chekhov’s death is indeed the equivalent of a minor event that is seen, heard, or experienced, Henry James’s tiny “germ,” whose function is to provide the writer with a starting point. The event has little relation to the title of the story and constitutes only a background, albeit a moving one, to the fourth part. Chekhov the man disappears from the physical and narrative levels; Chekhov the writer persists in the eminently literary interplay between reality and fiction, the lifelike and the unlikely. The uncanny episode of the champagne cork clashes with the tragic death of the man but supplies a lesson in realism that would have pleased the writer. Here we see the true homage Carver pays his master, as well as elements of a poetic art that emerges in Carver’s last two short-story collections.

***

18 First of all, Carver’s realism, as “minimalist” as it may seem, has nothing to do with a flat commentary on the real world. To approach it in that way would be like restricting the nature and impact of hyperrealism in painting to an exact copying of reality. As John Barth notes in “A Few Words about Minimalism,” the principle according to which “less is more” is not new, and it has long contributed to the creation of masterpieces in literature as well as painting. What I wish to stress here is the affinity between realism and the uncanny in Carver’s work, in hyperrealist art, and in Edward Hopper’s paintings many years earlier. How is it that certain things – a gesture, a few words, an object, a banal incident – assume unusual prominence and uncanny resonance when they are inscribed into everyday reality?6 A look at the work of Hopper and the hyperrealists may help answer this question, which involves a conception of realism quite different from that of the nineteenth century.

19 The hyperrealists, at least those associated with relativist realism, abandoned the idea that reality exists in itself as something unchanging, something the artist attempts to recreate and which takes its meaning from its context.7 This reassuring conception of the universe has been thrust aside in favor of the transitory point of view. Since things have no existence in themselves, they become real only through the mediation of consciousness or the camera, in the collusion of object and subject, or in the extension of a reality that escapes the eye. In all cases, point of view, whether subjective or objective, is preeminent. The object exists only as represented; it has no intrinsic significance. It is up to the spectator to give the object meaning. On a technical level, we may also note the importance of framing, a process that goes hand in hand with concern for point of view. We can find examples of this in Chuck Close’s close-ups of

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faces or in close-ups of objects or clothes by Gnoli or Hofkunst. The same may be said of Edward Hopper’s paintings, with their characters frozen in mid-gesture, their buildings pictured frontally (unless they appear in a combination of several points of view), and their unexpected perspectives that call to mind acrobatic shots. It is this same concern for framing that cuts off one side of houses or their rooftops, for example. This is a distinctive kind of realism that keeps characters at a distance by immobilizing them in certain behaviors. Such art is often called frozen because of the extent to which it seeks to be bare, stripped of anecdotal detail – much like Carver’s bare, pared-down stories.

20 There remains the champagne cork, however. It recalls the peacock that abruptly lands in front of Jack and Fran in “Feathers” – and the cast of Olla’s teeth atop the television set in the same story. It recalls, too, the old man and the woman who exchange incomprehensible remarks before Miss Dent in “The Train,” or the dead leaves the narrator of “Menudo” obstinately rakes. These small and insignificant realistic details assume uncanny importance because they are perceived by particular characters. Miss Dent, for example, knows nothing about the past of the other two characters and therefore cannot grasp what they are saying. Similar perplexities arise at the end of “Preservation” in Cathedral: Sandy cleared the newspaper away and shoved the food to the far side of the table. “Sit down,” she said to her husband once more. He moved his plate from one hand to the other. But he kept standing there. It was then she saw puddles of water on the table. She heard water, too. It was dripping off the table and onto the linoleum. She looked down at her husband’s bare feet. She stared at his feet next to the pool of water. She knew she’d never again in her life see anything so unusual. (46)

21 Sandy’s husband is, of course, not melting. It is merely the food defrosting on the table. For a few seconds, however, the reader is disoriented because, like Sandy, the reader focuses on “his feet next to a pool of water,” to the exclusion of all else, including the logical explanation. Focalization and framing highlight one part of reality and give it uncanny immediacy.8 At several earlier points in the story, all Sandy could see of her husband, laid out on the sofa, was his head and feet: “She saw his head come down on the pillow that lay across the arm of the sofa” (44); “In the darkened room she could just make out her husband’s head and his bare feet” (45); “She saw his head come up from the end of the sofa” (46). In the final sentence of the story the connection between the body parts and the person disappears: “She put her plate on the table and watched until the feet left the kitchen and went back into the living room” (46, my italics). We are reminded of the dismembered corpse and fragmented self so prominent in the literature of the fantastic. No dismemberment actually occurs, however; it is merely suggested metaphorically.

22 In much the same way, the peacock in “Feathers” goes unnamed for a dozen lines after its appearance: It was then that we heard this awful squall. There was a baby in the house, right, but this cry was too loud for a baby. “What’s that sound?” Fran said. Then something as big as a vulture flapped heavily down from one of the trees and landed just in front of the car. It shook itself. It turned its long neck towards the car, raised its head, and regarded us.” (Cathedral 7)

23 This scene is realistic; it depicts the way the peacock is gradually perceived by the character. Nonetheless, the scene remains uncanny. The subjective viewpoint frames and presents the incident without the usual clichés describing the “bird of paradise”

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and without any supplementary clarification from the narrator. We move from “this awful squall,” “this cry,” and “that sound” to “something,” “it,” and “the thing.” At last, twelve lines into the description, we find the name of this unnameable creature: “We both knew it was a peacock, sure, but we didn’t say the word out loud.” Why not say the name? The peacock is subsequently called “the bird” and “it.” Finally, the narrator makes the following remark: “I’d have thought it was somebody dying, or else something wild and dangerous.” It would seem this uncanny apparition, this thing with no name, can be evoked only by reference to the implicit. Here again we come near the gap between signifier and signified that is one of the hallmarks of modern fantastic literature. But no leap is made between them. It is up to the reader to decode the signs. Moreover, the reader will have the pleasure of pausing an instant, tempted by the mark of fatality that any object presented in its immediacy involves.

24 “Errand” offers a striking example of this process when Chekhov, Olga, and Dr. Schwöhrer drink the final glass of champagne. Their gestures and expressions are described, and the scene is realistic: “She arranged another pillow behind his head. Then she put the cool glass of champagne against Chekhov’s palm and made sure his fingers closed around the stem. They exchanged looks – Chekhov, Olga, Dr. Schwöhrer. They didn’t touch glasses. There was no toast. What on earth was there to drink to? To death? Chekhov summoned his remaining strength and said ‘It’s been so long since I’ve had champagne.’ He brought the glass to his lips and drank” (520). If this scene remains etched in the reader’s memory, it is doubtless because of its emotional force. (Chekhov breathes his last only two or three minutes later.) It is also because of the visual intensity and force of presence with which the narrator “sees” the scene, as if it were inevitable. Wasn’t Dr. Schwöhrer’s telephone call described by the narrator as “one of those rare moments of inspiration that can easily be overlooked later on, because the action is so entirely appropriate it seems inevitable” (519)? At this point we may cite the French hyperrealist painter Jean-Olivier Hucleux, who defines fatality in hyperrealist painting as “this necessity that forces one to undergo it as a whole, without those possible escapes into dream that give rise to interpretations of composition, enlargement, reduction… Fatality arises, the event is there, to the degree that a painting is specific” (Clair, “Hucleux” 16). Like the glass of champagne, the action of the narrator who at the end of “Menudo” starts to rake his lawn and then his neighbors’ lawn before crossing the street is so appropriate to the situation and to his character that it seems to have a certain “fatality” about it, something that sums up the situation in an instant. Here again it is the reader who decodes and completes the text, for the narrator-character provides no key.

25 We might thus speak of an uncanny realism in Carver’s work, much as we might say of hyperrealism that it combines familiarity and strangeness, déja vu and jamais vu.9 Seeking reality, we come up against phantasm. For all this strangeness, however, we do not go beyond the boundaries of normal life. If the reader feels any doubt, the hesitation lasts only the time it takes to find the obvious explanation or the familiar name. The reader never has to face the metonymic shift inherent in the fantastic. Instead, the reader is placed on a metaphorical level where links are established between the literal and the figurative.10 In the champagne-drinking scene discussed above, the narrator suggests just such a metaphorical connection: “What on earth was there to drink to? To death?” But such intrusions are rare in Carver’s stories. As a rule, the narrator is effaced. External focalization preserves the mystery of people and

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things even as it safeguards realism as a way of apprehending the universe. Thus, Lloyd’s temporary deafness in “Careful” must be understood on several levels, including the proverbial: No one is more deaf than he who will not hear. Similarly, the falling objects at the end of “Vitamins” recall the dripping food in the refrigerator in “Preservation”: for some people, everything goes wrong. Robert’s blindness in “Cathedral” is clearly metaphorical, as is the situation of Myers at the end of “The Compartment.” Myers is borne off in an unknown direction in the company of short swarthy men, without coat or suitcase or anything connecting him to the carefully ordered world he has worked to build: “These days he lived alone and had little to do with anybody outside of his work. At night he listened to classical music and read books on waterfowl decoys” (Cathedral 48). “Chef’s House” offers a final, still more subtle example. We can understand the failure of a marriage that seemed to revive under favorable circumstances only if we recognize the metaphoric implications of verb tenses in the story. For someone who experiences the situation as Wes does, the past is a trap that snaps shut on the present. And yet, having to move and change houses is an everyday occurrence. All these episodes can be called flatly realistic. They fill out the daily routines that Carver typically describes. Yet, at the same time, there is something more to each episode: a way of portraying people and things at a particular moment, of cropping or framing reality, of making us participate in the story by means of the unsaid that surprises us every time.

***

26 In “Errand” a multiple and essentially undecidable hypotext (who can name the works it stems from?) leaves its mark on the hypertext we read. This hypertext mixes the voices and the sources of the narrative, blends biography and autobiography, the objective and the subjective. Indeed, this final text becomes a puzzle-story. In it we lose the thread of the hypotext without knowing where the break occurs or whether the thread will be taken up again later, for instance, in the final lines. Strangely enough, the second narrative does not follow the expected outline and is not developed as an independent narrative. It appears, rather, as an imaginary outgrowth of the first narrative, whose insufficiencies it is supposed to remedy. Real and fictional then become interchangeable concepts depending on the narrative level, which may develop or equally well degenerate. And yet writing or telling a story cannot be everything and anything. Chekhov the man (or Olga Knipper the woman) is one thing; Chekhov the writer is another. Even though Chekhov’s name does not appear in the story’s title, it is surely he who inspires the uncanny ending.

27 This homage to Chekhov, who died of tuberculosis, by a writer who died of lung cancer in August 1988, not long after having written “Errand” (first published in the New Yorker of 1 June 1987) assumes a special place in Carver’s works. Located at the end of his last collection, “Errand” stands as his literary testament. (The story’s sophisticated narrative technique, something seldom seen in Carver’s work, is another sign of its distinctiveness.) A writer writes a story about another writer whom he considers his master and from whom he learned to write. What could be the subject of such a story except the process of writing and the nature of the realism that links the two writers in the same tradition? In the end, all this can be summed up in a champagne cork. Corks that fall on the floor are there to be picked up, as everyone knows, particularly a neatly

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dressed young bellboy. But why focus on a champagne cork when Chekhov has just died? Such is life. Reality is everywhere. Above all, it is where we least expect to find it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Applefield, David. “Fiction and America: Raymond Carver.” Frank 8/9 (Winter 1987-88): 6-15. Rpt. in Conversations with Raymond Carver. Ed. Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 1990. 204-13.

Barth, John. “A Few Words about Minimalism.” New York Times Book Review 28 Dec. (1986): 1+.

Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. New York: Vintage, 1984.

---. Where I’m Calling From. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Chevalier, Jean, and Alain Gheerbrant. Dictionnaire des Symboles. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982.

Clair, Jean. “Jean-Olivier Hucleux.” L’art vivant 36 (Feb. 1973): 16-18.

---. “L’adorable leurre…” L’art vivant 36 (Feb. 1973): 4-5; 37 (Mar. 1973): 4-6.

Eder, Richard. “Pain on the Face of Middle America.” Los Angeles Times Book Review 2 Oct. 1983: 3+.

Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972.

---. Nouveau discours du récit. Paris: Seuil, 1983.

---. Palimpsestes. Paris: Seuil, 1982.

Howe, Irving. “Stories of Our Loneliness.” New York Times Book Review 11 Sept. 1983. 1+.

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Methuen, 1981.

Leering, Jan. “Le réalisme relativiste.” L’art vivant 30 (May 1972): 8-9.

O’Faolain, Sean. The Short Story. Greenwich: Devin, 1974.

Prince, Gerald. A Dictionary of Narratology. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987.

NOTES

1. Gérard Genette calls the hypertext any text derived from a previous one by transformation or imitation. This previous text is called the hypotext (Palimpsestes 14). 2. When a narrative is embedded in another narrative, it may be said to unfold on a second level. This second-level narrative is produced by a narrator who is already a character in the first, or primary, narrative. Genette also distinguishes between heterodiegetic and homodiegetic, intradiegetic and extradiegetic narrators. The narrator of “Errand” is extradiegetic (external to the diegesis) as well as heterodiegetic (in that he does not tell his own story). At the end of the story, Olga Knipper becomes an intradiegetic narrator (as a narrator she is part of the diegesis, a character in the framing narrative) and a heterodiegetic narrator. See Figures III 238-59. Instead of narrative levels, Gerald Prince speaks of diegetic levels in A Dictionary of Narratology.

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3. The narrator's comment about the basis of Suvorin and Chekhov’s friendship (“Like Chekhov, he was the grandson of a serf. They had that in common: each had peasant’s blood in his veins” [Where 512]), derives from a remark made by Chekhov himself: “There is peasant blood in my veins and you cannot astonish me with peasant virtues” (O’Faolain 100). 4. The color yellow has dual significance. According to Chevalier and Gheerbrant, yellow is “the most divine of colors but also the most earthly” (535-37). 5. This distinction calls to mind the opposition between the man and the artist that was so dear to Henry James. In “The Private Life,” for example, the writer Clare Wawdrey plays a double role: mediocre presence and vital absence, while Lord Mellifont lives wholly in his public life and possesses no private life. 6. Several critics have noted the presence of the uncanny in Carver’s stories. Irving Howe writes, “There are artists who reach the strange by staying with the ordinary” (1), and Richard Eder observes, “Carver is more than a realist: there is, in some of the stories, a strangeness, the husk of a myth” (3). These critics, however, are more concerned with the content of Carver’s stories than with the way realism and the uncanny are connected. 7. For essential elements of this discussion I have drawn on the work of Jan Leering. 8. In an interview, Carver recalls what prompted him to write the story “Fat.” The story began with an anecdote told to him by his wife: “But I didn't do anything with the story for years and then it came time to write the story and it was a question of how best to tell it, whose story it was. Then I made a conscious decision how to present the story, and I decided to tell it from the point of view of the woman, the waitress, and frame the story as if she were telling it to her girlfriend. She can’t quite make sense of the story herself, all of the feelings that she experienced, but she goes ahead and tells it anyway” (Applefield 211). 9. Cf. Jean Clair: “The ambiguity of hyperrealism may lie in the fact that it plays on an ambivalence between the ‘already seen’ and the ‘never seen.’ What is represented to the eye is always the already known, the everyday familiar image. At the same time, however, it is also something that has never before been recognized as such. In a single stroke the object presents itself in its greatest familiarity and its most disturbing strangeness, its immediacy and its remoteness” (“L'adorable” 4). 10. I have borrowed this formula and the preceding references to fantastic themes from Rosemary Jackson (41-42).

ABSTRACTS

Claudine Verley is professor emerita of American literature at the Université de Poitiers, where she directed CERER (Centre de Recherche sur les Représentations du Réel). Her publications on Raymond Carver include two essays in JSSE, a special issue Profils Américains, and two books: Raymond Carver: des nouvelles du monde and Short cuts: Raymond Carver/Robert Altman.

“Errand” has much more to do with Chekhov as a writer than with his last days and death. Everything in Carver’s last story revolves around the notion of realism.From the objective biographical data of the implicit hypotext to the subjectively determined fictive hypertext, the shift is sometimes puzzling. Excisions, extensions, and the addition of more and more detailed imaginary episodes make it difficult to discriminate between the reality of Chekhov's life and the fiction in the story. And when a character becomes the narrator of an imaginary second

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narrative that reshuffles the items of the first narrative, readers no longer know whether the created scene in the present tense has come to “real” life or whether they are being deceived by the staging of a fake reality. The Chekhovian bellboy will have the last word as he bends over to retrieve the cork of the champagne bottle. His ordinary everyday gesture, delineated and framed as in a superrealist painting, appears inevitable.

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Raymond Carver’s America profonda

Gigliola Nocera Translation : Vasiliki Fachard

EDITOR'S NOTE

Originally published as: Raymond Carver, Tutti i racconti, a cura e con un saggio introduttivo di Gigliola Nocera, Mondadori, Milano 2005, pp. XI-XXXVII.

Sculpting the Word

1 In one of his last interviews to Francesco Durante in Rome (April 1978), Raymond Carver made several assertions that shortly afterwards were to acquire a prophetic quality representative of his writing. Chief among them is a sentence that can be looked on as a manifesto of his poetics: “Writing is an act of discovery.” This image brings to mind the work of a sculptor striving to reveal, and thereby liberating, the object imprisoned in a block of stone. Ironically enough, Carver’s onomastic fate felicitously predisposed him to chisel the surface of language in search ofthe right linguistic vena “vein”: his name evokes the idea of a sculptor, an engraver, someone wielding a scalpel or some such “extractor.”

2 The rhetorical fulcrum of this assumption rests precisely on this act, a way of proceeding through which the writing becomes a discovery: a vigorous progression through the incrustation of the linguistic Babel that separates the writer from his goal. In order to reach it, he will have to work with scalpels and increasingly sharp chiseling tools. He will do so not for the purpose of enriching the page with verbal arabesques but with the intention of cleansing, removing, and subtracting. Only by cutting away at the petrified surface and carving underneath will there emerge in full an intuited yet uncharted territory: a hitherto unknown geography that will transform the journey into a discovery. Thus, from his first collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) onwards, the path Carver follows is that of a neo-realism that cuts to the bone or, as he says himself, to the “marrow.” Unwilling to recognize a specific “father” in the many

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nineteenth-century American literary archetypes, Carver collects and develops fragments of previous poetics which sometimes recall Gertrude Stein’s denotative strain or the extraordinary concision that sets apart the Fitzgerald of The Great Gatsby or the Hemingway of the short stories. Carver also excelled at subordinating writing to the mind’s “lathe,”in accordance with the “omission” theory, which purposely suppresses every word that is not indispensable. Carver admitted in that Roman interview: It’s hard to be simple. The language of my stories is the language people commonly speak, but it is also a prose that must be worked on to make it seem transparent. That’s not a contradiction in terms. I subject a story to as many as fifteen revisions. The story changes with each of them. But there’s nothing automatic; rather, it’s a process. Writing is an act of discovery.

3 In his writer’s journey, Raymond Carver seems to be constantly guided by two forces: the first abets his desire to force his way into the universe of the short story in order to take part in the development of its renewal in post-war America; the second compels him to look for a change of direction, a personal “act of discovery,” safeguarding him from being associated with acknowledged literary movements or pre-established categories. Carver’s apprenticeship in writing, which stretches from the late 1950s to the early 1960s, occurs in a country focused on the promotion of the “American way of life” and the strengthening of its own well-being; in a mass culture consuming even more than everything, literature inclusive, but above all, the briefer form such as the short story, which the American public had rediscovered through authors like Saul Bellow or J.D. Salinger. The success of the short story was notably favoured by its transfer from the bookstore shelves to the news stands, as had already occurred with the dime novel, and its wider circulation in several well-known magazines of the time: The New Yorker, Story, Harper’s Bazaar, Mademoiselle, The Atlantic, or Esquire. Thus, Carver’s first contacts with literary classics and small academic reviews occur in a society undergoing an unprecedented leveling in the realm of consumer goods. According to Andy Warhol, this phenomenon is also a sign of democracy: What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

4 By popularizing products in this fashion, the United States was to become the biggest producer of popular icons in other domains as well: advertising (Coca Cola and Campbell Soup), art (Marilyn Monroe), and politics (John and Jacqueline Kennedy). Pop artists were quick to avail themselves of these icons by isolating, assembling, and reproducing them ad infinitum on their canvases. Carver himself will always retain an unconscious archetype of these influences that can be traced back to his adolescence: the enormous refrigerator and the pride of one’s own house – unfortunately sold when his family later went through an economic crisis. Such was the popular America that the young Carver wanted to capture in narrative: a mass culture in which, according to Warhol’s observations during a trip to California in 1960, Pop Art spreads exponentially as one progresses westward – towards Carver country. It is no coincidence, therefore, that one can trace many of Carver’s domestic objects to their pop originals. In fact, as they forcefully emerge from the pages of his tales as unexpectedly strange rather than

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traditionally defined, they often reveal a disquieting vision of the American well-being and its concomitant daily myths.

5 Living in the very vortex generated by the boom in consumer products that also affects the short story, Carver experiences its consequences firsthand: he witnesses the birth of a mass of producers, among whom authors whose ranks he himself will swell and whose proliferation is due to the ever-growing spread of creative writing classes. In the middle of it all, and owing to its unprecedented appearance into university campuses, the short story publicly questions the mechanisms of its own production and genesis, thereby accepting the pragmatic assumption that one is not simply born a writer but may also become one. It was with this aim in view that Carver set out on a search for masters that would guide him through the labyrinth of language. This explains why he – who said he had never had any familiar or scholarly tools for weighing the difference between a historical novel and a newspaper article – was grateful to John Gardner for teaching him what to read before teaching him how to write. It is unsurprising, therefore, that shortly afterwards, in his transition from college apprenticeship to the pitiless world of editing, Carver again sought and found other masters, such as Gordon Lish, the editor to whom he owes the publication of his first story in Esquire.

6 It was difficult to find new ways of representing the world in this frantic and business- minded America swarming with young authors, creative writing professors, compilers of anthologies such as Martha Foley and her annual Best American Short Stories, or review editorslike Gordon Lish. Nevertheless, and this is the other strength of Carver, he managed to make such an impact that he was to say later, in his successful years, “Maybe I’ve contributed to the resurrection, even in a commercial sense, of the short story, that’s all.” On each page of his stories Carver began to resolutely sculpt his own difference by keeping away from the trends and the attractive rules of the market as well as by not falling into artistic extremes. Thus he managed to keep at bay the self- reflexive tendency of writers like Donald Barthelme or John Barth(of the postmoderns he says with an almost scornful irony: “What a shame, such an excess of ambition crowned by so little success”), as he also distanced himself from the minimalist style of the younger authors whose strategies were summarily attributed to himself. In fact, he rebelled vigorously against this last definition by critics: “It’s been used to tag a number of excellent writers at work today, but I think that’s all it is, a tag.” According to him it did not carefully distinguish between the ability to photograph minimal segments of life – this is the strategy used by David Leavitt, Amy Hempel, or Susan Minot – and the only seeming simplicity of his own style. The latter is the outcome of a process of rarefaction: it turns out a short form which can safeguard and dominate the immense energy contained in its vaster origins. If in his literary voyage, therefore, Carver appears to be sailing gropingly, intuitively, it is due to the fact that he is, in his own words, “an instinctual writer rather than a writer working out a programme or finding stories to fit particular themes.” Far from being a symptom of intellectual precariousness, the above shows all the independence of a writer capable of distancing himself from his masters and of becoming in turn, owing to and in spite of them, a master too. In the end, Raymond Carver has clear ideas: he wants to change storytelling.

7 But what is the form he wanted to revolutionize and by whom had it been codified? It would not be too excessive to say that it is the form of all, including that of a writer headmired and who many believed Carver to have taken as a model: Hemingway.

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Carver said that he liked Hemingway’s first stories and that during his periodic re- readings of Hemingway’s work – he read him every two or three years – he would marvel at the cadence of the sentences, that is to say “not so much what he writes about, but rather the way he writes.”Carver, however, repeatedly asserted his own individuality and difference every time he was compared to this admired yet burdening predecessor:“I don’t feel his influence too much, even if I could take it as a compliment to be considered his descendant. Anyway, I don’t write fishing stories.”In fact, the problem was much more complicated than Carver might have suggested in his fleetinginterviews, since it is seemingly to Hemingway that Carver associated himself. This is already apparent in Carver’s use of a piece of dialogue from Hills Like White Elephants (“Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”) which he paraphrased into the almost homonymous title Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

8 Nature is still another major force throughout Carver’s work. This can be seen through his teenage characters, modeled on his own autobiographical recollections. Lured by fishing trips pregnant with initiatory overtones, they retain in their adult years their preference for the call of rivers and streams over the confined conjugal space. But it is also true that Carver’s portrayal of fishing for iridescent trout and salmon in the rivers of the Northwest is totally different from Hemingway’s. Indeed, fishing-lines and hand- to-hand combats will not suffice to make of him Hemingway’s heir because the distance between him and his predecessor lies not so much in the themes as it does in the writing itself, as Jay McInerney, Carver’s pupil at the University of Syracuse, clearly put it: Encountering Carver’s fiction early in the 1970s was a transforming experience for many writers of my generation, an experience perhaps comparable to discovering Hemingway’s sentences in the twenties. In fact, Carver’s language was unmistakably like Hemingway’s – the simplicity and clarity, the repetitions, the nearly conversational rhythms, the precision of physical description. But Carver completely dispensed with the romantic egoism that made the Hemingway idiom such an awkward model for other writers in the late twentieth century. The cafés and pensions and battlefields of Europe were replaced by trailer parks and apartment complexes, the glamorous occupations by dead-end jobs. The trout in Carver’s streams were apt to be pollution-deformed mutants. The good vin du pays was replaced by cheap gin, the romance of drinking by the dull grind of full-time alcoholism. Some commentators found his work depressing for these reasons. For many young writers, it was terribly liberating.

On the Brink of Catastrophe

9 In the affluent American society, where the pop phenomenon – be it involuntary as in the world of advertising, or conscious through artists who appropriate it – emphasizes in various ways the icons and myths of a new lifestyle, Raymond Carver chooses to write about the other side of these myths and icons. Set in the America of reassuring household appliances, of advertisements that praise waste, and of a television industry that homogenizes the masses, Carver’s stories expose the other side of the nation: the marginal America of junk collectors, of the new poor excluded from the story of the winners and the rules of official economy or carefully silenced and covered up by the media “under the smoothsurface of things.” This is a peripheral America of towns too small not to be swallowed up by the overwhelming and nameless expanses of the countryside; an America peopled by lower-middle class whites otherwise known as

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“white trash”; an America where furniture and household items are thrown out of the one-time Disney-like cottageslike teeth from rotten gums; where cult technological objects and household appliances take on a parallel life of their own. In the midst of all this, human beings – be they married or having recovered their pre-marital independence – are effective carriers of a vague sense of loss. Paralyzed and prey to the “tension” of “something [that] is imminent,” they invoke a silence that immediately resonates as artificial and theatrical (“will you please be quiet, please?”), or else they plod from one page to the next, entangled in minimal narrative markers: “he said,” “she said,” “he answered.”

10 When Carver’s first collections appeared1, the stories induced in the reader a surprising and notable shock of recognition. Indeed, Carver’s fiction immediately strikes us as postmodern insofar as it is pregnant with the impression that modernity’s certainties are about to collapse, if they have not already done so; and that there exists a multiple flipside to the American coin that in fact conceals a void: there’s an empty reverse of well-being and empty counterparts of optimism, family, and love. Assailed and nonplussed by this feeling of void which arises from a sense of loss and uprootedness, Carver’s characters seem incapable of recording and understanding the “great events” of contemporary American history.They can only witness it in their low, albeit cozy blue-collar existence; they are the survivors of the past and at the same time the disillusioned heralds for the generations to come. We can picture them as representatives of the stereotypical teenagers of the Cold War, as well as of a spreading conformity that touches the family and sexuality; on the one hand they are lured by the illusive new urban frontier of the suburb, and on the other they are cowed by the fear of the atomic era. We can imagine them as young and full of vigor, sallying forth toward new and culturally unexplored frontiers, yet soon disillusioned with the American dream that collapses on war fronts in Southeast Asia or under the lies of Watergate. We can even picture them as fathers, mothers, spouses quickly turned single, or born-again Christians attracted to the utopia of the open market while simultaneously being struck down by its nefarious aspects, by the dark side of Reagan’s America. Those who had once committed suicide for fear of the atomic bomb are now doing so because of economic or ethnic problems, undesired pregnancy, or because of a simplistic equation between homosexuality and AIDS. The disaster is so widespread that it hides its face behind the upbeat façade of the affluent society; it is so ineffable that Carver prefers to interiorize it rather than to voice it, thereby offering us characters bearing within them a sense of void and loss which is simultaneously personal as well as collective.

11 This loss can manifest itself disquietingly through identity crises, as in “The Father,” where the eponymous character resembles the newborn son, according to the snickers of the sisters, who later claim that the same father “doesn’t look like anybody!”It may also reveal itself through a couple’s mourning over a lost love which, mysteriously sublimated at the oniric level, suddenly surfaces as in the dreams of the protagonist in “Fat,” or revisited through the Faulknerian theme of incest between a brother and sister, as in Furious Seasons. It can also unleash itself in the voyeurism of “The Idea,” and even in “Neighbors,” where it takes the shape of an irrepressible impulse to put on the lingerie of the absent neighbor. The loss can also assume more drastic forms such as that of disembodiment in “Viewfinder,” where a character with hooks instead of hands

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and a Polaroid slung around his neck does his best to sell owners the pictures he has taken of their houses.

12 Whatever the meaning of these losses, their common denominator is an expectation, a tension ever projected towards what Carver calls “a sense that something is imminent,”and which is in fact already a catastrophe. The fact that it later does not explode completely nor resolve in a catharsis brings about this subsequent feeling of tension and paralysis that stems from a denied resolution. This is what happens in “The Student’s Wife,” in which a young wife and mother of two, inexplicably spends a sleepless night listening expectantly to the sound of cars passing outside. When dawn breaks, the return of light after an interminable night does not restore order; and while “the pale sheets whitened grossly before her eyes,” the wife of the student, whom the genitive strips of any specific identity, falls down on her knees crying “God, will you help us, God?” But how can help be offered to a person who fails to express clearly his own dis-ease?

13 Carver’s protagonists, in fact, are faithful to the unequivocal request for silence, to the idea of “be[ing] quiet”; they explain nothing, or almost nothing, of their own torment – about which very little is ever asked. In this brief and extraordinary account, in fact, the student, narcissistic to the point that he believes he can fight off his wife’s insomnia first with a page from Rilke, then with a sandwich and finally by massaging her legs and shoulders, eventually alienates himself and falls into a speechless slumber. The reader then, hedged in between two walls of silence – that of the husband’s sleep and of the wife’s despair at his bedside – sees himself invested with the task of understanding the reasons behind his uneasiness and of bridging the rarefied gap, the abyss in which the relationship between the two has snapped forever.

14 In cases where, unlike the above, the possibility to know the protagonists’ past or present exists, it may come about not through direct revelations but through other characters, much more omniscient, and between whom the protagonists themselves vicariously nestle, thereby setting up an unusual mental ventriloquism. In “Why, Honey?” for instance, the dangerous side of the son, a sometimes cruel and now a corrupt and unscrupulous adult, is exposed by the mother, who hides and lives in fear of being found out by him. In “Viewfinder” it is the revealing sentence of the photographer without hands but with penetrating intuition (“So they just up and left you, right?”) which reveals the fact that the protagonist was abandoned by his wife and children. The mystifying title of “What Do You Do in San Francisco?” is elucidated when a gimlet-eyed postman reads the mind of the person he hands a letter to: “Why don’t you forget her? Why don’t you go to work and forget her?”

15 We can also learn more about the characters’ lives by examining how Carver uses classic tools like the objective correlative to elucidate the present and watch out for the future. In “Are These Actual Miles?” for instance, the family automobile, which is sold by the wife at an unfathomable price and disappears that same night with its new owner, becomes the tangible sign of a marital life that similarly vanishes forever, as the original owners will never again confront a financial problem together. Finally, it is once again the hooks replacing the hands on the photographer’s stumps in “Viewfinder” that tell us we are about to enter a household which has been irreversibly maimed in its emotional life. But this rhetorical instrument is at its most touching in stories where the main characters are men in the powerful yet fragile age of initiation. In “Nobody Said Anything,” the big fish dismembered by the boy in order to give half of it to his

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fishing companion and then triumphantly brought to the quarrelling and disinterested parents, seems a clear symptom of the family’s imminent dismembering. In “Dummy” (later “The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off”), Carver’s most “aphasic” story, it is again a child who sees the violent death of old Dummy, a sort of “freak” singled out by his unintelligible idiolect, as an anticipation of the father’s disease and death.

16 The objective correlative can also be an action that succeeds in breaking the stasis. In these instances we are often confronted with a violence that is all the stronger for its unexpectedness. The apex of violence is reached in “Mine” (later “Little Things”), in which a young couple about to break up fight over the right to keep the child that the woman is clutching in her arms. The case is “solved” in Solomon-like fashion through a sequence consisting less of words than increasingly animated actions stylized like the movements of a new martial art. This is one of Carver’s shortest accounts as well as that in which maximum havoc is wreaked within a limited diegetic space, in a scant number of replies. It is also symptomatic of how Carver’s expressive minimalism, his economically intense style, transforms Hemingway’s omission into a language of the highest density.

17 Violence can also arise from the return of the repressed, which sometimes finds an allegorical representation of itself in nature. In “Distance”(later, “Everything Stuck to Him”), the evocation of a storm that occurred several years earlier and is now shattering the night serves to disclose the latent aggressivity in a young married couple whose freedom is restricted by the presence of their child. It also serves to unmask before our eyes the hypocrisy underlying the rather sentimental relationship of the characters today: the father himself and the now grown and “distant” daughter. In “So Much Water So Close to Home,” the account of an outing by four men who end up fishing in the same waters in which floats the body of a strangled woman, gives voice to a marital violence that the couple seems to want to oust from their daily life but which is always there. In “Tell the Women We Are Going,” Jerry, a young husband who “stared all the time and hardly did any talking at all,” represents a similar case. Troubled by the explosion of erotic impulses smothered for too long under the roles of husband and father, he inexplicably stones to death two girls on a bicycle ride. Here again, Carver introduces the return of the repressed in an oblique way, through the description of the scenery which serves as backdrop for this brutal scene, and which is entirely made of hard, implacable rocks colored with graffiti. Slogans such as “Repent now” or “Jesus saves,” signs of the religious rebirth in postwar America, along with ones like “Beat Yakima” are different allegories of the same violence. Robert Altman, the director of “Short Cuts” who devised a way of linking the “exemplary” quality of this narrative with the allegorical character of Carverian nature, ends the story with an earthquake as Jerry is grabbing a stone, both devices brilliantly signaling the return of the repressed and the ineffability of the crime.

Domestic Interiors, Objects, Visionary Settings

18 “There is definitely a change going on in my writing and I’m glad of it. It happened when I wrote the story “Cathedral.” What Carver said of the title story of his 1983 collection applies in fact to all that he wrote following What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the volume with which he achieved his first success in 1981. In the wake of success came also a throng of imitative followers – something he had not asked for –

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who readily held Carver as a model for the country’s numerous creative writing classes. It must be said that Carver’s comments on this presumed change were not always unambiguous. In fact, they were often contradictory, as were the remarks of the critics, divided between those who viewed 1983 as a turning point in the author’s style and those who did not.

19 Carver would say that in the stories of Cathedral, “although characters were stronger, things still didn’t go much better for them.”At other times he would emphatically assert that these stories were “stronger, better developed, and with more hope.” What is certain is that Carver wished to take a path that was more complex, both on the thematic level as well as on form. He imposed new imperatives, felt the need for a sort of volano “fly-wheel” that dispenses with restrictive formulas, with theory, but which would still allow the story to stretch and project itself into the “outside” of the characters. Carver now wanted the short story not merely to offer itself as a rarefied cluster of tensions or unarticulated expectations that remain “inside” the character but to open up and thereby stimulate in both reader and characters the vision of another world.

20 Supporting itself on new pillars, “buttresses” this time, involved a rethinking of its architectonics and structure. This explains why the word architecture started to crop up in his interviews. In a way, such interviews are occasional documents – much less meditated than the essays and reviews that are to be found in our Meridiano, but this is precisely why they are so revealing. It was in one of these interviews given in 1984 that Carver, drawing on his beloved Flaubert, cites a letter in which the French master beseeches his editor not to serialize an expurgated Madame Bovary by arguing that “Prose must stand upright from one end to the other, like a wall whose ornamentation continues down to its very base.” “Prose is architecture.” Two years later Carver repeated Flaubert’s sentence, adding to it a meaningful twist:“prose is architecture,” and these are not “baroque” times.

***

21 This was the turning point in Carver’s career: 1983, the annus mirabilis of Fires and Cathedral the year in which the two streams in Carver merged to create a watershed. Actually, this reflection in architectural, constructive and structural terms which did not betoken an arid imagination but, on the contrary, a new vision, could be seen in an earlier interview of 1982, when the collections were still in process. Affirming the writer’s claim to use “advice [from] someone you trust,” Carver said: “This is a farfetched analogy, but it’s in a way like building a fantastic cathedral. The main thing is to get the work of art together. You don’t know who built those cathedrals, but they’re there.” Uttered in the years when Carver’s distance from Gordon Lish was solidifying but had not yet reached its later polemical phase, this sentence is worth quoting because it was used to round off a long disquisition on the persona and role of the editor in a writer’s life – from Hemingway to Fitzgerald, from Ezra Pound to T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. We have to take a larger view of this sentence’s implications because it is articulated around an aesthetic nexus of paramount importance: it shows that Carver accepted and shared, during his formative years, Gordon Lish’s minimalist vision and possessed himself of its precise instruments. He accepted and shared a style

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reduced to its minimum, rarefied, and at the same time pregnant with the words it leaves out.

22 With time, his “instinctual writer’s” energy and imaginative distance would make him realize, during the journey from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? to What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, that this iconic style whose surgical economy strips to the bone and to which he owed his success, also had him skirting a narrative “degree zero” beyond which it was impossible to proceed. He therefore felt the need to explore the opposite direction: that of a fuller, more generous expression without succumbing to a certain postmodernist “baroque” which he did not adopt. He did this in 1983 with the publication of such stories as “Harry’s Death,” “The Pheasant,” “Where Is Everyone?” all of which he inserts in Fires and, especially, with the twelve stories of Cathedral. In other words, just as he accepted the challenge of minimalist rarefaction, Carver now accepts the challenge of going beyond this minimalism and the difficult task it entailed of taking his distance from Lish. The latter, in turn, was able to also gracefully distance himself from a more mature Carver who was eager to tread new paths on his own. This eventually led Carver to restore in his 1988 anthology Where I’m Calling From, containing what he considered his best work, the original length of the stories that Lish had reduced, often by half.

23 This decision revealed the artistic and poetical shift undergone by Carver during these years; he started to follow a different technique for sharpening and eradicating the superfluous word. It would be reductive to read this change in light of the events in his life (i.e. a more self-assured Carver settling down in his post-alcoholism years; the prominence of the “strong” Tess Gallagher) or in terms of an aesthetic revolt against an intrusive editor. The opening of Carver’s artistic prospects in the 80s was such that both versions of these stories can coexist within the same canon and present an equal level of excellence. As Carver often said when talking of his frequent rewrites and revisions, this coexistence is possible because these are different stories (“they are all different stories, and they have to be judged differently,”he told the critic William Stull in 1987). Distinguishing them, however, implies an obvious shift in focus. “The Bath” is a case in point. In its 1981 version, the short one advocated by Lish, the reader’s attention is drawn to the symbolic and salutary bathing performed by the mother of a dying child whose fate is, apparently, not worth troubling about. In its 1988 version, marked by a shift in Carver’s sensitivity, a return to the original manuscript’s length, and the new title “A Small, Good Thing,” the story draws the reader’s attention to the final catharsis achieved through the eating of small sweet rolls, as in an ancient burial ritual. In this version it is important to show that the child is dead and that his toys and useless birthday cake are relics from another life. Seen from this different angle, the little bread rolls offered by a tenacious baker during the night become a tender metaphor of life rarelyconveyed by a short story. “‘A Small, Good Thing’ and ‘The Bath’ are really two different stories,” Carver repeats to Kasia Body in 1987. Thus, in light of the author’s own words, the rest – from the disquisitions on the real paternity of Carver’s minimalism to the attempts (not authorized, it seems, by Tess Gallagher) at critical reconstructions of the texts edited by Lish – is reduced to mere polemics by Carver’s firm position in the canon of twentieth-century American literature.

24 Turning back to the texts, what the reader will not fail to notice in the collections following What We Talk About is the different tone in Carver’s prose. As Carver himself acknowledged, there has occurred a shift from the asphyxiating “him and her” to the

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ampler “family relations” that project towards the surrounding landscape. In an interview from that same year, 1983, and in the wake of the enthusiastic reception of Cathedral by the critics, an enraptured Carver asserted: There is an opening-up in this book that there’s not been in any of the other books. There was a period of several months when I didn’t write anything. And then the first story that I wrote was Cathedral, which is unlike anything I have ever done before. All the stories in this book are fuller and more interesting, somehow. They are more generous. They are not quite so pared down.

25 This is unquestionably true of the stories both in Fires and Cathedral. “Opening-up”then (Carver’s words to Kay Bonetti suggest the cracking of a code) means writing in different ways; it also means rewriting or retracing one’s steps. In fact, a large part of the 80s is characterized not only by its “original” writing style but also by an unending process of revising and rewriting of previously published works. It is to this process that we owe the protean and unique Carver canon made up of stories with variable lengths, with modifications in the names of one or more characters, and with various titles. This trend would abate only towards the end of the decade, which coincided with the author’s death. Consequently, the label “original” would be applied to the stories from his last collection, Elephant and Other Stories, and to the unpublished ones recovered among his papers and included in Call If You Need Me.

26 The opening-up may also be triggered, in a more general sense, by glimpses into a different life or, what Carver himself liked to call, a “second life”: that which came after the difficult beginnings, the economic problems, the break up of the first marriage, and, most importantly, the addiction to alcohol. Opening up, then, means including other personal experiences or, as Carver prefers to say, other “obsessions”into his writing: “There are certain obsessions that I have and try to give voice to: the relationships between men and women, why we oftentimes lose the things we put the most value on, the mismanagement of our own inner resources. I’m also interested in survival, what people can do to raise themselves up when they’ve been laid low.”It is not a question here of autobiographical writing, something Carver always refused to do, but of drawing new incentives from personal experience and transforming them into new narrative obsessions. It is no coincidence, therefore, that many of the collections in Carver’s “second life” present characters that measure themselves against the “mismanagement of our own inner resources” characterized by alcoholism and the ordeal of coming out of it. This is obvious in “Where Is Everyone?” in which a husband and wife who had previously broken up alternatively attend the sessions of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is also noticeable, in stories of Cathedral such as “Careful,” in the feeling of neurosis and impotence that an alcoholic husband experiences as he struggles to remove impacted earwax. This motif has a distant echo in the early story “The Hair,” where a hair stuck between the protagonist’s teeth almost drives him mad. We see instances of this wasting of one’s life in “Where I’m Calling From,” which takes place in the gloomy Christmas atmosphere of a community of alcoholics; in “Chef’s House,” when a couple seek to find a lost balance through the husband’s recovered sobriety. It emerges again in “Kindling,” one of the previously unpublished and posthumous stories from Call If You Need Me, where still another alcoholic divorcee spends a few days in the rented room of an outlying American town.

27 It is not surprising therefore that in these writings by a more mature Carver in which there are no longer any children or adolescents, one of the important themes or “obsessions” should be a more complex communicative ritual around which the life of

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the couple is being articulated: this life of the couple unfolds within a domestic space that becomes an active part of the narration. As is characteristic of American culture, the event evolves in space more than it does in time, a space which can only be described but that provides the diegetic thread of the story. It is the synchronic coexistence of the objects that fill the home – a home that extends to the garden and neighboring spaces – which indicates the passing of time in personal and collective affairs. The married couple nestle in this space and find, through discussion, a sign of their own existence that will bear witness to their own duration in time or take stock of their failures.

28 Thus, there are married couples who felicitously recover their lost equilibrium inside the space of another, as in “Chef’s House,” where they also risk losing that balance when Chef and his daughter, “fat Linda,” regain possession of it. Other couples succeed in maintaining it within the impersonal space of an institution for Alcoholics, as in “Where I’m Calling From.” There are still others to whom it is not vouchsafed to enjoy the blessing of a lasting relationship, as is the case in “Call If You Need Me.” In this story, the narrator and his wife Nancy fail, in spite of their well-organized plan, to recreate their shattered universe. Finally, some couples are affected by a stasis that welds time to the space of a room, as in “Preservation,” where the protagonist, after being fired, decides to “move” on the household couch. Similarly affected are large families that tend to absorb the space of others, as in “Elephant,” where the relatives ask for attention, affection, and above all, infinite supplies of cash.

29 One can observe still another characteristic: when couples are irrevocably reduced from two to one, the survivors may attach themselves, vampire-like, to the life-space of another couple, while still clinging to their own. This could already be seen in “Why Don’t You Dance?” from the 1981 collection of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the story in which the protagonist, single again, projects himself into the life of a young couple who will probably acquire the bed and furniture scattered about the front lawn of his house. Similarly, in “Boxes,”the solitude and neurosis of the old mother who has just turned single are filtered by the couple of the son and daughter-in-law. The same occurs in “Fever,” where the protagonist has the illusion that he has retrieved the warmth of a shattered family in the harmonious couple of the old, motherly babysitter and her husband. The same phenomenon recurs still in “Kindling,” where the protagonist, Myers, seeks to recreate the family that alcohol took away from him through Sol and his “fat” wife, the owners of the room he is renting. This projecting is valid also in cases where the couple or neo-singles eventually shut themselves up inside the house, as in “Careful,” or in a train car, as in “The Compartment” or “The Train.” The characters in these stories try to communicate, to dialog with the surrounding space, a domestic space that is a synecdoche of the American space.

30 In this “architectural” reconsideration of narrative space which Carver uses to conjure up the vision of an other world there are, besides the familiar structures of landscape architecture typically found in suburbs (lawns, swimming pools), other important elements, albeit secondary ones, ranging from animals to objects. It is upon these – which disclose nothing of their past, as in a Greek tragedy deprived of a prologue, and which have no prospect of a salutary projection into the future – that falls the task of “historicizing” the general architectonics of the narration, thereby offering us a reading made of narrative bits and pieces that would otherwise remain obscure.

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31 The animals are no longer the iridescent trout of initiation or the mouse with disquieting eyes in “What’s in Alaska?” They are the Orphic beings that belong to an exotic and alien bestiary. In “The Pheasant,” (Fires) the protagonist runs over one of them as it unexpectedly crosses the road at night, shattering one of the lights as “it spun up past the windshield, trailing feathers and a stream of shit.” The sight of this beautiful animal, whose death is evinced only by its unnatural presence on the asphalt and a stain of blood at the mouth, evokes in the driver the vision of a different world. “How well do you really know me?” Gerald asks the girl traveling at his side, and shortly after that everything precipitates, as he comes to the realization, horrified, “that he no longer had any values, no frame of reference,” and that he had accelerated in order to kill. Later, in the parking lot of the first restaurant, he steps out of the car and sets out by himself on the edge of the road under the scrutiny of the waiters. The vision triggered by this death also enables us to follow up the thread – and the void – of his former life. In “Feathers,” the story that opens Cathedral, a couple invited over by friends has to put up with a peacock that announces itself with an “awful squall” in the garden and later roams, voluminous, around the dinner table. Years later everything will change in Jack and Fran’s life, but the memory of this inexplicable vision remains.

32 In “Blackbird Pie” (Elephant and Other Tales) and the posthumous “Call If You Need Me,” two stories inexplicably connected through the presence of the same animal, the two crisis-ridden couples experience an analogous epiphany as they walk out of the garden and find themselves in the presence of horses coming out of nowhere.“I put my hand against the horse’s neck and felt a surge of power run up my arm to the shoulder,” one reads in the first story. “I felt helpless, but I was scared, too. ‘Can you tell me what’s going on?…. What’s that suitcase doing on the front porch? Where did these horses come from?’…. ‘I’m leaving you,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s happening. I’m heading for town tonight. I’m striking out on my own.’” In the second story too, as horses flock into the garden from nowhere, they re-order the events and feelings that marked the couple’s life. They were big white horses with long manes.… But nervous, too.… Their ears kept rising and falling as they tore out clumps of grass…. “We won’t forget that,” she said. She began to cry…. Go, dearest one, and God be with you…. I drove back to the house and parked in the driveway and looked at the hoofprints of the horses from last night. There were deep impressions in the grass…

33 In Carver’s writings, objects also have particular potentialities. They are not the simple daily things over which our mind’s eye skims. In the form of barbecues, chainsaws, or lawnmowers, they too can project themselves onto the external world. Their presence is even more disquieting when they populate the inside of a house; the more claustrophobic the space of the house, the stronger their voice and the stupor it creates. For instance, as the refrigerator in “Preservation” unexpectedly breaks down, it turns from a jewel of domestic progress into a morgue that turns out decomposing matter and carcasses, thus becoming an intrusive narrative element. Similarly, the TV set in “Where Is Everyone?” which startles awake the protagonist who has returned to live with his mother, exposes the unease within: “I woke up with a start, the pajamas damp with sweat. A snowy light filled the room. There was a roaring coming at me. The room clamored. I lay there. I didn’t move.”

34 More than any other appliance or communicative medium, the telephone, always ringing out of anyone’s control, becomes an enigma which lends itself to multiple readings. In “A Small, Good Thing” it arouses the irrepressible anxiety of the dying

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Scotty’s mother; in “Are These Actual Miles?” every ring marks a step in the distance the wife is taking from her husband; in “So Much Water So Close to Home,” it reveals the rough sensibility of the husbands on their fishing trip; and the telephone which rings by mistake in “Whoever Was Using This Bed” sets off the couple’s first meditation on the drama of an irreversible coma. Most disquieting also is that of “Are You A Doctor?” for it succeeds in drawing the character away from his domestic space into another space, from which he will emerge forever changed: “‘Are you there, Arnold?’ she said. ‘You don’t sound like yourself.’”

35 If many of these objects are moved from their canonical place, if they are not only isolated and set off, as they usually are in pop art, but are also misplaced and decontextualized, they take on another disconcerting quality. This is illustrated by the bridle, an emblem of domination, abandoned or perhaps forgotten by passing tenants in the eponymic story: “The rider pulls the reins this way and that, and the horse turns. It’s simple.” Likewise, in “Feathers,” the plaster cast of a young woman’s teeth carefully preserved and placed on the TV set serves as a reminder of her recovered beauty and… of her dentist’s skill: “There were no lips to the awful-looking thing, and no jaw either, just these old plaster teeth packed into something that resembled thick yellow gums.” These objects can also remain indecipherable and mysterious, as in Carver’s extraordinary last story, “Errand.” There, the cork of the champagne bottle from which Chekhov drank before dying lies on the floor until one of the hotel bellboys furtively pockets it the next morning. We are given no explanation, but this amiable young man’s gesture, a gesture completely futile in comparison with the delicate task Olga Chekhov is entrusting him with, stands out with amazing vividness in the reader’s mind.

36 In “Cathedral,” Carver’s most Orphic and visionary story in which the protagonist reluctantly at first helps a blind person draw a cathedral by guiding his hand, the vision of an other world is finally restorative and cathartic, as he also, in a reversal of roles and assisted by the blind man who asked him to close his eyes, draws one himself. The “blindness” to which the protagonist submitted has thus, like an ancient retaliation, liberated him from the phenomenology of domestic life as it has also disrupted its old borders manifest in the asphyxiating confines of the TV screen, the claustrophobic limits of the house, and the invisible limits of the conjugal trap. Guided towards “blindness” by a blind man, the character finally achieves self-consciousness, like Oedipus in the woods of Colonus.

37 Between the rarefied realism of the first collection and the visionary realism of the last lies the evolution of Raymond Carver – and with it an extremely significant portion of the twentieth-century American short story. Carver was a great narrator because he knew how to transgress and rise above any theory – an outlaw capable of writing up new laws. He sought masters, from John Gardner to Gordon Lish, so as to learn not to imitate them, and he knew how to expand the confines of American realism in order to take it to the unmapped territories of a visionary. He unveiled to us an anonymous and marginal America that no one knew, conferring to her the immortality of an epos.

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AUTHORS

GIGLIOLA NOCERA Gigliola Nocera graduated from the University of Catania (Italy), where she is now Associate Professor of American Language and Literature. Her publications include “Furori Trascendentali di Louisa May Alcott” (Tranchida, 1996), “Il linguaggio dell’Eden: natura e mito nell'America di Thoreau” (Tranchida, 1998), and several essays on 19th and 20th century American literature. For Mondadori, she has served as the editor of Truman Capote, Romanzi e racconti (1999), Truman Capote “Il Duca nel suo dominio: intervista a Marlon Brando” (2004) and Raymond Carver, Tutti i racconti (2005).

Journal of the Short Story in English, 46 | Spring 2006