Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena

Institute for English/American Studies

Winter Term 05/06
HpS: "The ‘New Realism’ in Contemporary American Short Fiction"

"Minimalism" in Raymond Carver’s "Collectors"

Name: Mathias Keller

Table of Contents

I. Introduction 2

II. Setting and Point of View 3

III. Characterization of the Protagonists 5

A. The I-Narrator 5
B. Aubrey Bell 8
C. The Development of their Relation 12

IV. Unfamiliar Actions and Events 13

V. Conclusion 16

VI. Bibliography 19
A. Primary Sources 19
B. Secondary Sources 19

I. Introduction

Raymond Carver’s "Collectors"1 is part of the often underrated trend2 in contemporary

American short fiction which is called "Minimalism" or "New Realism". Its most significant
characteristic, in contrast to "Postmodernism", is that it returns to the realistic depiction of
everyday life (mimesis) in the American society. Raymond Carver can be labelled as one
dominant representative of this movement and he writes in most cases about the trivialities
of everyday life. Very frequently he constructs stories with a depressive and hopeless mood
due to the failure of personal relationships between the protagonists. Then, alcoholism is
their last refuge. Furthermore, Carver admired Hemingway and adopted some very
interesting techniques from his literary idol. Indeed, the most prevailing one was Carver’s
imitation of the "Iceberg-Theory"3 in his stories. Hemingway states that in a story only
about 1/8, like the top of an iceberg, should be told and 7/8, the part underneath the water,
should be discovered by the reader. The latter represents for Hemingway as well as for
Carver the most important part of a short story. Wolfgang Iser wrote in his books on the
aesthetics of reception about the analogous technique of blanks/omission.4 He states, that
the main issues lie underneath the plain and fragmentary surface of narration. Accordingly,
the story depends on speculations by the reader, which are intended by the author, and
often a high level of previous knowledge is required to understand all circumstances and
motivations of the characters. Due to the variety of speculations it can be doubted that a
coherent interpretation of a text with a lot of blanks is possible. However, they certainly do
create an enormous effect.

In the seemingly simple low-rent tragedy "Collectors", "Carver’s most minimalistic [story],"5
a salesman for vacuum cleaners enters the house and life of the I-narrator. A multitude of
 blanks and, moreover, unfamiliar events and actions contribute to a large extend to the
high potential of anxiety of the story. In the following, I will first reveal the most significant
blanks concerning the setting, the point of view and the two protagonists. By doing so, I will
also attempt to fill them. Secondly, I will analyze what is unfamiliar in the story and how
events and actions of the two characters amplify the, on the whole, uncanny situation.
Finally, I will sum up the main findings of my analysis and evaluate them.

II. Setting and Point of View

In the beginning of the story, the unemployed I –narrator wastes his time by lying on the
sofa and waiting for the postman on a rainy day. However, not the anticipated postman with
a hopeful letter approaches, instead, it is the ominous vacuum cleaner salesman Aubrey Bell
who draws nearer. He is supposed to present some cleaning tools for Mrs. Slater, who is
said to be the wife of the I-narrator. As Aubrey Bell states it, her card was drawn in a
lottery and "[she] is a winner" (C 114). According to the I-narrator "Mrs. Slater doesn’t live
[there]" (Ibid.). Nevertheless, Aubrey Bell forces his way into the house and takes off his
hat, coat and galoshes.

[...]

1
Raymond Carver, "Collectors," Where I’m Calling From. New and Selected Stories (New
York: Vintage Books, 1989) 113-120. All page references within the text refer to this
edition. [Siglum C]

2
Uta Jäggle, Raymond Carvers Kurzprosa: Untersuchungen zu Formen narrativer Reduktion
(Aachen: Shaker, 1999) 17. Henceforth, all quotes from secondary sources in German are
translated into English.

3
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: 1964).

4
Wolfgang Iser, Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung
literarischer Prosa (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1970). Also: Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des
Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (München: Fink, 1976). Arthur F. Bethea calls them in
his book Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver (New York;
London: Routledge, 2002) on page 36 "indeterminate spots," which denote the same as
Iser’s "Leerstellen".

5
G. P. Lainsbury, The Carver Chronotope: Inside the Life-World of Raymond Carver’s Fiction
(New York: Routledge, 2004) 88.

Works by Raymond Carver

Carver, Raymond. All of Us: The Collected Poems. ed. William L. Stull. News York: Vintage, 2000.
- - -. A New Path to the Waterfall. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1989.
- - -. At Night the Salmon Move. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1976.
- - -. Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Otheer Prose. Ed. William L. Stull. New York: Vintage, 2001.
- - -. Cathedral. New York: Knopf, 1983.
- - -. Elephant and Other Stories. London: Collins Harvill, 1988.
- - -. Fires. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1983; New York: Vintage, 1984; New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1989.
- - -. Furious Seasons and Other Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1977.
- - -. If It Please You. Northridge, CA: Lord John, 1984.
- - -. In a Marine Light: Selected Poems. London: Collins Harvill, 1987.
- - -. My Father's Life. Derry, NH: Babcock & Koontz, 1986.
- - -. Near Klamath. Sacramento: English Club of Sacramento State College, 1968.
- - -. No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings. London: Collins Harvill, 1991; New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1992.
- - -. Put Yourself in My Shoes. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1974.
- - -. The Pheasant. Worcester, MA: Metacom, 1982.
- - -. The Stories of Raymond Carver. London: Picador, 1985.
- - -. Those Days: Early Writings by Raymond CarverCarver. Elmwood, CT: Raven, 1987.
- - -. Two Poems. Salisbury, MD: Scarab, 1982.
- - -. Two Poems . Concord, NH: Ewert, 1986.
- - -. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Knopf, 1981.
- - -. Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1988; Franklin Center, PA: Franklin Library,
1988.
- - -. Where Water Comes Together with Other Water. New York: Random House, 1985.
- - -. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
- - -. Winter Insomnia. Santa Cruz: Kayak, 1970.
- - -. Ultramarine. New York: Random House, 1986.
Carver, Raymond with Shannon Ravenel. (Eds.) The Best American Short Stories 1986. Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1986.
Carver, Raymond and Tess Gallagher. Dostoevsky: A Screenplay. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1985.
Carver, Raymond and Tom Jenks. (Eds.) American Short Story Masterpieces. New York: Delacorte, 1987.

Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short
story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major writer of the late 20th century and also
a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s.

Contents
[hide]

• 1 Life
• 2 Writing
• 3 Works
o 3.1 Fiction
 3.1.1 Collections
 3.1.2 Compilations
 3.1.3 Some individual stories
o 3.2 Poetry
 3.2.1 Collections
 3.2.2 Compilations
o 3.3 Screenplays
o 3.4 Essays, Poems, Stories (Uncollected Works)
• 4 Films
• 5 Books about Carver

• 6 External links

[edit] Life
Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in
Yakima, Washington. His father, a sawmill worker, was an alcoholic. Carver's mother
worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. His one brother, James Franklin Carver,
was born in 1943.

Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. In his spare time he read
mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life and
hunted and fished with friends and family. After graduating from Davis High School in 1956,
Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. In June of 1957, aged 19, he
married 16-year-old Maryann Burk. She had just graduated from a private Episcopal school
for girls. His daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December of 1957. When their second
child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born the next year, Carver was 20. Carver
supported his family by working as a janitor, sawmill laborer, delivery man, and library
assistant. During their marriage, Maryann worked as a waitress, salesperson, administrative
assistant, and teacher.

Carver became interested in writing in California, where he had moved with his family
because his wife's mother had a home in Paradise. Carver attended a creative-writing
course, taught by the novelist John Gardner, who had a major influence on Carver's life and
career. Carver continued his studies first at Chico State University and then at Humboldt
State College in Arcata, California, where he was first published and studied with Richard
Cortez Day and received his B.A. in 1963. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the
University of Iowa, for one year. Maryann graduated from San Jose State College in 1970
and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977.

In the mid-60s Carver and his family lived in Sacramento, where he worked as a night
custodian at Mercy Hospital. He sat in on classes at what was then Sacramento State
College including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz. Carver's first book of poems, Near
Klamath, was published in 1968 by the English Club of Sacramento State College.

With his appearance in the respected "Foley collection," the impending publication of Near
Klamath, and the death of his father, 1967 was a landmark year. That was also the year
that he moved his family to Palo Alto, California, so that he could take a job as a textbook
editor for Science Research Associates. He worked there until he was fired in 1970 for his
inapproptiate writing style, too many active verbs. In the 1970s and 1980s as his writing
career began to take off, Carver taught for several years at universities throughout the
United States.

During the years of working in different jobs, rearing children, and trying to write, Carver
started to drink heavily and stated that alcohol became such a problem in his life that he
more or less gave up and took to full-time drinking. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver
was a teacher in the Iowa Writers' Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver stated that they
did less teaching than drinking and almost no writing. The next year, after leaving Iowa
City, Cheever went to a treatment center to attempt to overcome his alcoholism, but Carver
continued drinking for three years. After being hospitalized three times because of his
drinking (between June of 1976 and February or March of 1977), Carver began his 'second
life' and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.

In 1982, Carver and first wife, Maryann, were divorced.[1] From 1979 Carver had lived with
the poet Tess Gallagher whom he had met at a writers' conference in El Paso, Texas in
1978. They married in 1988 in Reno, Nevada. Six weeks later, on August 2, 1988, Carver
died in Port Angeles, Washington, from lung cancer at the age of 50. In the same year, he
was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is buried at Ocean View
Cemetery in Port Angeles, Washington. As his will directed, Tess Gallagher assumed the
management of his literary estate.

In 2001 the novelist Chuck Kinder published Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale, a roman à
clef about his friendship with Carver in the 1970s. In 2006 Maryann Burk Carver wrote a
memoir of her years with Carver: What It Used To Be Like; A Portrait of My Marriage to
Raymond Carver.

[edit] Writing
Carver's career was dedicated to short stories and poetry. He described himself as "inclined
toward brevity and intensity" and "hooked on writing short stories" (in the foreword of
Where I'm Calling From, a collection published in 1988—and a recipient of an honorable
mention in the 2006 New York Times article citing the best works of fiction of the previous
25 years). Another stated reason for his brevity was "that the story [or poem] can be
written and read in one sitting." This was not simply a preference but, particularly at the
beginning of his career, a practical consideration as he juggled writing with work. His
subject matter was often focused on blue-collar experience, and are clearly reflective of his
own life. The same could probably be said of the recurring theme of alcoholism and
recovery.

Carver's writing style and themes are often identified with Ernest Hemingway, Anton
Chekhov, and Franz Kafka. Carver also referred to Isaac Babel, Frank O'Connor, and V. S.
Pritchett as influences. Chekhov, however, seems the greatest influence, motivating him to
write Errand, one of his final stories, about the Russian writer's final hours.

Minimalism is generally seen as one of the hallmarks of Carver's work. His editor at Esquire
magazine, Gordon Lish, was instrumental in shaping Carver's prose in this direction - where
his earlier tutor John Gardner had advised Carver to use fifteen words instead of twenty-
five, Gordon Lish instructed Carver to use five in place of fifteen. Objecting to the "surgical
amputation and transplantation" of Lish's editing, Carver's eventually broke with him.[1])
During this time, Carver also submitted poetry to James Dickey, then poetry editor of
Esquire. His style has also been described as Dirty realism, referring to a group of writers in
the 1970s and 1980s that included Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff - two writers Carver was
closely acquainted with - Ann Beattie, and Jayne Anne Phillips. These were writers who
focused on the sadnesses and losses of the everyday lives of ordinary people—often lower-
middle class or isolated and marginalized people who represent Henry David Thoreau's idea
of living lives of "quiet desperation."

His first published story appeared in 1960, titled "The Furious Seasons". More florid than
much of his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. "Furious
Seasons" was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and
can now be found in recent collections No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me.

His first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was first published in 1976; the title
story had appeared in the Best American Short Stories 1967 collection. The collection itself
was shortlisted for the National Book Award, though it sold fewer than 5,000 copies that
year. He was nominated again in 1984 for his third major-press collection Cathedral,
generally perceived as Carver's best. Also included in the collection are the award-winning
'A Small Good Thing', and 'Where I'm Calling From' - a story later selected by John Updike
as one of the Best American Short Stories of the Century. Carver said that he saw the
collection as a turning point in his career and a move towards a more mature, poetic and
optimistic style.

His final (incomplete) collection of seven stories, titled Elephant in Britain (included in
"Where I'm Calling From") was composed in the five years before his death. The nature of
these stories, especially Errand, have led to some speculation that Carver was preparing to
write a novel. Only one piece of this work has survived - an unpromising fragment "The
Augustine Notebooks", printed in "No Heroics, Please".

Tess Gallagher published five Carver stories posthumously in "Call If You Need Me"; one of
the stories ('Kindling') won an O. Henry Award in 1999. Prior to his death, Carver had won
six O. Henry Awards for the stories 'Are These Actual Miles' (originaly titled 'What is it?')
(1972), 'Put Yourself in My Shoes' (1974), 'Are You A Doctor?' (1975), 'A Small, Good Thing'
(1983), and 'Errand' (1988), respectively.

[edit] Works
[edit] Fiction
[edit] Collections

• Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (first published 1976)

• Furious Seasons (1977)
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981)
• Cathedral (1983)
• Elephant (1988)

[edit] Compilations

• Where I'm Calling From (1988)

• Short Cuts: Selected Stories (1993) - (film tie-in)

[edit] Some individual stories

From Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

• "Fat"
• "Nobody Said Anything"
• "The Student's Wife"
• "Neighbors"
• "Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarets"
• "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"

From Furious Seasons

• "Distance"
• "Dummy" (revised title "The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off")
• "So Much Water So Close to Home"

From What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

• "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"

• "Why Don't You Dance?"
• "Viewfinder"
• "Mr Coffee And Mr Fixit"
• "Gazebo"
• "I Could See The Smallest Things"
• "Sacks"
• "The Bath"
• "Tell The Women We're Going"
• "After The Denim"
• "So Much Water So Close To Home"
• "The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off"
• "A Serious Talk"
• "The Calm"
• "Popular Mechanics"
• "Everything Stuck To Him"
• "One More Thing"

From Cathedral
 • "Vitamins"
• "Careful"
• "Where I'm Calling From"
• "Chef's House"
• "Fever"
• "Feathers"
• "Cathedral"
• "A Small, Good Thing"

From Elephant

• "Boxes"
• "Whoever Was Using This Bed"
• "Blackbird Pie"
• "Errand"

[edit] Poetry

[edit] Collections

• Near Klamath (1968)

• Winter Insomnia (1970)
• At Night The Salmon Move (1976)
• Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985)
• Ultramarine (1986)
• A New Path To The Waterfall (1989)

[edit] Compilations

• In a Marine Light: Selected Poems (1988)

• All of Us: The Collected Poems (1996)

[edit] Screenplays

• Dostoevsky (1985, with Tess Gallagher)

[edit] Essays, Poems, Stories (Uncollected Works)

• Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (1983)

• No Heroics, Please (1999)
• Call if You Need Me (2000)

These books gather otherwise uncollected works. Fires covers Carver's career during the
period 1966–82. The latter volumes were published posthumously, and include early fiction,
essays, and reviews of other authors. Call if You Need Me was identical to No Heroics,
Please apart from the replacement of poetry in the latter with new stories, two found in
Carver's desk by his last partner, Tess Gallagher and three found in his archives by scholar
William Stull.

Раймонд Карвер (англ. Raymond Carver, 25 мая 1938, Клетскени, Орегон — 2 августа
1988, Порт Анжелес, Вашингтон) — американский поэт и новеллист, крупнейший
мастер англоязычной короткой прозы второй половины ХХ в.
Содержание
[убрать]

• 1 Биография
• 2 Творчество и признание
• 3 Стихи
• 4 Рассказы
• 5 Другие произведения
• 6 На русском языке
• 7 Библиография

• 8 Ссылки

[править] Биография
Отец — рабочий на лесопилке, алкоголик, мать — официантка. В 18 лет женился,
перепробовал много тяжелых профессий. В 1959 учился на курсах писательского
мастерства у Джона Гарднера, затем — в университете Гумбольдта в Калифорнии, в
университете Айовы. Дебютировал рассказом «Чудовищная погода» в 1961. После
первых публикаций стихов и прозы преподавал в 1970—1980-х гг. в различных
университетах Америки. Хватался за любую работу, чтобы содержать семью, стал много
пить, несколько раз лечился от алкоголизма. Бросил алкоголь в 1977 после тяжелой
мозговой комы. Вторично женился, много писал. Умер от рака легких.

[править] Творчество и признание

Считал себя наследником Э. Хемингуэя, У. Фолкнера, А. Чехова, довел искусство
рассказа до предельного минимализма. Крупнейший представитель школы «грязного
реализма», лауреат нескольких литературных наград, в том числе премии О.Генри
(1983 и 1988), премии журнала «Poetry» (1985). По рассказам создан фильм Роберта
Олтмена «Короткий монтаж» («Short Cuts», 1993). О нем самом снят телевизионный
фильм «Писать и оставаться добрым» («To Write and Keep Kind», 1996), написан роман
Марка Максвелла «Никсонкарвер» (1998). На японский язык прозу Карвера перевел
Харуки Мураками.

[править] Стихи

• Winter Insomnia / Зимняя бессонница (1970)

• At Night The Salmon Move/ Лосось выплывает ночью (1976)
• Where Water Comes Together with Other Water/ Там, где вода встречается с водой
(1985)
• Ultramarin/ Ультрамарин (1986)
• A New Path to the Waterfalls/ Новая тропа к водопаду (1989)

[править] Рассказы

• Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?/ Вы не будете так добры помолчать? (1976,
Национальная книжная премия)
• Furious Seasons/ Чудовищная погода (1977)
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love/ Так о чем мы говорим, когда
говорим о любви (1981)
• Cathedral / Собор (1983, номинация на Пулитцеровскую премию)
 • Elephant / Слон (1988)

[править] Другие произведения

• Dostoevsky /Достоевский(1985, киносценарий)

[править] На русском языке

• Собор. М.: Известия, 1987 (Библиотека журнала «Иностранная литература»).

• Стихи [из разных книг] // Иностранная литература, 2005, № 7.
• Поезд
• Вы — доктор?
• Рассказы
• Рассказы

[править] Библиография

• Saltzman A.M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: University of South Carolina

Press, 1988.
• Conversations with Raymond Carver/ Ed. by Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L.
Stull. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.
• Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver. New York: Scribner’s, 1990.
• …when we talk about Raymond Carver/ Ed. by Sam Halpert. Layton: Gibbs Smith, 1991.
• Campbell E. Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992.
• Remembering Ray: A composite biography of Raymond Carver/ Ed. by William L. Stull
and Maureen P. Carroll. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1993.
• Runyon R.P.Reading Raymond Carver. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1994.
• Nesset K. The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Survey. Athens: Ohio UP, 1995.
• Halpert S. Carver: An oral biography. Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1995.
• Hallett C.W. Minimalism & the Short Story: Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Mary
Robison. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999.
• Bloom H. Raymond Carver: comprehensive research and study guide. Broomall: Chelsea
House, 2002
• Zhou J. Raymond Carver's short fiction in the history of black humor. New York:
P.Lang, 2006.
• Carver M. What it used to be like: a portrait of my marriage to Raymond Carver. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 2006

Literary minimalism
Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface
description. Minimalist authors eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate
meaning. Readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story, to "choose
sides" based on oblique hints and innuendo, rather than reacting to directions from the
author. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional; they're
average people who sell pool supplies or coach second tier athletic teams, not famous
detectives or the fabulously wealthy. Generally, the short stories are "slice of life" stories.

Some 1940s-era crime fiction of writers such as James M. Cain and Jim Thompson adopted
a stripped-down, matter-of-fact prose style to considerable effect; some classifiy this prose
style as minimalism.
Another strand of literary minimalism arose in response to the meta-fiction trend of the
1960s and early 1970s (John Barth, Coover, and William H. Gass). These writers were also
spare with prose and kept a psychological distance from their subject matter.

Minimalist authors, or those who are identified with minimalism during certain periods of
their writing careers, include the following: Raymond Carver, Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton
Ellis, Ernest Hemingway, Amy Hempel, Eneas McNulty, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff,
Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Mary Robison, Frederick Barthelme, Richard Ford and Alicia
Erian.

American poets such as Robert Creeley, Robert Grenier, and Aram Saroyan are sometimes
identified with their minimalist style.

The Irish author Samuel Beckett is also known for his minimalist plays and prose.

Dirty realism is a North American literary movement born in the 1970s-80s in which the
narrative is stripped down to its fundamental features.

This movement is a derivation from minimalism. As minimalism, dirty realism is characterized

by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Authors working within the genre
tend to eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. The characters in
minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional.

Dirty realism authors include the short story writers Raymond Carver (1938-1988), Tobias
Wolff (1945), Richard Ford (1944), and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (1950).

Insularity and self-enlargement in Raymond Carver's Cathedral

Essays in Literature; Macomb; Spring 1994; Nesset, Kirk

Full Text:
Copyright Western Illinois University, Department of English
Spring 1994

In "The Compartment," one of Raymond Carver's bleakest stories,

a man passes through the French countryside in a train, en route
to a rendevous with a son he has not seen for many years. "Now
and then," the narrator says of the man, "Meyers saw a farmhouse
and its outbuildings, everything surrounded by a wall. He
thought this might be a good way to live-in an old house
surrounded by a wall" (Cathedral 48). Due to a last minute
change of heart, however, Meyers chooses to stay insulated in
his "compartment" and, remaining on the train, reneges on his
promise to the boy, walling out everything external to his
selfish world, paternal obligation included.

Meyers's tendency toward insularity is not, of course, unique

among the characters in Cathedral or among the
characters of earlier volumes. In Will You Be Quiet, Please?
there is the paranoid self-cloistering of Slater and
Arnold Breit, and in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
we read of James Packer's cantankerous,self-absorbed
disgruntlement about life's injustices. In Cathedral appear
other, more extreme versions of insularity,from a husband's
self-imposed confinement to a living room in "Preservation" to
another's pathetic reluctance to leave an attic garret in
"Careful." More strikingly in Cathedral than before, Carver's
figures seal themselves off from their worlds, walling out the
threatening forces in their lives even as they wall themselves
in, retreating destructively into the claustrophobic inner
enclosures of self. But corresponding to this new extreme of
insularity, there are in several stories equally striking
instances where--pushing insularity the other way--characters
attempt to throw off their entrapping nets and, in a few
instances, appear to succeed. In Cathedral, and in Cathedral
only, we witness the rare moments of their comings out, a
process of opening up in closed-down lives that comes across
in both the subjects and events of the stories and in the
process of their telling, where self-disenfranchisement is
reflected even on the level of discourse, rhetorically or
structurally, or both.

As one might expect, "de-insulation" of this kind necessarily

involves the intervention of others: the coming out of
a self-enclosed figure depends upon the influence of another
being--a baker or a babysitter or blind man, or even a
fellow drunk on the road to recovery, who, entering unexpectedly
into a character's life, affords new perspective or
awareness and guides him along, if not toward insight then at
least away from the destructively confining strictures
of self. As one might expect further, such interventions and
influences are mobilized in the stories through the
communal gestures of language--through the exchanging of tales
and through communicative transactions, particularly, where
separate identities blend and collaborate rather than collide.
Thus even as "Carver's task," as Paul Skenazy writes, is to
depict the "tiny, damning confinements of the spirit," in
Cathedral it is also to go beyond depicting the suffocations and
wilted spirits of characters in chains (78). Engaging in what he
calls a kind of writerly "opening up" of his own, Carver draws
out in various uplifting moments the momentary gratifications
and near-joys characters experience when, however temporarily,
the enclosing walls come down--when their self-preoccupations
lift and they sense new freedom, a freedom they may or may not
ever truly participate in at all
(Interview 21).

But since outright freedom is for many of Carver's lot as

terrifying as total lack of mobility (think of Arnold Breit
in "Are You a Doctor?" or Lloyd in "Careful"), the freedoms
Carver's newly-liberated characters experience manifest
themselves ironically as forms of enclosure, ample and humane as
those enclosures may be. Be they a comforting memory of one's
old bedroom, or the warm, fragrant reality of a bakery, or a
vision of the awesome interior of a cathedral, they are
enclosures nevertheless. Trying to free themselves of the
fetters of insecurity and addiction, Carver's characters expand
both inwardly and outwardly and, thanks to the beneficial
incursion of other lives and other stories, imagine larger, more
spacious enclosures--places big enough and light enough to allow
the spirit room to breathe. In Cathedral, by and large,
characters are more insulated than ever, cut off from their
worlds and from themselves; but a few of them, like J. P. in
"Where I'm Calling From," trying patiently and steadfastly "to
figure out how to get his life back on the track" (135),
demonstrate through shared stories and through overtures
toward human connection new and unprecedented awareness. It is
an awareness of collective confinement, a sense
that we can and often do help each other set aright our derailed
lives, that by opening up to others and to ourselves,
we do indeed occasionally get those lives back on track.

"Where I'm Calling From" is the story of a man coming to grips

with addiction within the security of an alcohol
treatment home. Contrary to the situations of "The Compartment,"
"Preservation," and "Careful"--situations in
which men blockade themselves in ways as offensive to others as
they are self-destructive--this narrator's
confinement is both positive and necessary. Locking himself up
voluntarily in "Frank Martin's drying out facility"
(127), he is a stronger version of Wes in "Chef's House," a
wavering recoveree who lapses back into alcoholism
when his summer retreat--the sanctuary of his fragile recovery--
falls out from under him. Up until now, this
narrator (like many of Carver's narrators, he goes unnamed) has
insulated himself with drink, with the buffering
torpor alcohol can provide, his addiction being both a reaction
to and the cause of his failing marriage. Arriving at
Frank Martin's dead drunk, exchanging one extreme state of
insularity for another, he takes refuge from a prior
refuge--one that was killing him. Sitting on the porch with
another recovering drunk, J. P., he takes further refuge in
the story his new friend has to tell.(1)

It is significant that throughout most of the story Carver

leaves his characters sitting where they are. Protected yet
still exposed to the chill of the outer world, the porch is that
liminal space existing between the internal security of
a cure-in-progress and the lure, if not the danger, of the outer
world. On the porch, the narrator and J. P. are at once
sheltered and vulnerable, their physical surroundings an
objective correlative to the transitional state of their minds
and wills. Beyond the "green hill" they see from the porch, as
Frank Martin tells them, is Jack London's house--the
place where the famous author lived until "alcohol killed him"
(137). Beyond that--much farther north--is the
"Yukon," the fictive topos of London's "To Build a Fire," a
place where, as the narrator recalls later, a man will
"actually...freeze to death if he can't get a fire going" (146).
With his wet clothes, tragically enough, London's figure
is hardly insulated from the chill, even though, ironically,
he's bundled up in the manner of the two strongest figures
in Carver's story: J. P.'s wife, Roxy, whose "big knuckles" have
broken her husband's nose, wears both a "coat" and
"a heavy sweater" (142); Frank Martin, hard-edged and tough and
looking like a "prizefighter," keeps his "sweater
buttoned all the way up" (137).

By the end of the story, sitting alone and enjoying the

transitional comforts of the porch, Carver's narrator fails to
recall, or subconsciously omits, the tale's sad conclusion--the
fact that, at the mercy of the elements, London's man
eventually freezes to death, his life extinguished along with
his fire. Still upset perhaps about Tiny's "seizure," the
narrator chooses not to think of the extreme consequences of
ill-prepared exposure to the outer world. Nor does he
remind himself that death entered the heart of the sanctuary
only days before, this time without claiming its prize.
Subject also to bodily complaints, J. P. suffers from the
"shakes" and the narrator from--an occasional "jerk in [his]
shoulder"; like Tiny, the fat electrician from Santa Rosa, J. P.
and his friend are each in their own way overpowered
by biology, by nature. Their bodies--like their minds--are
adjusting and compensating in the process of recovery.
Just as love was once upon a time "something that was out of [J.
P.'s] hands"--something that set his "legs
atremble" and filled him "with sensations that were carrying him
every which way" (132)--the aftermath of
drinking is for both men superseded in intensity only by death,
the ultimate spasm, which proceeds from both
within and without, insulate themselves however they may.

Before "going inside," Frank Martin suggests a bit of

recommended reading, namely The Call of the Wild. "We have
it inside if you want to read something," he says. "It's about
this animal that's half dog and half wolf" (137). Like
London's "animal," we learn, the narrator is similarly divided,
torn by inner impulses. At the outset of his first
visit, Frank Martin had taken the narrator aside, saying, "We
can help you. If you want help and want to listen to
what we say" (138). Thinking now in retrospect, the narrator
says, "I didn't know if they could help me or not.
Part of me wanted help. But there was another part" (138).
Partly civilized, partly wild, the narrator is in one sense
interested in protecting himself from himself, his retreat at
Frank Martin's a gesture of attempted
self-domestication that, considering present circumstances,
unfortunately did not come off the first time. "We're
not out of the woods yet," he says, describing the second
aftermath of addiction, the physical extremity of which
leaves him and his friend trembling in their chairs, still
caught up in the war of selves. "In-between women,"
Skenazy writes of this story, "in-between homes, in-between
drinks, the narrator locates himself in his
disintegration" (83). And yet it is between selves, we should
hasten to add, where he begins to come to terms with
disintegration, and begins imagining ways to reintegrate,
rebuild.

Above all he wants "to listen," as Frank Martin says, though it

is not Frank he listens to chiefly but to J. P. "Keep
talking, J. P.," he says early on (130), interjecting this and
like phrases throughout the story in the manner of a
refrain: "You better keep talking," he says (136). The coming
out of hardened insularity involves intensive listening,
as necessary for him as telling is for J. P., and for Carlyle in
"Fever," who comes out of a psychological and
physical ordeal by spilling his pent-up turmoils to a
babysitter. For this narrator, significantly, the process of
coming out involves going into the narrative of another,
involves entering imaginatively into a discourse which,
arising of the communal act of storytelling, is at once familiar
and unfamiliar. Since "commiseration instigates
recuperation," as Arthur Saltzman observes of this story, J.
P.'s story initiates through both comradery and
displacement the continuation of the narrator's own story--and,
if all goes well, the reassembly of the fragments of
his life (147). Which is not to say, of course, that there are
not perils as well as benefits in transactions of
discourse, the sharing of stories. In "Will You Please Be Quiet,
Please," a secure, seemingly happy man comes
unglued at hearing the tale of his wife's infidelity, a story
she tells him herself; in "Sacks," a son enclosed by his
own world and concerns meets his father briefly in an airport,
and upon hearing the story of his father's adultery
(and his parents' ruined marriage), he seals himself off
completely from his father, more alienated and embittered
than ever by the old man's confession. Before Cathedral,
generally, narrative transactions--if transaction has taken
place at all--constitute perilous intercourse indeed.

But in "Where I'm Calling From," as in other stories in

Cathedral, Carver would have us believe otherwise. "I'm
listening," the narrator says, waiting for J. P. to go on with
his tale. "It's helping me to relax, for one thing. It's
taking me away from my own situation" (134). Still, J. P.'s
story helps him do more than merely "relax." Listening,
and the imagination required of close listening, takes him away
from his "own situation" even as it brings him closer
to the heart of his problems. His inner crisis is externalized
in J. P.'s story, both in the pairing of their present
circumstances and in the details of his friend's narration--in
such odd details, in fact, as the "well" J. P. fell into as a
boy. Like the chimneys from which J. P. ends up making his
livelihood later in life--narrow, tubular enclosures
associated with the family to whom he becomes attached (they run
the chimney-sweeping business)--the well is a
trap, a darkly insulating prison; it represents the extent to
which J. P. senses, enclosed until very recently in a
bottle, he has hit "the bottom" in the present trajectory of his
life.(2) For both the narrator and J. P., the well
represents literally the pitfalls of experience, the dark
refuges in which they find themselves (voluntarily or
involuntarily) existing, places they are extricated from
ultimately only through the intervening efforts of others.
Like J. P. "hollering" at the bottom of the well, the narrator
is waiting for a drop-line of his own, his "line out"
being (along with his willingness to reform) the telephone. By
the end of the story he has tried calling his wife
twice, and is about to call his "girlfriend," hoping to make
contact with the women in his life. Not by any means
out of the woods yet, though, he is still wavering in his
resolve. In one of the story's last lines, he says, thinking of
his girlfriend, "Maybe I'll call her first"--suggesting, given
what we know about her drinking habits, that that line
out may send him tumbling back into the hole. Torn between the
warmth of stability and the chill of the outer
world, between civilization and wilderness, he is, we assume,
still at war with himself.

With two layers of female protection, in a sense, buffering him

from the world, he is mildly obsessed with the
women in his life, so it is not surprising that his life and J.
P.'s story intersect finally in a woman's kiss. Far more
hopeful than the peacock in "Feathers"--one man's token of a
kind of radiant bliss he'll never know--Roxy's kiss is
for the narrator a token of "luck," emphasizing more than his
need for help from without, a rope down the well of
his life. As a gesture, Roxy's kiss underscores the degree to
which women provide security in his life; he has
depended on them, certainly, as much as he has in the past on
drink, or as he has recently on the captivating flow
of J. P.'s narrative. Our sense of his greatest personal
security comes with his description of the time his landlord,
coming around one morning to paint the house, awakened him and
his wife in their bedroom:

I push the curtain away from the window. Outside, this old guy
in white coveralls is standing next to his ladder.
The sun is just starting to break over the mountains. The old
guy and I look each other over. It's the landlord, all
right--this old guy in coveralls. But his coveralls are too big
for him. He needs a shave, too. And he's wearing this
baseball cap to cover his bald head. Goddamn it, I think, if he
isn't a weird old fellow. And a wave of happiness
comes over me that I'm not him--that I'm me and that I'm inside
this bedroom with my wife. (145)

Seated on "the front steps" in the chill air beyond the porch,
the narrator warms himself with this memory of the
past-triggered, seemingly, by the kiss he gets from Roxy (before
she and J. P. "go in," leaving him outside alone).
He associates his "happiness" then, in his memory, with being
"inside" the bedroom with his wife, suggesting not
only how much women are integral to his well-being but also how
beneficial certain walls and enclosures have been
to him at times. "Outside," in the form of a strange, skinny old
man, are reminders of toil and old age, and, as
before, of what lies beyond that illness and decrepitude and
death; "inside," on the contrary, there is security and
leisure, embodied by a laughing wife and the enveloping comforts
of a warm bed, and by a recognition of his
circumstances as being as secure then as they were.

Thus the contact the narrator makes with an old man one morning
is recapitulated by his contact with a younger
man years later, though contact is closer now since both men are
"outside" and are working communally in their
efforts to find ways back in. Epitomized in the gesture of
Roxy's kiss, the intersection of their lives and stories has
initiated a recuperation that may get them, as J. P. says, "back
on the track." So crucial is this intersection,
ultimately, that it is manifested even on the level of the
story's structure, in the way the story unfolds. With its
disruptions in time and narrative continuity, the story mirrors
the psychic energies of the narrator, wavering from
man to man in its focus, intertwining the individual threads of
their stories and lives in a manner that makes them
come to seem oddly inseparable, fused in a brotherly textual
knit. Promoting such healthy complicity, "Where I'm
Calling From" embodies and dramatizes our collective tendencies
to discover ourselves in the stories of others, and
to complicate other lives with our own as we collaborate toward
understanding, toward liberation from the
confinements that kill.

In "A Small, Good Thing" we find a similar coming together of

lives--rather more disparate lives, but with problems
no less serious. It is the story of a couple dealing with the
loss of a child, and of the consolation they find
eventually, haphazardly, in the company of a baker; it is a
story about the way fear and worry and grief can cause
people to break out of the habitual, insulating, self-
preoccupations of their lives, and about how the narratives of
others can cushion the violent unsettling such break-outs bring
on. As in "Where I'm Calling From," recovery
entails "listening," as characters enter briefly into the lives
of others through channels of verbal interaction. In this
story, however--perhaps because Ann and Howard Weiss, its
central figures, are simultaneously more stable and
more emotionally vulnerable than J. P. and his friend, and
because the story evokes a greater sense of affirmation
overall, despite its subject--the liberating aspects of
attentive listening are rather more noticeable. With a fullness
and optimism unequalled in any other story, Carver dramatizes
here what William Stull calls "talk that works" (11).
Carver provides here in essence an answer to the failures his
characters have been subject to all along, failures of
characters who, in stories in all of his books, talk and listen
with characteristically poor results. Corresponding to
this new fullness of possibility, the shape of the story itself
swells out to new proportions (revised from its
original form as "The Bath"), reflecting on the level of
narrative the kind of psychological and spiritual expansion
taking place within.

"So far," the unnamed narrator says of Howard Weiss, "he had
kept away from any real harm, from those forces he
knew existed and that could cripple or bring down a man if the
luck went bad, if things suddenly turned" (62). As
for J. P.'s friend, "luck" is important to Howard; its
capriciousness, he knows, dictates somehow over the details of
his world--has in fact allowed "forces" to insinuate themselves
into the placid interior of his life, forces manifesting
themselves after the initial blow in the ominous calls of the
baker. His insular bubble of security now on the point
of bursting, Howard remains sealed in his "car for a minute" in
the driveway, his leg beginning to "tremble" as he
considers the gravity of his circumstances. Trying to "deal with
the present situation in a rational manner" (62), his
motor control is suddenly as erratic as that of Frank Martin's
clients. Similarly affected, Ann's teeth begin to
"chatter" as fear takes her over, and as she realizes that she
and her husband are "into something now, something
hard" (70). Both Howard and his wife--like recovering
alcoholics--are afflicted by the physical consequences of
their dealings with an irrational, overpowering problem, in the
face of which rationality is useless. Thanks to a bit
of bad luck, their secure and self-enclosed familial world is
turned inside out.

As the focal figure of the story, Ann seems both more

preoccupied and more sensitive than her husband, not
necessarily because her parental (maternal) attachment to the
boy is greater than Howard's, but because she is
afforded more interior space in the story throughout. Thus,
despite the intensity of her preoccupation in their
days-long vigil, she momentarily glimpses the walls around her,
walls erected in the tide of catastrophe. "For the
first time," the narrator says, describing Ann's realization
after many hours in the hospital, "she felt they were
together in it, this trouble" (68). Realizing she has shut
herself off to everything but her son and his condition, she
acknowledges that she "hadn't let Howard into it, though he was
there and needed all along. She felt glad to be his
wife." If in a sense the disruptive force of calamity clarifies,
it also causes both Ann and her husband, hemmed in
now by fear and dread, to project outward as they seek respite
from confinement. Worry insulating them as
security had before, they stand staring "out at the parking
lot." They don't "say anything. But they seem...to feel
each other's insides now, as though the worry had made them
transparent in a perfectly natural way" (71). Their
interior state of affairs is "natural," of course, because it is
nature--and their powerlessness in the face of it--that
makes them transparent, that prompts them, fire-distilled now by
mutual concern, to gaze out the window the way
J. P. and his friend stare from the porch. After Scotty's death,
however, they will have to "get used to...being alone"
(82); soon they will have to readjust tensions in the marital
bond that have been for years filtered by their son's
presence. What was once a common refuge is suddenly no longer
available to them.

As in "Where I'm Calling From," the act of exchanging stories is

also a kind of refuge, though here it becomes an
even more compensatory one. Ann and Howard end up in a bakery,
giving up the oppressive environment of the
hospital--and a house full of painful momentoes--for a warmer,
more spacious setting. The narrative transaction
occurring in the bakery is for husband and wife the "restorative
measure" the doctor mistakenly diagnoses in
discussing Scotty's "very deep sleep"; at the hands of the baker
the Weisses are doctored as their son could not be.
Contrary to the situation of J. P. and his friend, recovery is
administered to them by a speaker who cannot
empathize with his listeners, a man as ironically unlike them as
anybody could be. "I don't have any children
myself," the baker tells Ann and Howard, "so I can only imagine
what you must be feeling" (87). Still, sparked by
his power to "imagine" their grief, he begins his tale of
"loneliness, and of...what it was like to be childless all these
years," offering them if nothing else at least the consolation
of knowing that they know what they are going to
miss. Thus husband and wife listen, and listening, enter the
baker's world--his story--to temporarily escape their
own. "They listened carefully," the narrator says, drawing
through repetition special attention to the act, "they
listened to what the baker had to say" (88).

Elsewhere in Cathedral, remarkably, hearing and listening are

treated in less optimistic terms: in "Careful," a man's
metaphorical deafness to the world is figured in the literal
blockage of his ear with wax; in "Vitamins," a similar if
more general kind of deafness finds its emblem in a dismembered,
dried-out human ear. But in other stories--in
"Fever" and "Where I'm Calling From," for instance--characters
indeed turn their ears to others, and come away
better for it. "I got ears," the blind man says in "Cathedral,"
affirming, in spite of his handicap, that "Learning never
ends" (222). In "Intimacy," one of Carver's last stories, a
fiction-writing narrator calls himself "all ears," exploring
both the idea of the writer as plunderer of experience (as
earlier, in "Put Yourself in My Shoes") and of the writer
as listener, as someone who, by listening carefully,
reconstructs memory and experience in order to reorder the
disorder of his past. In "A Small, Good Thing," more strikingly
than ever, telling and listening are beneficial,
recuperative activities. And yet what is crucial is not so much
the substance of the stories as it is the process of the
telling. "I was interested," J. P.'s friend says of J. P.'s
tale. "But I would have listened if he'd been going on about
how one day he'd decided to start pitching horseshoes" (132).
Enveloped similarly in the baker's tale, Ann and
Howard listen, escaping the still unthinkable reality of their
present circumstances by entering the far more stifling,
insulated life of their host, and thus they begin a slow journey
out of the darkness of grief. Though it is still dark
outside, it is "like daylight" inside the bakery; warmed by the
light and the ovens and the sweet rolls they eat, and
revived by shared compassion, Ann and Howard do "not think of
leaving."

The welcome light of possibility, finally, along with hopes if

not promises of self-regeneration, is reflected in the
shape of the story overall, which we have here in its revised
form; "A Small, Good Thing" is two-thirds again as
long as the original published version, "The Bath," and is the
longest story Carver ever collected. Like many stories
in Cathedral, which Carver describes as "fuller and more
interesting somehow" as well as "more generous," the
revised version of this story reflects part of an "opening up in
this book" which, as Carver says, is absent in "any
other of the books" (Interview 22). From the shadowy,
overdetermined world of "The Bath," where the tiny
enclosure of a bathtub provides a sole comfort for characters
("Fear made him want to take a bath," the original
narrator says of Howard), we traverse to the indoor daylight of
the bakery, where food and talk and commiseration
actually do make a difference, if not redeeming characters of
their miseries then consoling them at least, allowing
them to understand that loneliness and hardship and death are
part of the natural order of things, and that as people
they are not in it alone. Embodied in this "fuller" version of
the story, Carver's "opening up" suggests further the
very real extent to which style can wall an artist in--suggests
how as an artist Carver, like a few of his more
fortunate characters, is capable of breaking free of enclosing
environments, exchanging them not only for greater
capaciousness but, we must assume, for a new understanding of
himself and his craft as well.

In the title story, "Cathedral," the coming out of a self-

insulated figure is more dramatic than ever before, not
simply because he is more fully shut off than some but because,
like Meyers riding away from his son on a train to
nowhere, he is ignorant of the serious nature of his insularity.
Walled in by his own insecurities and prejudices, this
narrator is sadly out of touch with his world and with himself,
buffered by drink and pot and by the sad reality, as
his wife puts it, that he has no "friends." As are the figures
in "A Small, Good Thing" and "Where I'm Calling
From," however, he too is given an opportunity to emerge from
the strictures of self-enclosure, though here it is
not a story that opens him up but a more subtle nonverbal
transaction--an odd, unspoken communication between
him and his blind guest, Robert. And as is often the case in the
conversations of Carver's characters, talk fails him,
and yet his failure is more than made up for by the connection
he finally succeeds in making, by the self-liberating
results of his attempt.

Not surprisingly, this narrator lives in a narrow, sheltered

world. Like Howard and Ann, he is threatened abruptly
from without; the appearance of his wife's friend constitutes--
at the outset, at least--an invasion of his enclosed
existence. "h blind man in my house was not something I looked
forward to," he admits (209), and later adds, "Now
this same blind man was coming to sleep in my house" (212). His
territorial impulses, spurred on certainly by
insecurity, make for what Skenazy calls an "evening of polite
antagonism between the two men" (82). The
narrator's buried hostility, we suppose, is rooted in the blind
man's association with aspects of his wife's past and
of her independent nature in general--aspects that are
intimidating to him, not the least of which is her former
marriage, a subject with which he is obsessed. Simultaneously
fascinated by and reluctant to hear the blind man's
story ("my wife filled me in with more details than I cared to
know," he says; "I made a drink and sat at the kitchen
table to listen" [213]) he searches for himself indirectly in
his wife's relationship with Robert. Like J. P.'s friend,
this man's sense of a secure identity depends upon his bond with
a female, a bond he seems to need to see
perpetually reinforced--though, perturbed by his insensitivity,
his wife isn't about to give him the reinforcement he
craves. Referring to his wife's conversation with Robert in the
living room, he says, "I waited in vain to hear my
name on my wife's sweet lips" (218). His muddled search for
self, we guess, involves a continual gauging and
protecting of the autocratic status of his name. A year earlier,
listening to Robert's half of a taped conversation, he'd
been startled to hear his "own name in the mouth of [a]
stranger, this blind man" he did not know (212). Insistent
upon asserting his identity over his wife, therefore, he
blankets her past the way he has lately blanketed his
present--with insulating self-absorbency. Summing up her prior
life, he refers to his wife's ex-husband only as her
"officer," adding, Why should he have a name?" (211). He is no
ideal listener, having predicated the names and
stories of others under the subject of his own tyrannical yet
precarious identity: he listens for purposes of
self-validation, relegating the rest of experience--like
Robert's marriage--to a place "beyond [his] understanding"
(213).

It is fitting that Robert, the invader in the house, is

insulated only physically, left in the dark only by his
handicap.
Extremely outgoing--not to mention friendly--he has done "a
little of everything," from running a sales
distributorship to traveling in Mexico to broadcasting "ham
radio." His activities, unlike those of his host, bring him
out into the world, his booming voice having extended as far as
Alaska and Tahiti before making its way into the
narrator's home. Unlike the baker and J. P.--relatively
restrained men--Robert is characterized by the strength of his
personality, and he serves accordingly as the extra-durable
guide needed to pull his host out of his shell (though like
the Weisses, Robert, too, is dealing with grief, having just
lost his wife; "I know about skeletons," he says [223],
responding to the narrator's query regarding the TV). As the
narrator fails to describe the image he sees on
television, Robert listens, and having "listened" to failure,
takes charge of the situation. "Hey, listen to me," he
says, activated suddenly by his host's admission of verbal
impotence. "Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Why
don't you find us some heavy paper. And a pen. We'll do
something. We'll draw one together. Get us a pen and
some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff" (226). Robert's
initiative in the matter of the narrator's failings, not to
mention the remedy he employs in general, suggests that verbal
handicaps--and the larger problems they are
symptoms of--are debilitating as blindness (stemming as they do
from the willed blindness of ignorance, oversight).
Robert's handling of the situation, finally, suggests that
handicaps are first and foremost challenges to overcome.

"[M]ost of the communication in this story," writes Michael

Vander Weel, in reference to the joint project of the
drawing, "comes through shared non-verbal work, as expression
that stops short of the effort and commonality of
speech" (120). Indeed, as Irving Howe observes, the drawing of
the cathedral is a "gesture of fraternity" that, like
the meal preceding it, establishes solid contact between the men
and in turn nudges the narrator temporarily out of
his self-contained world (43). The subject of their mutual
efforts--the cathedral--as a symbol represents a kind of
common humanity and benevolence, and of human patience and
fortitude, in the process of "a-spiring."(3)
Curiously enough, it is within the walls of the cathedral that
the narrator ultimately ends up. "I was in my house,"
he says at the end of the story, his eyes still tightly closed--
bringing to mind the "box" he drew when he and Robert
began, something that "could have been the house [he] lived in"
(227). What begins as an enclosing spatial
configuration of his home--and present level of awareness, we
assume--gradually swells in proportion to become
something far more spacious than what he started with, something
with interior depths as enlightening to him as
bakeries and bedrooms are comforting to others.

"I didn't feel like I was inside anything," he says (228),

unwilling still to open his eyes. While Meyers "close[s] his
eyes," alternately, to whatever encroaches on his personal
life--his voluntary blindness as bad as Lloyd's deafness
in its turn--the narrator of "Cathedral" finds not escape but
sanctuary within self-confinement, his sanctuary
existing, by virtue of hip, closed eyes, within that inner
vestibule of self, where selfishness gives way at last to
self-awareness. A man obsessed with the faculty of vision
("Imagine," he says earlier of Robert's wife, "a woman
who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her
loved one" [213]), he clings to a miraculous glimpse
of a world beyond the borders of his insular life, blinding
himself voluntarily to the distracting reality of his former
world. The profundity of his new awareness staggers him; "It was
like nothing else in my life up to now," he says,
and adds, in the story's final sentence, "It's really
something." The indefiniteness of his language--he is usually a
little more glib than he is here--expresses the sheer
incomprehensibility of his revelation, and the fact that he
registers it as such. He experiences "depths of feeling," as
Saltzman calls them, that only a few enlightened
characters in Cathedral experience, feelings that he "need not
name to justify" (154). The changes working in him
are not unlike those "impossible changes" Ralph Wyman undergoes
in "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?," where
even more pronounced tensions of jealousy, possessiveness, and
self-preoccupation are vented finally in human
contact. Just as Ann Weiss wants "her words to be her own" after
the death of her child, seeking out a personal
vocabulary of grief, this narrator reaches for words weighty
enough to fit his experience, and, failing gloriously in
that, settles for indefinites. Impossibly changed, reduced to
semi-inarticulateness, he keeps his eyes fastened shut,
wavering between self-awareness and habitual existence in a new
and newly-spacious enclosure; he is "no longer
inside himself," as Skenazy writes, "if not quite outside, no
longer alone, if not quite intimate" (83).

Naturally, this coming out is mirrored by rhetoric of the story.

Early on in the story, the narrator feels momentarily
"sorry for the blind man," his insulated hardness beginning to
soften. As the walls of his resentment noticeably
crack, he watches with "admiration" as Robert eats, recognizing
Robert's handicap to be no impairment to his
performance at the dinner table. The tonal shift in the final
sequence of the story--marked by a kind of mild
ethereality flooding the last lines--illustrates on the
rhetorical level the opening up the narrator has undergone, and,
certainly, is yet to undergo. Like Robert, who is on a journey
by train, dropping in on friends and relatives, trying
to get over the loss of his wife, the narrator is also on a
journey, one signalled by signposts in his language and
played out by the events of the story he tells. His
destination--as are the destinations for all of Carver's
travellers,
whether they leave home or not--is necessarily a confining one.
But it is also a destination where one's sense of
shared confinement makes for heretofore-unknown freedoms.
"What's a cathedral without people?" Robert asks,
bidding his host to add a touch of humanity to the drawing, to
"put some people in there" (227). Approaching his
destination, the narrator begins to realize just how
exhilarating confinement can be, once one sees beyond the
narrow enclosure of self that larger, more expansive enclosure
of society. He begins to sense, as did perhaps the
builders who toiled for years to raise the cathedrals they would
never see--people who were, as Robert says, "no
different than the rest of us" (224)--he begins to sense, the
warmth of the blind man's touch still vibrating in his
hand, that we are all in this together, and that that really is
something.

Carver wrote "Cathedral" on a train, writing in his cabin during

a transcontinental journey from Seattle to New
York.(4) Enclosed in tight quarters, rubbing shoulders with all
kinds of people, heading somewhere in a hurry: the
writing environment seems an appropriate one, considering the
story--and the volume of stories-which was to
come of that ride. "It was a different kind of story for me, no
question," he explains in his preface to Where I'm
Calling From. "Somehow I had found another direction I wanted to
move toward. And I moved. And quickly" (i).
Reflecting the process of his "opening up," Carver is in this
collection definitely going somewhere in a hurry; in
Cathedral, as in no other volume of his stories, characters
connect with one another, however briefly, and as a result
of their connections come away changed. Such momentary
connections, of course, do not reflect the tone of the
book as a whole. Most of the stories--"The Compartment" or "The
Train," say, ironically stories about people on
trains--are slightly fuller explorations, or re-explorations, of
Carver's old familiar territory, reimmersions into
tableaux where human proximity not only provides no real
connection but also alienates, with disconnectedness
and alienation coming hand-in-hand as end-products of
insularity, terminal self-enclosure. In these stories, as well
as in the lighter ones, Carver suggests that life hemmed in
rigidly by walls is a hard life indeed--suggests, contrary
to Meyers's observation, that this is perhaps not "a good way to
live," this having a ticket to ride and no idea
where one is going, no connection with one's fellow travellers.

As Irving Howe notes, the stories of this volume "draw upon the
American voice of loneliness and stoicism, the
native soul locked in this continent's space" (42). While in
rare moments we find characters transcending the
fettered states of soul by means of smaller, personal
unfetterings of self, such moments do not deny the "locked"
status of the characters in general, or the darker implications
of Carver's vision overall. Still, Carver implies, it is
through our collaboration with others that we free ourselves
from the slavery of self-absorption. We see in these
stories that compassion, as well as stoicism, is a prerequisite
not just of happiness but of survival, and that while
confinement may be the precondition of many lives there is still
a good deal of freedom available within it--freedom
which becomes tangible only when it is recognized for what it
is. In this sense the stories of Cathedral are on a par
with those that Carver and Jenks praise as editors of American
Short Story Masterpieces, stories which have, as
they say, "the ambition of enlarging our view of ourselves and
the world" (xiii)--enlarging us as readers, that is, both
in the sense of expanding and setting us free.

NOTES

1 For a brilliant narratological and stylistic analysis of this

story see Verley.

2 See also Carver's later story "Elephant" (Where I'm Calling

From), in which a reformed alcoholic refers to his
drinking days, and his vision of an alcoholic relapse, as "rock
bottom."

3 For this coinage I am indebted to Lonnquist.

4 This bit of information I gleaned in a conversation with Tess

Gallagher, who refutes Carver's assertion in his
preface to Where I'm Calling From that "[a]fter a good night's
sleep, [he] went to [his] desk and wrote the story
'Cathedral.'"

WORKS CITED

Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. New York: Random House, 1984.

--. Interview. Saturday Review. Sep-Oct 1983: 21-22.

-- and Tom Jenks. Introduction. American Short Story

Masterpieces. New York: Delacorte, 1987.

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

--. Where I'm Calling From. 1st edition. Franklin Center, PA:
Franklin Library, 1988.

--. Will You Be Quiet. Please? New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977.

Howe, Irving. "Stories of Our Loneliness." New York Times Book

Review. 11 Sep 1983: 42-43.

Lonnquist, 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, IL: Western Illinois University, 1987.
142-50.

Saltzman, Arthur. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: U of

South Carolina P, 1988.

Skenazy, Paul. "Life in Limbo: Raymond Carver's Fiction."

Enclitic 11(0000): 00-00.

Stull, William. "Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond

Carver." Philological Quarterly 64 (1985): 1-15.

Verley, Claudine. "Narration and Interiority in Raymond Carver's

'Where I'm Calling From.'" Journal of the Short
Story in English 13 (1989): 91-102.

Weele, Michael Vander. "Raymond Carver and the Language of

Desire." Denver Quarterly 22 (1987): 00-000.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further

reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

Тамара Боголепова
ТРИ ЖИЗНИ РАЙМОНДА КАРВЕРА

Раймонд Карвер, один из самых читаемых в последние десятилетия американских

писателей, незадолго до конца своей короткой жизни любил говорить: "Я
счастливый человек. Мне удалось прожить две жизни." Карвер приводил при этом
точную дату завершения своей "первой" жизни и начала "второй": 2 июня 1977
года.
День этот для Карвера был одновременно страшным и знаменательным. 2 июня
1977 года Раймонд Карвер, уже сравнительно известный поэт и писатель, после
очередного запоя впал в состояние мозговой комы: "Я словно очутился на дне
очень глубокого колодца," - вспоминал он позднее. Врачам удалось вернуть
Карвера к жизни, а он с того дня ни разу не выпил ни капли спиртного.
"Вторая" жизнь Карвера длилась недолго, всего 11 лет. 2 августа 1988 годв он умер
от рака легкого. Но даже зная свой страшный диагноз (в США врачи всегда ставят
пациентов в известность о характере заболевания), зная, что времени остается
совсем мало, он не уставал повторять своим друзьям и близким: "Каждый день я
чувствую на себе благословение божие. Каждый день я не устаю благодарить
судьбу. Каждый день я чувствую радостное изумление от того, как у меня все
теперь устроилось."
Действительно, во "второй" своей жизни Карвер обрел много больше, чем в
"первой": к нему пришла и заслуженная слава, и настоящая любовь, и
материальное благополучие. И, самое главное, - его творческий потенциал не
только не иссяк, но, напротив, блестяще реализовался в нескольких книгах
рассказов: "Так о чем мы говорим, когда говорим о любви" (1981), "Собор" (1983),
"Откуда я взываю" (1988), в поэтических сборниках "Где вода сливается с другой
водою" (1985), "Ультрамарин" (1988), "Новая тропинка к водопаду", в сценарии к
фильму "Достоевский".
Но, говоря о полноте счастья, испытанной им в конце жизненного пути, Карвер
никогда не зачеркивал своей "первой" жизни - ведь этот этап его писательской
судьбы был для него тяжелой. но очень большой школой, в которой ему пришлось
учиться с самого рождения.
Раймонд Карвер родился 25 мая 1938 года в небольшом городке Клэтскени (штат
Орегон) на Северо-Западе США. Детство его прошло в Якиме (штат Вашингтон),
где, как и во многих других городах американского Северо-Запада, сосредоточена
лесная и деревообрабатывающая промышленность. В Якиме отцу Карвера удалось
найти место заточника пил. Доходы семьи были невелики, поэтому Раймонду
после окончания средней школы в 1956 году не удалось продолжить образования.
Подобно многим американским писателям-классикам, он оказался перед
необходимостью зарабатывать себе на хлеб тяжелым трудом.
К концу 50-х годов Карвер все острее осознает в себе тягу к литературному
творчеству и в 1961 году приезжает в Калифорнию. Только через десять лет ему
удается издать первые сборники стихов: "Зимняя бессонница" (1970), "Лосось
выплывает ночью" (1976) и опубликовать рассказы ("Поставь себя на мое место",
1974).
Калифорния с ее свободой нравов, терпимостью к любому проявлению
эксцентричности и увлечением художественными экспериментами в годы подъема
молодежного движения становится западной "Меккой" американских
нонконформистов (восточной был Нью-Йорк). "Улицы кишмя кишели головными
повязками, широкополыми шляпами, амулетами, мокасинами, римскими
сандалиями и кожаной бахромой, свисающей с каждого жилета или куртки," -
вспоминает о Сан-Франциско тех лет, этой штаб-квартире контркультуры,
литератор Джим Хьюстон, знавший Карвера в калифорнийский период его жизни.
Карвер с его суровой северо-западной закваской, похожий на "застенчивого
медведя", даже внешне не очень-то вписывался в калифорнийский стиль жизни -
даже внешне. Тот же Хьюстон отмечает, что Карвер одевался совсем не так, как
многие представители богемы Сан-Франциско: "На нем были черные брюки и
белая рубашка, он выглядел бы совсем консервативно, если бы и то и другое не
было сильно измято". И все же Калифорния, этот живописный, шумный и пестрый
"сумасшедший дом" Америки (вспомните известную песню "Отель Калифорния")
увлекает Карвера в водоворот и хаос своей жизни.
Он поселяется неподалеку от Сан-Франциско сначала в городке Арката, затем - в
Купертино вместе с женой Мэриан и двумя детьми. Но отношения в семье
становились все более напряженными: возможно, оттого что они поженились
совсем рано, после окончания школы, где были одноклассниками, возможно, из-за
несходства характеров, а скорее всего - от трудных материальных условий, не
дававших Карверу сосредоточиться на творчестве, развивали раздражительность и
стремление отвлечься от повседневных забот с помощью крепких напитков. Не
отставала от него в этом и Мэриан.
Но, несмотря на все неблагополучные обстоятельства калифорнийского периода,
Карвер продолжал писать и делал все, чтобы усовершенствовать свое мастерство.
Он много и жадно читал, с увлечением учился на писательских курсах.
Очень большую роль в его биографии сыграла встреча с выдающимся
американским романистом 60-70-х годов Джоном Гарднером (1933-1982), который
руководил работой писательской студии в колледже ґико в начале 60-х годов.
Именно Гарднер познакомил начинающего новеллиста Карвера с именами и
произведениями многих великих мастеров этого жанра: "На занятиях он всегда
упоминал о писателях, чьи имена были мне незнакомы: о Конраде, Портер, Бабеле,
ґехове," - вспоминал Раймонд Карвер. Гарднер внимательно относился ко всему
написанному слушателями студии, но особенно заметный интерес вызывало у него
то, что делал Карвер. Гарднер не патронировал начинающего автора, но сумел дать
ему необходимые советы и внушить веру в его писательское призвание. "Хороший
литературный учитель," - любил повторять Карвер, - "как твоя литературная
совесть," - и прибавлял, что Гарднер и был для него как раз таким учителем.
Поэтому известие о трагической гибели Джона Гарднера в 1982 году для Карвера,
как и для многих других писателей его поколения, стало тяжелым ударом: "Я
тоскую о нем больше, чем могу выразить словами," - говорил он, вернувшись с
похорон Гарднера.
Во многом благодаря Гарднеру к Карверу пришла любовь к русской литературе - к
творчеству Тургенева, Толстого-новеллиста, и особенно к ґехову. Рассказы
Карвера, где даны краткие, немногословные зарисовки обыденной жизни, критики
почти всегда сравнивают с рассказами ґехова, а самого Карвера нередко называют
"американским ґеховым". Сам Карвер не раз говорил о своем восхищении
мастерством ґехова, о чувстве внутреннего родства, которое он испытывает, читая
ґехова или о нем. Последний рассказ "Поручение", написанный Карвером для
своего, последнего же, сборника, - это рассказ о смерти ґехова.
Вероятно, это еще одно свидетельство того огромного значения, которое
принадлежало ґехову в творческой жизни американского писателя.
Проза Карвера с первой же фразы поражает простотой и отсутствием какой бы то
ни было замысловатости. Краткие реплики, которыми обмениваются его
персонажи, состоят из самых ходовых слов и выражений в речи современных
американцев. Рассказы Карвера в оригинале - превосходный источник
американской разговорной лексики для тех, кто хотел бы научиться беседовать, а
не "изъясняться с представителями основной массы населения этой страны".
Сюжеты карверовских рассказов, повествующих о самых заурядных житейских
делах: семейных радостях или, напротив, ссорах между супругами, потере работы,
переезде из одного города в другой, дорожных происшествиях или распродаже
ставшего ненужным домашнего скарба, - тоже не отличаются особой
занимательностью или оригинальностью. Потому так часто рецензенты и
литературные обозреватели в США и других странах определяли творчество
Карвера термином "минимализм", имея в виду его сходство с художественным
течением, развившимся в музыке, живописи и литературе с конца 70-х годов.
Минималисты тяготели к ясности смысла, лаконизму и даже скупости
выразительных средств, к отказу от всякого рода декоративности, предпочитая
нечто подобное знаменитому "телеграфному стилю" Хемингуэя - кстати, одного из
любимых писателей Карвера. Действительно, предельная сдержанность
художественной палитры Карвера, сосредоточенность на житейской прозе делают
его творчество близким манере "минималистов", впрочем, как и произведениям
"неореализма" (просьба не путать с итальянским неореализмом 1950-х годов) или
же "грязного реализма" - еще одного течения 70-80-х годов, к которому относили
Карвера другие критики.
Но, как это всегда бывает с большими художниками, масштаб и суть их творчества
трудно измерить с помощью тех или иных терминов. "Как бы ни пытались это
делать, сама тайна произведений Карвера остается нетронутой," - справедливо
замечает талантливая американская поэтесса Тэсс Галлахер, литературный
соратник и вдова Раймонда Карвера.
В самом деле, простые, будничные истории и отношения, о которых повествует
Карвер, завораживают своей глубиной, недосказанностью и загадочностью не
меньше, чем самый закрученный детектив.
О чем хотел поведать нам Карвер в новелле "Ванна", одной из четырех, которые
читатель сможет прочесть на страницах этого альманаха? О хрупкости
человеческой, особенно детской, жизни, которая оказывается под угрозой даже от
сравнительно "легкого" столкновения с движущимся автотранспортом? О силе
инерции повседневного существования, которая даже при таком потрясении, как
тяжелая мозговая травма сынишки, все равно влияет на поведение любящих его
родителей, заставляя их вновь и вновь мечтать о горячей ванне для себя как о
главном жизненном удовольствии (что и вправду весьма типично для
американцев)? Или речь идет о том, что никакая катастрофа не может остановить
течения жизни?
Этот рассказ о несчастном случае, который произошел с мальчиком по дороге в
школу в день его рождения, и о том, как переживали это несчастье его родители,
рождает много вопросов. Отвечать на них каждый читатель будет по-своему,
потому что у каждого из нас - свой опыт и своя реакция на происходящее в жизни,
но и потому еще, что подтекст прозы Карвера, как и у ґехова, и у Хемингуэя,
неисчерпаем, и более всего - потому, что Карвер, подобно своим
предшественникам, не торопится подсказать нам один единственный верный ответ
и вряд ли сам уверен, что знает его.
Вглядываясь в обычную жизнь людей с более чем скромным достатком, так
хорошо знакому ему самому, Карвер вовсе не бесстрастен, хотя и пристрастным
его тоже не назовешь. Он умеет передать озабоченность теми симптомами
духовного неблагополучия, которые он называл "эрозией" человеческих
отношений: распад семейных связей, усиливающееся отчуждение и одиночество,
формальность контактов даже между самыми близкими людьми (как в рассказах,
публикующихся в настоящем издании: "Кое-что напоследок", "ґто не танцуете?"
и в некоторых других из того же сборника "Так о чем мы говорим, когда говорим о
любви"), атрофия чувств и вялость эмоциональных реакций, открывающая дорогу
цинизму и насилию (рассказы "О чем мы говорим. когда говорим о любви?", "Как
же много воды вокруг", "Скажи женщинам - мы идем" из того же сборника и
новеллы, вошедшие в другие книги, изданные в разные годы). Вновь и вновь
фиксируя эти опасные проявления рутинного существования, Раймонд Карвер,
умеющий подметить и страшное, и смешное, вовсе не стремится "обличить",
"разоблачить" или сразить своих персонажей убийственной иронией, столь
хароактерной для литературы постмодернизма - особенно для тех, кого называют
"черными юмористами". Позиция Карвера-повествователя - меньше всего позиция
судьи или "ликующего нигилиста", по выражению Гарднера; Скорее он ощущает
себя одним из тех, о ком рассказывает, потому за внешней невозмутимостью и
видимой сдержанностью интонации угадывается тревога, горечь или сочувствие.
Франсуа Лакэн, один из переводчиков прозы Карвера на французский язык,
признавался, что когда он увидел фотографию писателя с характерным для него
серьезным, внимательным и добрым выражением лица, он понял, что совершил
непростительную ошибку: "Я перевел его книгу в ироническом тоне, а человек на
фотографии никогда бы не поставил себя выше своих персонажей." И Лакэн
перевел книгу заново.
Рассказы Карвера зовут людей к размышлению об общих бедах и неурядицах, к
поискам пути выхода из духовного кризиса и депрессии. Этот путь вовсе не
представляется писателю ясным и очевидным. Во всяком случае, он явно не
склонен искать выход в сфере социальных потрясений, хотя о необходимости
решения социальных проблем на основе более радикальных и продуманных
программ оздоровления экономических и общественных отношений, чем в годы
пребывания у власти республиканцев во главе с Рейганом, он охотно говорил и
писал в конце жизни. В рассказах Карвера, созданных в это время, намечается
кроме того и еще одно средство лечения эрозии человеческих отношений, которое
вновит в его творчество "особенно яркие проблески надежды." Это заметно в
рассказах "Видоискатель", "О чем мы говорим, когда говорим о любви", "К нему
все пристало" (сборник "О чем мы говорим, когда говорим о любви"), "Лихорадка"
и особенно - "Собор" из одноименного сборника, где из шелухи повседневности,
отупляющей стереотипности бытовых условий, беспросветной разобщенности,
словно величественный храм, где люди, собравшись вместе, могут устремляться
душой к самым высоким идеалам, вырастает убежденность в нетленности таких
ценностей, как любовь, взаимопонимание, помощь в беде и радость
сопричастности самому чуду бытия, каким бы сложным и грустным оно порой ни
было.
"Писать и оставаться добрым" назывался документальный телефильм режиссера
Джин Уокиншо о Карвере, впервые показанный по седьмому каналу телевидения
США осенью 1993 года. Название этого фильма как нельзя более точно определяет
суть творческого кредо Раймонда Карвера, чья смерть хоть и была безвременной,
не смогла прервать его писательской биографии. Потому, что настоящий писатель,
как и всякий большой художник, живет в созданных им творениях.
"Третья жизнь" замечательного американского писателя ХХ века Раймонда
Карвера у него на родине полнокровна и разнообразна. После того августовского
дня в 1988 году, когда он был похоронен на тихом кладбище маленького городка
Порт-Анжелес в штате Вашингтон, куда вместе со своей второй женой Тэсс
Гэллахер он вернулся в начале 80-х годов и где был так счастлив среди зеленых
полей, густых лесов и чистых горных рек Северо-Запада, только в одном
издательстве "Вантэдж"вышли десять книг его рассказов и стихов, которые
быстро разошлись тиражом в полмиллиона экземпляров - цифра для "не самой
читающей страны" огромная. Особенно популярны были сборники "О чем мы
говорим, когда говорим о любви" и "Откуда я взываю"; последний авторы
литературных обзоров окрестили "величайшим хитом Карвера".
Творчество Карвера изучается на уроках литературы в школах, составляет
непременную часть университетских курсов, посвященных современной
американской словесности. Герои прозы Карвера впервые появились и на
киноэкранах: в 1993 году вышел большой трехчасовой фильм известного
режиссера Роберта Олтмана "Срезая Углы" (Short Cuts), в том же году завоевавший
приз "За лучший фильм" на кинофестивале в Венеции. Одна за другой появились
книги отзывов и воспоминаний о Карвере: "Когда мы говорим о Карвере" под
редакцией Сэма Халперта (1991) и "Вспоминая Рэя: коллективная биография"
(редакторы Уильям Стэл и Морин Кэррол, 1993) - среди них. В создании
последней, как прежде - в подготовке к печати поздних произведений Карвера,
принимала большое участие Тэсс Гэллахер, "добрый гений" его "второй жизни".
Слава Карвера растет и за пределами Соединенных Штатов. Его произведения
переведены более чем на двадцать языков, в том числе - и на русский. Первое
знакомство отечественного читателя с карверовской прозой состоялось за год до
его смерти, в 1987 году, когда в серии "Библиотека "Иностранной литературы""
вышел сборник рассказов "Собор" под редакцией А.М.Зверева. Нынешняя
публикация четырех рассказов Раймонда Карвера в переводе Ивана Ющенко,
первая на Дальнем Востоке - продолжение этого приятного знакомства, которое,
будем надеяться, на этом не завершится.
Опубликовано в журнале:
«Иностранная литература» 2005, №7

Реймонд Карвер[1]

От редакции

Реймонд Карвер (1938-1988) - американский поэт и новеллист, автор четырех сборников стихов и нескольких
сборников рассказов, его творчество отмечено на родине писателя многими литературными премиями.

Реймонд Карвер родился в штате Орегон, в семье лесоруба, он самостоятельно выбивался в люди, прошел
суровую жизненную школу - работал рассыльным, ночным сторожем, оператором на бензоколонке, санитаром
в больнице. Поступив в Калифорнийский университет, Карвер посещал и писательские курсы, которыми
руководил Джон Гарднер. Известный романист поддержал в самом начале пути талантливого дебютанта,
мечтавшего «создавать мир из слов».

Первый же сборник рассказов «Не будете ли вы так добры помолчать?» (1976) принес Карверу заслуженный
успех. Рецензенты отмечали скупость и точность языковых средств, тонкий психологизм молодого автора,
его умение задеть читателя за живое, «растревожить его». За первым сборником последовали другие.
Карверу ставили в заслугу возрождение интереса к короткому рассказу в англоязычной литературе, даже
называли самым значительным со времен Хемингуэя мастером этого жанра. Да и сам Карвер воспринимал
Хемингуэя как своего учителя. А еще он не раз говорил о своем внутреннем сродстве с Чеховым. С великим
русским классиком сравнивали Карвера и американские критики, считая, что того и другого писателя
роднит внимание к маленькому человеку, к драмам и «скучным историям» повседневной жизни, а также
«любовь к недоговоренности».

Стихи Карвер начал писать гораздо раньше, чем рассказы. Но первое его стихотворение увидело свет только
в 1984 году, а в 1985 году вышел первый сборник стихов - «Там, где вода встречается с водою», - сразу же
удостоенный премии журнала «Поэтри».

«Его стихи, - писал критик журнала «Нью-Йорк тайм», - это очищенные, отфильтрованные, более
концентрированные версии его рассказов, они позволяют нам, бросив всего лишь мимолетный взгляд, увидеть
точный срез обыденной жизни в ее критический, переломный момент».

«Читаешь стихи Карвера и понимаешь, что этот человек пережил больше, чем многие из нас» - таково
суждение обозревателя журнала «Поэтри».

Произведения Карвера переведены на двадцать языков.

Первое знакомство русского читателя с одним из самых тонких мастеров американской прозы состоялось в
1987 году, еще при жизни «американского Чехова», - в «Библиотеке журнала «Иностранная литература»
вышел сборник его рассказов «Собор». Составитель и автор предисловия - Алексей Зверев.

В этом номере журнала мы впервые представляем русскому читателю Карвера - поэта.

Моя ворона

На дерево под моим окном села ворона.

Чья она? Теда Хьюза, Галвея,

 Фроста, Пастернака, Лорки?

Одна из Гомеровых птиц плотоядных?

Нет. Просто - ворона,

Которая так и не пригодилась

Никому из поэтов.

Она посидела пару минут.

Поточила о ветку клюв и

Улетела из моей жизни.

(Далее см. бумажную версию)

[1] © 1984, 1985, 1986 by Raymond Carver

TALKING ABOUT THE PROCEDURES OF RAYMOND

CARVER
Ricardo Sobreira1[1]

To win?
To lose?
What for, if the world will forget us anyway.

Raymond Carver [1938 – 1988]

The aim of this essay is to discuss and analyze some strategies used by the late American
writer Raymond Carver in his short story “A Small, Good Thing”, as an innovatory manner of
expanding the suspense of the story. What contributes to this achievement is the minimalist
structure of the narrative, the usage of several elements and images and also the unusual
focalization as a kind of aesthetic dialog with the cinematographic language.
I will begin by briefly examining some information about the author’s biography as well
as some aspects of his work and its aesthetic procedures:

Raymond Carver is acknowledged by the literary critics as one of the most inventive
postmodern writers. His writing is straightforward, stark and destitute of sentimentality.
Basically, he did not concede any space to language ornamentation or figures of speech. His
characters are antiheroic, emblematic and depressed people. They take part in quick and almost
abrupt stories, in which a little conflict is “fought” and, then, they unpredictably end, as in his
famous short stories “So Much Water So Close To Home”, “What We Talk About When We
1[1]
Ricardo Sobreira is a Brazilian student and an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher at CCAA – Centro
de Cultura Anglo-americana, one of the most important English schools in Brazil.
Talk About Love”, “Tell The Women We’re Going”, “Where I’m Calling From”, just to cite a
few.

Talking about A Small, Good Thing

In one of his most important short stories, “A Small, Good Thing”, Raymond Carver was
able to create psychologically rich characters in a very accurate way. This story deals with
subject matters intrinsically related to our human condition and our contingencies like, for
instance, the fear of the death, the sensation of powerlessness before the violence, the cruelty and
the incommunicability of the human being, as well as dwells on the importance and the meaning
of affection, of communion among the people in these chaotic days we have been living.
The version of the short story “A Small, Good Thing” encompassed in the collections
“Where I’m Calling From” and “Short Cuts” is a revision of two previous attempts. One of these
previous versions, “The Bath”, was awarded a few prizes, but in it, the author did not seem to
explore all the dramatic potentialities of the narrative. Therefore, “A Small Good Thing”
represents a phase of aesthetic maturity in the style of the writer. If in “The Bath”, Raymond
Carver creates characters and situations that are almost schematic, generating, thus, a lurid and
gloomy atmosphere, in “A Small Good Thing”, on the other hand, he intensifies his humanist
realism, producing a more complex portrayal of his characters. But before turning to a closer
examination of that, we must remember some of the facts and tensions present in the story:

Ann Weiss, a young and joyful mother, drives to a bakery and orders a cake. Then the
baker, a very impolite man, writes down her order and her phone number. But before the party
can be celebrated, Scotty, the birthday boy, is knocked down by a car. His parents, Ann and
Howard Weiss, go immediately to the hospital and powerlessly watch him die. Meanwhile, the
baker, as he is an evil entity, makes phone calls to the Weiss, reproaching them because they did
not pick the cake.
As the baker does not tell them who he really is, the parents get really scared and even
think that the man who keeps phoning them is the same “psychopath” who knocked over Scotty.
Only after Scotty’s death, Ann comes to know that the phone calls had being made by the rude
baker. So the angry and frightened parents stop by the bakery and tell the baker they could not
pick the cake because Scotty had died. Then they rebuke him so fiercely that he realizes how
cruel his acts were. He feels so sorry that he asks them to forgive him and says that he used to be
a different kind of human being years ago, but now he was just a baker. After that, he serves
them some of his delicious rolls, and says, “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this” (404).

It is interesting the fact that, according to what I have already pointed out, another version
of this story had been published in the book “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”
and it is entitled “The Bath”. Nevertheless, it focalizes more intensively the human brutality and
uncertainty. The characters of “The Bath” are unnamed. Except for the mother, Ann, the other
characters are just referred to as the boy, the father, the dog, etc. These characters seem to be
undefined, permanently locked in individual spheres, what turns the narrative into something
sketchy and impersonal. “The Bath” is shorter because, as it dwells on the anguished feelings, it
ends when Ann gets home for the first time after Scotty’s accident, the telephone is ringing and
when she answers it, she hears a voice say: “It’s ready”. Though the language used in “The
Bath” is more straightforward, even laconic and filled with symbolic images, “A Small, Good
Thing”, the expanded version, deals more deeply with the question of the human situation,
absolving the baker from his nonfigurative condition of “evil force” and transforming him into a
man devastated by his personal flop.
The characters of “A Small, Good Thing” represent the so-called North-American working
class. A good example of it being Ann Weiss, the housewife; her husband, Howard, the
businessman, and, above all, the baker, who at the ending of the story reveals all his bitterness
because of his frustration in a country like the United States, where the progress and the triumph
seem to be the only acceptable parameter. Although Carver was not an effusively politicized
writer, it is clear that this specific character, the baker, symbolizes in an almost Kafkaesque
manner, the submission of a man to the capitalist system, and depicts an almost palpable drama
played by the blue-collar class.
The predominant feeling among the characters of “A Small, Good Thing”, as well as
among the people of the real world nowadays, is a considerable incommunicability: In the
beginning of the story, the mother tries to be gentle to the baker, but she gives up soon in face of
his extreme rudeness. It can be exemplified by the following fragment, which also serves as a
concept to the minimalist aesthetic:

The baker was not jolly. There were no pleasantries between them,
just the minimum exchange of words, the necessary information.
(376)

After the moment when Scotty is run over, the despair of his parents increases because the
boy does not come to consciousness and the doctors and nurses seem to be incapable or
unwilling to talk to Ann and Howard about the real situation of the kid. In an institution that is
supposed to protect lives, what they find is the total disregard for human beings. Dr. Francis, for
example, in opposition to his patient, looks healthier and healthier every day, and he gives
laconic answers every time he is asked about the child’s condition:

Howard waited. He looked at the doctor.

“No, I don’t want to call it a coma,” the doctor said and glanced
over at the boy once more. “He’s just in a very deep sleep (...) He’s
out of any real danger, I’d say that for certain, yes”. (383)

Therefore, all the conflicts in “A Small, Good Thing” are a result of the extreme
incommunicability the characters experience. The fragmentation of the reality and, consequently,
the failures during the communication process are the main factors that trigger the hostility
depicted in the story: right after the moment Scotty is hit by a car, he stands up, feeling a little
dizzy, and hears his friend ask “what it felt like to be hit by a car” (378). Thus, the resentment
triggered by such unsociability is also implicit in the attitude of a nurse who enters Scotty’s room
and, without even saying a word to the parents, starts to draw off blood from the child’s arm.
When asked by the parents, the woman precariously explains:

“Doctor’s orders,” the young woman said. “I do what I’m told.

They say draw that one, I draw” (386)

The usage of the demonstrative pronoun “that” by the nurse in her statement promote the
disembodiment of the human being. “That” is a word that is syntactically used to refer to
something or someone that is away from the speaker. By doing so, she implies that Scotty is just
another patient, just another meaningless thing to the structure of the health system.
Ironically, the baker, though in an atrocious manner, is the only one who interrogates the
problem of Scotty’s existence because he sets off the process of reification of the characters and
their relationships. Metonymically through the birthday cake, he calls the other characters’ (and,
subsequently, the reader’s) attention to the subject of the personality of the boy. But while he
seems to be trying to humanize and “revitalize” Scotty, the life of the child is slowly fading
away. This hypothesis becomes evident in the following fragment of the narrative in which Ann
leaves the hospital and, feeling so guilty in an “obscure way” for what happened to her son, she
hears the phone ring and, when she answers it, the voice says:
 “Scotty,” the man’s voice said. “It’s about Scotty, yes. It has to do
with Scotty, that problem. Have you forgotten about Scotty?” the
man said. Then he hung up. (392)

Given the happenings of the text and the tension experienced by the characters, the baker
acts like a destabilizing entity in the story. As Ann and Howard are too perturbed by their child’s
condition and the fact that they do not know who is making the phone calls contributes to a sort
of disembodiment of the mysterious man who keeps tormenting them on the other side of the
line. Therefore, the baker proceeds as an evil force, a wicked being that intrudes on the most
unexpected moments of the story to stir up their panic and, indirectly, make them blame
themselves for having neglected the boy.
Such moments of tenseness appear randomly in the text through the utilization of some
strategies to expand the suspense like, for instance, the insertion of narrative “ramifications”
parallel to the main plot. This narrative device is known as anticlimax because it delays the
ending of the central story. Thus, the narrator, in cuts that recall the cinematographic language,
dislocate the reader’s attention to additional narrative elements, postponing and causing a greater
expectation for the conclusion of the short story.
What contributes to the generation of the anticlimax in “A Small, Good Thing” is the
inclusion of the drama experienced by a Negro family that is waiting for their son who is in the
operation table. Ann realizes that those people were “in the same kind of waiting she was in” (391)
because Franklin, the black boy in the operation table, though innocent, was hurt by an external
agent, just like Scotty was; that is, their stories had gone through similar ruptures:

He said, “Our Franklin, he’s on the operation table. Somebody cut

him. Tried to kill him. There was a fight where he was at. At this
party. They say he was just standing and watching. Not bothering
nobody. But that don’t mean nothing these days”. (390-391)

And besides this little parallel drama be rather analogous to the central story line, it is
interesting to mention the fact that Franklin does not survive the surgery and dies — what can be
interpreted as an anticipation of Scotty’s tragedy.
The narrator also uses another narrative procedure: the focalization of unusual elements
that are very useful in order to compose the scenes. His detailed descriptions of locations,
objects, characters, and, above all, their actions, help the reader to develop clearer notions of
temporality, spatiality, and to form a monstrous image of the baker:

He looked at them and rolled his tongue behind his teeth. (402)

Another expedient that contributes to the increasing sensation of anguish and uncertainty
in the text is related to the author’s capacity of condensing words, of precisely removing the
excessive elements of the dialogs so that what is left is just the minimum, just the essential
amount of information that is needed to the (in)comprehension of the message.
Whenever the doctor comes and examines the comatose boy, Ann tries really hard to get
answers from him, but the words he uses to explain Scotty’s condition are so limited that make
her feel even more frightened and confused. When asked about the boy’s recovery, the nurses
also provide minimal answers like “stable” or “his signs are good”, what really worries the
parents instead of comforting them.
The conciseness of Carver when dealing with words and sentiments detectable in “A
Small, Good Thing”, as well as in the whole minimalist artistic production, from the sober work
of Sol LeWitt to the succinct music of Suzanne Vega, requires that the reader/observer/listener of
this kind of art develop a high level of understanding and also a vast capacity of interaction and
reconfiguration of the symbolic and aesthetic elements provided by the artist along his or her
work. Although these artistic artifacts are conceptually simple, they have an enormous
perceptive density.
In “A Small, Good Thing” and in other stories written by Raymond Carver, the ordinary
themes of quotidian life are stylistically structured, and that is why they suggest much wider
human dimensions. Therefore, the simple act of answering the phone and not hearing a voice on
the other side of the line sounds like an overwhelming catastrophe. The violence is repressed in
the silence, the crisis and the fatal human collapse is implicit between the lines of the carefully
constructed discourse of the author. Michael Wood once wrote in “The New York Times” that
“in Mr. Carver's silences, a good deal of the unsayable gets said”.2[2]
Analyzing the characters is also something crucial in order to understand the text. Ann
Weiss, for example, symbolizes a stereotypical woman, a young mother whose actions are
somewhat automatic. She shows all her motherly sweetness, her uncertainty, her fear, but
nevertheless, she seems incapable of fighting against her own alienation. Only after her son’s
death, which represents the sacrifice, she starts to get rid of her behavioral automatism and then
she demonstrates her anger:

She clenched her fists. She stared at him fiercely. There was a deep
burning inside her, an anger that made her feel larger than herself,
larger than either of these men. (402)

The automatism of the social roles and the sensation of powerlessness of the character
reach such a dramatic level that Ann does not seem to be able to stand her current situation and
then she escapes totally from her reality, foreshadowing herself and Scotty running away to a
safer territory. Her incapacity of dealing with the situation is so palpable that she even mentally
advises a girl she met in the hospital not to have children in order to avoid such suffering:

“Don’t have children,” she told the girl’s image as she entered the
front door of the hospital. “For God’s sake, don’t.” (393-394)

The father also goes through similar alienation, but given the circumstances, Howard tries
an inverse kind of flight: by means of his flashbacks, he searches for some relief in the memories
of his serene and successful past. His life had been apparently full of satisfaction until the day
that brusque rupture happened and forced him to face a completely new reality:

Until now, his life had gone smoothly and to his satisfaction (...) He
was happy and, so far, lucky — he knew that (...) So far, he had
kept away from any real harm, from those forces he knew existed
and that could cripple or bring down a man if the luck went bad, if
things suddenly turned. (379)

However, what is surprising in “A Small, Good Thing”, if we compare it to “The Bath” are
the conversational rhythms of the baker. As he talks, he makes clear that he acted according to
his survival instinct, choosing the violence and the cruelty as a form of expression, as a way of
manifesting all his unhappiness:

“It cost me time and money to make that cake. If you want it, okay,
if you don’t, that’s okay, too. I have to get back to work.” He
looked at them and rolled his tongue behind his teeth (...) “Lady, I
work sixteen hours a day in this place to earn a living, (...) I work
night and day in here, trying to make ends meet” (402)

2[2]
WOOD, Michael. Stories Full Of Edges And Silences, The New York Times, Books, 26/04/1981.
<http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/01/21/specials/carver-wood.html>
 “God alone knows how sorry [I am]. Listen to me. I’m just a baker.
I don’t claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I
was a different kind of human being (...) But I’m not any longer, if
I ever was (...) I’m not an evil man, I don’t think (...) You got to
understand what it comes down to is I don’t know how to act
anymore, it would seem”. (404)

When the baker becomes conscious of the perverse acts he practiced, he recovers the sense
of humanity he said he had lost a long time ago because of his overwhelming routine of work.
All his cruelty is due to his exaggerated materialism. We live in a material world where the
commercial relations are favored in detriment of feelings like fraternity, forgiveness, and love.
From this moment on, Carver’s prose, exactly because it suggests a critique of the social and
economical system, reminds the discourse of other great writers who preceded him and highly
influenced his work, like Czech author Franz Kafka and, above all, Russian writer Anton
Chekhov (whom Carver once confessed he was very fond of). The exhausting schedule of work
causes a person to become “robotized”. This winds up by leading them to isolation and making
them lose their affection. Other problem that contributes to the baker’s hostility seems to be his
childlessness:

Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the
baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of
loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come
to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be
childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens
endlessly full and endlessly empty. (405)

Carver also displayed his accuracy when he created an unexpected ending to his short
story: the sensations of incommunicability and reification are transformed into something
positive. The three characters (Ann, Howard and the baker), after pulling up a fierce argument,
start to articulate those feelings that were petrified until then. And finally, after Scotty’s sacrifice,
there is a brief communion among them, in which the food and the dawn of a new day reaches a
great symbolism, and, for a little while, we believe that communication and understanding are
the key to bind again those abysses that tear the people apart.

“You probably need to eat something,” the baker said. “I hope

you’ll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going.
Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.” (404)
[Howard and Ann] listened to him. They ate what they could (...)
They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in
the windows, and they did not think of leaving. (405)

“A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver follows the narrative structural scheme
below:

Initial Ending
Rupture Suspense
situation Sacrifice Association
A happy couple Scotty, the Scotty does not wake up; The parents are Scotty dies After the
(Howard and birthday boy, afflicted by the baker’s phone calls. too. argument, the
Ann) plans to is knocked parents forgive
celebrate their over. The Anticlimax Anticipation the baker. The
 Ann meets an Afro-
American family
Franklin, the black
whose son was hurt in
eight-year-old birthday party boy, dies. three of them
a party and he is
child’s is canceled. sit around the
undergoing a surgery
birthday. table and eat.
INCOMMUNICABILITY >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>COMMUNION

Due to his development as a writer represented by his stories such as “A Small, Good
Thing” and “Cathedral”, Raymond Carver began to be compared since then to important writers
like Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemmingway. However, Mr. Carver and his work were
misinterpreted since the beginning. Some critics who classified his art as depressive and freezing
attacked him. Many people doubted the existence of Minimalism, even Carver himself, who
refused this label because he thought it was too simple to define his work.
But, whatever it is, every time we talk about Raymond Carver we talk about a tragic,
challenging, astoundingly beautiful mosaic — the life.
Bibliography:

CARVER, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Random House. New York, 1989.

CARVER, Raymond. Where I’m Calling From – New And Selected Stories. Random House. New York,
1989.

HASHIMOTO, Hiromi. Trying To Understand Carver’s Revisions. In: Tokai English Review, N.º 5,
Tokio, Japan, 1995, pp. 113-147.

CRIADO, Francisco J. Rodriguez. El realismo pesimista de Raymond Carver.

<http://maruska.soria.org/carver.htm> 09/09/2002.

SOBREIRA, Ricardo. Sobre o que falamos quando falamos de Raymond Carver.

<http://www.faijales.com.br/collii/main.php?
path=comunicacoes/raymond.htm&frame=false&image=true> 10/01/2002.

© 1989 by the estate of Raymond Carver

© Максим Калинин. Перевод, 2005

Raymond Carver (1938-1988)

Contributing Editor: Paul Jones

Classroom Issues and Strategies

Carver has been quoted as saying that his stories could happen anywhere. That is
pretty much true. Additionally, they are so contemporary that they require almost no
background material or preparation for reading and understanding by an American
audience. Even the issues of class (most of Carver's characters, if they have jobs,
are marginally employed), although they do exist in Carver stories, are not too
heavily at play in "A Small, Good Thing." However, this lack of location, class, and
even time can be used to start a classroom discussion. You might ask: Where is this
story set and in what year? How old are the characters? How does this affect your
reading of the story? Does this lack diminish the story? Would it have been a better
story if we knew it had been set in, say, Cleveland in May 1978? How would this
story be read by readers outside of Carver's culture? Would it be understood
differently in France or in Cameroon? The questions can draw the class toward a
discussion of style in literature and to one of the major issues for Carver: What
constitutes a good story?

To bring Carver himself into the classroom, I recommend the Larry McCaffery and
Sinda Gregory interview found in Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction or in
Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s as sources for rich
Carver quotes and his own insights into the stories and the writing process. For
example, Carver cites Isaac Babel's dictum, "No iron can pierce the heart with such
force as a period put in just the right place," as one of his own guiding principles.

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues

In many of Carver's stories, issues of loss and of alcoholism are a part of the larger
issue, which is the isolation and terror of people when a total breakdown of survival
systems is at hand. The near-inarticulateness of his characters in the face of this
terror and loss is significant and has been a major point of contention among his
critics. Some say that Carver's characters are too ordinary, underperceptive, and
despairing to experience the philosophical questions of meaning into which they have
been thrust. His defenders say that Carver characters demonstrate that people living
marginal, routine lives can come close to experiencing insight and epiphany under
pressure of intruding mysteries, such as the death of a loved one.

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

You would definitely want to talk about "minimalism" in fiction. The style has become
so pervasive that students may just assume that this pared-down method of story-
telling is simply how one writes fiction. Frederick Barthelme writes that as a
minimalist "you're leaving room for the readers, at least for the ones who like to use
their imaginations." John Barth counters with this definition of a minimalist aesthetic:
"[its] cardinal principle is that artistic effect may be enhanced by a radical economy
of artistic means, even where such parsimony compromises other values:
completeness, for example, or richness or precision of statement." Carver was at
first the most influential practitioner of minimalism, and then, through the rewriting
of his earlier stories, a writer who repudiated the style.

Luckily, Carver's stories can be used to show both the power of the so-called
minimalist approach and its limits. Have the students first read the brief (ten-page)
story "The Bath," which was the earlier version of "A Small, Good Thing." "The Bath"
is an excellent example of what minimalism does well and can be more terrifying and
unsettling than anything by Stephen King. Contrasting and comparing "The Bath"
and "A Small, Good Thing" from Carver's later, more expansive period will allow the
students to participate in the intense debate about style. Carver preferred the
second version, but he didn't pass judgment on those who like "The Bath" best.

Another useful approach for showing the nuances of revision at work in Carver's
writing is to look at a few other versions of his stories. A particularly illustrative case
is a short-short-story of under five hundred words that has been known as "Mine"
(Furious Seasons), "Popular Mechanics" (What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love), and "Little Things" (Where I'm Calling From). The last two differ only in title,
but there are significant differences in "Mine." Students need not be textual critics to
talk about the choices that Carver has made in the various versions of his stories.

Original Audience

Carver's stories were published in most of the important slick magazines of the
seventies and eighties including Esquire and The New Yorker. All along the way his
work also appeared in small literary magazines. David Bellamy called Carver "the
most influential stylist since Donald Barthelme." He was writing for writers, for those
who appreciated experimental literature as well as for a general, though
sophisticated, reading audience.

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, and Ernest Hemingway are the obvious influences on
Carver's work. The seemingly simple pared-down style of writing follows straight
through to Carver. You might consider teaching Carver and Hemingway and perhaps
Donald Barthelme together, then entering into a discussion of the bare bones style of
each.
Another way to consider Carver's style is to remember that he began writing poetry
before he tried fiction and continued writing and publishing poetry throughout his
career. He said (in a Paris Review interview with Mona Simpson), "In magazines, I
always turned to poems first before I read the stories. Finally, I had to make a
choice, and I came down on the side of fiction. It was the right choice for me."
Carver's poetry has been compared to that of William Carlos Williams, although I see
many obvious differences in their approach, sense of the line, and sense of narrative.
His poetry can also be compared to that of James Wright, particularly with respect to
the class of people from which the poems and stories are drawn.

Bibliography

The following collections by Carver include stories mentioned above:

"Mine." In Furious Seasons and Other Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1977.

"Little Things." In Where I'm Calling from: New and Selected Stories. New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.

"Popular Mechanics" and "The Bath." In What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.

Critical books on Carver are as follows:

Campbell, Ewing. Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne,
1992.

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

1992.

Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: University of South

Carolina Press, 1988.

Carver talks about his writing and the writing of others in the following books:

Carver, Raymond. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.

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

The following book of photographs helps show the locations for several of Carver's
stories:

Adelman, Bob. Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver. "Introduction" by

Tess Gallagher. New York: Scribner, 1990.

I find it always helpful to hear the author read his stories, which is especially true in
the case of Carver, although only the following early tape is available:

Ray Carver Reads Three Short Stories. Columbia: American Audio Prose Library,
1983.

"A Small, Good Thing" can be found on tape (but not read by Carver) in the
following:

Where I'm Calling From. Read by Peter Riegert. New York: Random House Audio
Publishers, 1989.
Raymond Carver 1938-1989
Carver Interview

Carver Articles
"The Narrowed Voice: Minimalism and Raymond Carver"
"Carver's Vision" by Phillip Carson
"A Subtle Spectacle: Televisual Culture in the Short Stories of Raymond Carver"

"Cathedral" Articles
"Insularity and Self-Enlargement in Raymond Carver's 'Cathedral'"

Fine Art Connection

"Minimalism: Then and Now" by Constance Lewallen, Berkeley Art Museum + Pacific Film
Archive

Teaching "Cathedral"
Teaching Raymond Carver, from The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Contributing
Editor: Paul Jones
Pairing "Cathedral" with Tess Gallagher's "Rain Flooding Your Campfire"