an ... V . w. a", "J 4 I. flown.” A; . . .wwim wit x. .5. . .....7 2 » fix! . n... . :3. .,. ,. ... ..........~.... n+5; .. o3. . w '. ._’ .11. ... L" mum-‘1‘ at?) , v Q 5‘, ,.»dllo¢(.. ... A12». .1 i! 99.1“? huh £1 Illlllllllllllllllllll'lllIllllllll c2 ‘ 31293 01712 0183 This is to certify that the dissertation entitled AN AESTHETICS OF "IDEALIZED HUMAN DESIRE" AND AN ETHOS OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION, COMMUNION, AND PERSONAL GROWTH: A READING OF RAYMOND CARVER'S SHORT STORIES AS SEMIOPEN TEXTS presented by ’Jonathan Daniel Eck has been accepted towards fulfillment of the requirements for Ph. D. degree in English LU we fir 4x54“; Major professor Date in Iva/My I57, 11% MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0-12771 LIBRARY Mlchlgan State Unlverslty PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record. TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due. DATE DUE MTE DUE DATE DUE JAg 93 W W! (I 1/98 mass-nu AN AESTHETICS OF “IDEALIZED HUMAN DESIRE” AND AN ETHOS OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION, COMMUNION, AND PERSONAL GROWTH: A READING OF RAYMOND CARVER’S SHORT STORIES AS SEMIOPEN TEXTS BY Jonathan Daniel Eck A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English 1998 ABSTRACT AN AESTHETICS OF “IDEALIZED HUMAN DESIRE” AND AN ETHOS OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION, COMMUNION, AND PERSONAL GROWTH: A READING OF RAYMOND CARVER’S SHORT STORIES AS SEMIOPEN TEXTS BY Jonathan Daniel Eck Raymond Carver's short stories are semiopen in their articulation of a psychological “tension” between openness and closure. They engage readers both by their ongoing storyness and “guided closure.” Although various critics have described Carver’s stories as minimalist or hyperrealist narratives, his stories remain open for readers who imaginatively explore Carver's characters, the focus of Carver’s stories. Carver's neorealism explores characters’ dreams and desires, and communicates their subconscious desires and inner lives to readers. Carver allows his characters to act upon their desires and explore possibilities for personal--and moral-~growth, especially by communicating and bonding with others, and despite a difficult cultural environment. Rather than presenting overt moral themes, Carver’s stories work indirectly and provide readers with “clues” about his characters and how they can obtain psychological growth and closure. This allows readers to work through ambiguities inherent in some stories. Instead of being merely nihilistic, as his negative critics have maintained, Carver's stories provide both openness and tentative, but not final, closure. DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Robert Regan Eck and Ruth Saunders Eck, and to my sister, Deborah Joy Teal. ifi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS All the members of my committee have helped me in producing this dissertation. Thank you, Professors Barry Gross, William Johnsen, Robert Martin, and James Seaton. Additionally thanks go to John Jackson, M.D., Mr. Abdul Hayee, Mr. Michael Sobocinski, and Ms. Jill Thornton, all of whom helped me and encouraged me to complete this work. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 RAYMOND CARVER’S POPULAR RECEPTION, HIS CRITICAL RECEPTION, AND A NEW CRITICAL CONCEPTION OF HIS STORIES: AS SEMIOPEN TEXTS CHAPTER 2 MINIMALISM AND RAYMOND CARVER CHAPTER 3 NEOREALISM AND HYPERREALISM IN CARVER’S STORIES CHAPTER 4 SHORT STORY THEORY AND CARVER’S STORIES CHAPTER 5 CARVER’S MORAL VISION AND HIS SEMIOPEN SHORT STORIES BIBLIOGRAPHY 14 59 126 179 198 Chapter 1 RAYMOND CARVER'S POPULAR RECEPTION, HIS CRITICAL RECEPTION, AND A NEW CRITICAL CONCEPTION OF HIS STORIES: AS SEMIOPEN TEXTS Raymond Carver's short stories have powerfully affected both critical readers and uncritical readers. Some readers, however, find Carver's stories to be of poor quality. They complain that Carver's stories are bleak or dark in subject matter or theme, or that they are stories without significantly large plots or characters. Some complain about a flat, minimal style. Carver has been labeled a “minimalist” by most critics; others have labeled him a “neorealist” or “Dirty Realist.” As Bill Delaney observes: Nearly everything written about Raymond Carver begins with two observations: he is a minimalist, and he writes about working class people. Even when the critic is sympathetic, this dual categorization tends to stigmatize Carver as a minor artist writing little stories about little people. (435) However, despite the implications of these labels, and despite a number of negative critics, Carver’s short stories gained a large receptive audience of readers and fellow writers. His critical reputation began to grow after Hill_XQu_£leaae_Be QuieLL_Elgaae3 (1976), and especially after Cathedral (1983), and it continues to grow. 2 In fact, Carver received various awards for his stories. In 1983, Carver was awarded a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; in 1988, Carver was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Carver’s story collections were nominated for the National Book Award (1977), National Book Critics Circle Award (1983), and Pulitzer Prize (1984); and individual stories were awarded annual recognition in such anthologies as Thn_PnShnnLL_PIizn, Ihn_ant_Amnrinan_Shnrt Sindee, WARD and Wes This study is an exploration of the nature of Carver's achievement as a short story writer; its focus is to explain how his stories satisfy two basic, seemingly contradictory needs of readers: first, our need, as human beings, “to impose a closed structure on experience in order to make sense of it," and second, our need to explore without preconceived restrictions, that is, our deep-seated need as readers, and as human beings generally, for “non-closure” (Head 195-97). Carver's short stories articulate this psychological “tension” between openness and closure in a distinctive and pronounced way and thus may be described as semiopen texts. Raymond Carver's short stories may be described as “open” to the extent that they fully engage readers by their storyness and coherent structure of formal elements: according to contemporary short story theory, Carver's stories are prototypical in their storyness and in their exploration of what Charles E. May refers to as “idealized human desire." Short story theorists commenting upon Carver's stories point to the open nature of his stories--that they require, sustain, and stimulate engagement of reader participation, collaboration, and even (for Rohrberger) “cocreation.” However, Carver's own critical commentary of stories (and literature generally) discusses elements of stories that are not described by the commentary of these short story theorists. For Carver, and as manifested in his stories, stories should also contain moral content and moral significance. Also, and importantly, reading Carver's stories with a particular moral perspective--name1y, concerning the overriding needs of human beings for personal growth, human communication, and the communion with others, gives his stories a greater degree of closure. This quality of Carver's stories has been generally overlooked by his critical readers. But, I would maintain, Carver's stories are written to be read and reread to give readers this “guided closure.” However, while Carver's stories are both open and provide closure, such closure is not complete: readers are free to review and reconsider the themes and ideas Carver presents. For although Carver maintains certain moral values as absolutes, he is primarily concerned in his stories with the 2:99:33 by which his characters' actions lead to their moral progress, including insight into their own lives and their personal victories: Carver’s stories are not “minimally” 4 reductive, but they can give careful and engaged readers various depths of satisfactory closure, even if not all of his characters obtain such affirmative closure. Carver's stories function dynamically with a narratological “tension" between openness and closure, and remain distinctively semiopen for their readers. Rereading Carver's stories from the perspectives of short story theory (which emphasizes their ongoing engagement for readers and their “openness”) and with Carver's own critical sensibilities (which gives them a significant, but not always an obvious, measure of “guided closure”) underscores their importance and significance for readers as semiopen texts. Necessary to an appropriate assessment of Carver's literary achievement is an appreciation of Carver's stories in the context of genre criticism. Some short story theorists, most notably Susan Lohafer, Charles E. May, and Austin Wright, contribute particular commentary about Carver's short stories: they also describe and illuminate how his stories can be read for storyness, as stories. These and other short story theorists have described qualities of good stories generally and how such stories typically affect readers. Important works discussing short story theory include The_Lnnnl¥_YQinn (Frank O'Connor, 1963); WWW (Mary Rohrberser. 1966); W (Flannery O'Connor, 1969); Shnrt_stnry Ihenries (Ed. Charles E. May, 1976); Ihn_Shnrt_SLnr¥ (Ian Reid, 977); WWW (Valerie Shaw, 1983); Bn;rnadins_the_3hnrt_5tnry (Ed. Clare Hanson. 1989); SDQIL Stnr¥_Ihnnry_at_a_Crnssrnads (Eds. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn ClareY. 1989); and Thn_unu_Shnrt_StnI¥_Ihnnries (Ed. Charles E. May, 1994). In addition, other commentary about short story theory or short stories in general will be cited in order to better describe and detail the nature and qualities of Carver's short stories. In evaluating Carver's short stories in terms of short story theory, two general features will be considered: 1) a writer's use of the formal elements of a story, and 2) the storyness of a story. Carver's use of formal elements in a story needs more attention and investigation. For most theorists to be quoted, a story's form--its brevity, framing, and narrative movement—-coheres to give readers a sense of story. Other formal elements include a story's whole range of language, including not only aspects and suggestions of tone, mood, and theme, but also specific metonymic and metaphoric elements. All elements that work to this sense of story and that reflect a story's short form and attendance to ending may be said to constitute its formal elements. Despite their lingering reputations as minimalist or neorealist narratives, Carver's short stories have a number of thoughtfully coherent tropes and metonymic elements, which typically work subliminally upon readers of his short stories. Many of his stories that may seem to be minimally told are actually deeply structured and complex in their use of formal 6 elements. Carver's stories can be short, brief, and contain omissions, yet still fully engage readers. Although short story critics do not uniformly agree on all points, they do agree that because of its brevity, every detail in a short story matters, or should matter. In fact, for short story theorists generally, questions about a story's quality center upon its elements and their coherence--and not whether a story is large or elaborate. Genre critics of the short story bring a sensitivity to the evaluation of a particular short story writer's stories, and their insights are applicable to Carver's short stories, even though relatively little criticism of his work exists within this context. This study does recognize some elements of “minimalism” in some of Carver's stories. For example, a Carver story may affect a reader significantly by what is omitted. Carver's flhat_fle_lalk AhgnL_flhen_fle_1alk_Abgut_Lgye most clearly exhibits this self- conscious minimalist technique, which requires a reader's full participation in the story, which is also a quality that short story theorists hold to be typical of well-crafted stories. Some of Carver's stories also seem to fit the minimalist label, at times, because most of his stories are often quite short. However, because of the brevity of short stories generally, readers expect to read them more carefully than novels, reading their implications, tonalities, omissions, reading “between the lines”--and rereading them imaginatively after having read the ending. In this sense, then, length alone 7 does not make a typical short story “minimal.” This understanding of how stories are read by readers, of how good stories are read by readers, and of what good stories can achieve, is relevant and necessary in exploring and evaluating Carver's stories; not only to answer charges of his “minimalist” critics, but, more importantly, to read and appreciate his stories. Also, required of any critical analysis of Carver's stories is an appreciation of how his stories changed throughout his life; Critics such as Nesset, Saltzman, and Campbell make the point that Carver continued to grow as a writer and that his stories became fuller and less alike, beginning with Caahadral. A recovering alcoholic since 1977, Carver's fiction gradually moved away from his most minimalist period of What_fla_1alk_Abgnt Hhan_fla_1alk_Abggt_Lgya. While most of his stories may be similar in some ways, his stories changed as he continued to develop as a writer. In this study, I will explore what I consider to be stories that are typical of the body of his work, stories that are both characteristic and interesting. In this study of Raymond Carver's stories, three general observations about his stories are important to recognize. First is the general popular reception of his stories. Some critics claim that he may even have been the short story writer most responsible for reviving interest in this genre in the United States. His stories are easy to read (on their surfaces), and most stories are short. The settings and characters are, almost without exception, familiar to most readers. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, Carver's stories often have an immediate impact upon readers. As Lewis Buzbee observes, “Carver's stories have the power to move people deeply, immediately” (115). Additionally, Carver's stories are well built, deeply structured, and individually cohere in ways both obvious and not obvious. To better appreciate this, these stories can be read again and again: they invite close reading and rereading. They typically use a number of formal elements to achieve their power and attraction for readers. Many, if not most, of these elements may not be obvious to most readers--uncritical and critical alike. In fact, many stories contain features not commented on by the majority of critical readers, but which nevertheless act to give coherence, complexity, and power to the stories. Lastly, Carver's stories do exhibit storyness, which can be defined or described in various ways, including, primarily, as a continuous psychological engagement of readers. According to short story writer and theorist John Gerlach, “Story proper is more accurately defined by speculations it encourages on the part of the reader than by what actually occurs in the reported event” (80). Charles E. May in his introduction to Iha_Naw_§hgrL_$Lgry Ihagriaa notes the “family resemblance” of features noted by short story theorists when they describe features of short stories. Storyness is the core feature of most stories, and readers who read and criticize short stories expect to locate this in short stories. 9 Carver's stories often have enigmatic endings, but, in most cases, they can be completed by readers rethinking the story or rereading the story in terms of its ending. In some instances, readers may have to reread or recall earlier parts of the story in order to reprocess the ending. In other cases, the reader may not be able to finally resolve the story in terms of its ending but will remain engaged by the story. Other stories have obvious closure. In all of these cases, the stories continue to engage readers, both intellectually and emotionally, after readers have read them, and this, in effect, constitutes their storyness. Carver's stories may be further described as being constructed as a spiral: they are open because of their readability and how they reward a reader's attention and engaged reading; additionally, they invite a reader's expectation of closure and give some initial closure by their formal elements and deep structure. Together, these elements guide readers through the stories, moving readers, in effect, closer to the center of each story with each reading. In this way, also, by Show these stories are read, Carver's stories may be described as semiopen. Carver's seemingly ongoing attention to writing and revising Inis published stories--he revised almost continuously and Irepublished various stories prior to Cathadral--underscores his <>Wn role as a reader, as well as how his stories are actually r ead by ordinary readers. Carver's own critical comments about 8tories, whether in his own published essays or in interviews 10 (such as in a 1984 interview with Larry McCaffery and Sinda Gregory below), make clear this function of his writing as a process involving psychologically engaged readers: I guess I'm old—fashioned enough to feel that the reader must somehow be involved at the human level. And that there is still, or ought to be, a compact between writer and reader. Writing, or any form of artistic endeavor, is not just expression, it's communication. (110) Likewise, in his essay “Fiction That Throws Light on Blackness," Carver elaborates his (often—disregarded) moral focus: In fiction that matters the significance of the action inside the story translates to the lives of people outside the story [readers of the story]. Do we need to remind ourselves of this? In the best novels and short stories, goodness is recognized as such. Loyalty, love, fortitude, courage, and integrity may not always be rewarded, but they are recognized as good or noble actions or qualities; and evil or base or simply stupid behavior is seen and held up for what it is: evil, base, or stupid behavior. There ara a few absolutes in this life, some verities, if you will, and we would do well not to forget them. (184) Carver's attention to what readers value and are engaged in WIlile reading stories is clearly evidenced by his stories, which 11 while being seemingly objective, open, and transparent, also carefully guide readers in their reading and rereading of them. Again, I describe this combination of openness and guided closure as semiopen, and interpret Carver's short stories as being semiopen texts. Basic to contemporary short story theory is the recognition of how stories affect and involve readers. Even Edgar Allan Poe's (1842) famous prescription for constructing powerfully written, finished tales, that they be conceived and designed so as to produce “a certain unique or single affagt” (47), underscores this methodology in terms of a raaaar, the person for whom this “effect” is intended. Stories have been retold and reread throughout the world primarily because of their effect on and appeal to readers or audiences. To describe readers as audiences is appropriate inasmuch as readers of short stories expect to become imaginatively involved with their reading of them. Randall Jarrell makes the point in “Stories” that “children ask first of all: 'Is it a trua_a;gry'? They ask this (of the storyteller, but they ask of the story what they ask of fish. Carver’s first-person narrative allows readers to littlsaLgine the boy's psyche and to see how he views the world-—not 3 List a physically real world, but one infused by fantasy, desire, Eilclsii. wondrous Nature. Characters who reexplore this complex world 513=7152fensive to someone of the man's generation’s sensibilities. (rcazafiding to a friend, she tells something about her experience 111 in terms that belittle the man: “The guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there in his yard. No lie. We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don’t laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record player. The old guy gave it to us. And all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?" (What 9-10) More significantly, perhaps, is the man’s loss of his manhood, as evidenced by his giving away his formerly cherished (and romantic) records and record player--and his bed, which he simply calls “a good bed." In fact, the first thing he says to the girl is: “Hello . You found the bed. That's good" (6). Careful readers surely can “read between the lines” here, and his drinking and exhibitionistic placing of his furniture outside are all of a piece--together they describe a man who has been emotionally dispossessed and who is now attempting to take stock of his life and move forward by ridding himself of painful past memories. A reader might easily view this “yard sale" as a rneans of catharsis for the man, and as a way for him to reach out tr) others, even to strangers. The situation of the man is pxaignant, but the girl's interpretation of it underscores his displacement from his own society and culture, a society that seems to place less and less regard and respect towards men who are merely ordinary . 'Various stories of Carver’s describe this devaluation of 112 males who are married and divorced. Although Carver is not blind to the cruelties and selfish brutalities of many males--witness such stories’ themes as found in “So Much Water So Close to Home," “Are These Actual Miles?" “Tell the Women We’re Going," “Why, Honey?" “The Student’s Wife," and “Blackbird Pie," in which males are shown or described otherwise as being insensitive and domineering (“So Much Water So Close to Home"); cruel, threatening and brutally violent (“Tell the Women We’re Going" and “Why, Honey?"); and distanced or emotionally divorced from their wives (“Are These Actual Miles?" “The Student's Wife," and “Blackbird Pie"). In short, Carver is no misogynist; however, many of his stories recount a male character’s loss of status or manhood in contexts describing domineering or abusive women. While some couples get along well (as those in “Neighbors," “Put Yourself in My Shoes,” “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," “After the Denim," “Cathedral," A Small, Good Thing,” “Boxes," and “Whoever Was Using This Bed"), many more do not, and in these relationships the women, whether wives or girlfriends, seem domineering, threatening, or uncaring towards their male counterparts. For example, in “Why Don’t You Dance?” the boy never makes ea move without his girlfriend’s consent or directions. At times, for example, when bidding, she tells him how to act; at other thimes, her requests take on the status of commands: “‘That's enough,’ the girl said. ‘I think I want water with mine’" (7) . Also, the boy’s statement, “We’re interested in the bed and maybe 113 the T.V. Also maybe the desk" (6) describes his ongoing need to meet her approval first. Clearly, he is also uncomfortable (“I feel funny") when she tells him twice to (first) try the bed and (secondly) to kiss her. His single act of assertion towards her is to ask, “So what do you want?" (7). As various critics have noted, their conversation and behavior suggest that they, too, will be breaking up in the future, just like the man and his wife did (May, Ihe_$hgrt_$tgry 94; Meyer, Raymnnd_Carrer 88; Nesset, Iha_$tg;iaa 38). According to Campbell, “Human experience almost dictates it [their chaotic futurel" (Raymgnd_garyax 45). As Nesset notes, “In the most obvious sense, the boy and the girl are symbolic stand-ins for the couple who bought the bed and shared it before. Less obviously, their conversation betrays tensions in their own relationship" (38). Careful readers consider these psychological tensions and find a story that suggests a potential for emotional growth--for the girl and the boy--by relating to the man in a more empathetic and communicative manner. But even though the girl does dance with the man, it is clear that they as a couple are takers and not givers or sharers, and lack the foundations of trust that might lead to their emotional growth. “Why Don’t You Dance?” and other Carver stories seem to underscore that acting upon human desire (the desire to dance, listen to music, enjoy “social drinking," tr: cite some examples here) is a necessary precondition for C=loser communication, communion, and moral growth, but that it is that sufficient--there must also be a trust and willingness to do 114 so. That the girl does not quite understand the significance of her dance and encounter with the man is obvious and underscores for the reader her emotional limitations. Arthur Saltzman comments: “There is something especially chilling and depressing about the girl’s casual acceptance of mutual incomprehensibility" (103). The disconnection that the girl comes to feel at the story’s conclusion is foreshadowed by Carver’s “understated" language of the placement of bedroom furniture and sides of the bed: “His side, her side" (May, Shgxt_5tgxy 93). This lack of connection, but sustained disconnection, is amplified by the “inversion of [the man’s] home" (Saltzman 101); his “ruins" of his marriage outside for all to gawk at (Campbell, Raymghd_gazyar 43). May notes in Ihn_5hnIt_SLQIYi_Ihn_EnsliLY_ni_Artifine how this story “emphasizes the Chekovian use of concrete details to communicate hidden reality" (144). In “Why Don’t You Dance?” the objects do give readers information from which to better understand its characters--the story is not merely enigmatic or obsessed with surface detail to the exclusion of story. Even so, it also aptly suggests contexts for stories: a human exchange, given freely and in trust, leading to character growth. Carver’s use of informing objects is largely a question of t:heir value in this story. The central “good" object, the bed, jJB, of course, where another story of the man’s began and ended. But Carver’s use of concretizing language, language that draws al:tention to their physicality and utility (“Except for that, 115 things looked much the way they had in the bedroom” [3] and “[E]verything was connected. Things worked, no different from how it was when they were inside” [4]) also emphasizes how unsolid and unreliable the behaviors and intentions of Carver’s characters are when thay are not agnhattad and taraa_tgt, and how poignant their sufferings must seem when they are abandoned and forgotten. “Why Don't You Dance?" is a poignant plea, disguised, perhaps, by what Saltzman finds to be the man’s tone of “regulated bemusement that is the stage beyond despair" (101). But although they dance, the quality of their dancing lacks a necessary trust and graciousness, requirements for moral growth, as I read this Carver story, so, consequently, the girl obtains no closure from her experience. Even so, the story remains semiopen for readers who can imagine the necessary contexts for such closure. “Why Don’t You Dance?" was one of Carver’s first stories written after his cessation of drinking alcohol in 1977, and in its brief form a fitting beginning to his most “minimal" collection of stories, What_Wa_Ialk_Ahgat_Whan_Wa_Ialk_Ahgat .Lgye. Although it is often cited as an example of stories that lack a clear resolution, the story’s resolution is achieved by its readers, who imaginatively participate in it and ask Gnaestions about it. Even so, various “clues" are present within ii: to allow readers to do this. An obvious message is also Chonveyed nonverbally when the girl and the boy look at one 'allother in their recognition of the fact that the man does not 116 insist on his asking price: just as the girl suggested, asking ten dollars less per item is a successful business technique. Also, readers may infer from the placement of the line, “The girl looked at the boy," coming just after the third time the man says he “would take" less, that the man is more interested in getting rid of his past memories than in investing for the future. Much is revealed about all three characters in this short exchange of bidding, so that readers can continue to successfully infer from consistently placed “clues" that for the man, at least, such household items are all almost meaningless without an “informing" home life, but that for the girl and boy such items have a tangible value or not with respect to their utility and larger cultural status (for the girl, the man’s once cherished records are “crappy" and “shit"). In seven pages, “Why Don’t You Dance?" is anything but a “minimal story": its thematic concerns were appropriate when it was written and remain so today, and readers can imaginatively explore and consider these. Jfirgen Pieters asserts that in “Why Don’t You Dance?" the “characters are mere pronouns" whom readers, “out of sheer necessity, some inexplicable thirst for meaning or truth, [construct] a sense of ‘real characters’ around" (64, 65); and that because characters fail to change in this story, it must remain “utterly static" (67) . However, readers do find this Eitory to be a complete story; the characters do change, even if tflae potential exists and is lost for greater, more significant Cilange. More importantly, this story is hardly static for 117 careful and imaginative readers. Lastly, the question of the use of pronouns for the three characters does not significantly alter our reading of the story. We notice that the girl calls the boy “Jack" at one point, and we assume that the other characters have names also, even though readers do not know them. If “the girl" were given the name of “Sally," for instance, would this add to this story's impact for readers? I doubt it; probably the reverse is true. Readers may more closely attend to other n, elements of the story (whether foregrounded or backgrounded), and be kept more alert for any detail out of the ordinary. Of course, it is important to acknowledge that some of Carver’s stories of this period were expanded and made subsequently fuller, the best illustration of this being how the expanded “A Small, Good Thing" became so much more comprehensive than its prototype “The Bath" that Carver imagines them and calls them “two entirely different stories not just different versions of the same stories" (McCaffery and Gregory 102). Significantly, the later story includes more descriptive detail and dialogue, and attends to the characters’ lives more fully (although some readers prefer the greater immediacy of “The Bath”). Pieters also maintains that in “Why Don’t You Dance?” the ‘verbs used actually work to foreground the static quality of this storyg and he cites half of the third paragraph to illustrate the overall static quality of the story (68): The chiffonier atggd a few feet from the foot of the bed. He had emptied the drawers into cartons that 118 morning and the cartons Wata in the living room. A portable heater Was next to the chiffonier. A rattan chair with a decorator pillow stggd at the foot of the bed. The buffed aluminum kitchen tggk_up a part of the driveway. A muslin cloth, much too large, covered the table, and hang down over the sides. (What 3-4) (His italics) According to Pieters, this inclusion of verbs of position ;. “set[s] the static atmosphere by which the story is pervaded” (69). By themselves, of course, they could not do this, but Pieters adds that together with slowing cars, the priority of the man’s looking at his furniture to a description of him moving it outside, and the girl’s backward-gazing narrative--these, and Carver’s descriptions of non-actions, his focus upon iconic imagery, and the limited dialogue of the characters--work to slow the story's narrative speed to a "reduced, slowed down" transmission (69). Of course, he is right about Carver’s deliberate use of thoughtful, slowed-down description to help to reify a story. But the man’s gazing out his kitchen window while pouring himself (another drink actually begins the story, and the girl's backward gazing helps to “frame" it-—even though both observations are not merely static and carry the thematic implications described aboven Likewise, looking closely at the verbs of “position” underlined above with those below, which follow in the same Paragraph--“fern Wag on the table . . . television set rast_e_d_Qn 119 . atggd a sofa and chair . . . desk Waa_phahad_againat (emphasis mine)--also conveys, on a subconscious level, a personified presence. Furniture and household objects may act as informing “subjects," a kind of man-made chorus that “witnesses” the human drama presented there. Can personification be found in a Carver story? Yes, in “Are These Actual Miles?" to cite just one example, the tires on their convertible “give a little scream" as Toni accelerates away to make an immoral “deal" with a _ customer, offering her body to cover the “bankrupt" Leo. Although they may be “survivors," Carver’s characters face threats to a secure source of identity, and often in the case of his male characters, threats to their sense of manhood. These threats typically are associated with financial insecurity. Few cultures, perhaps, equate successful manhood with material wealth as much as the American one; conversely, one’s manhood is called in question if one is poor or has difficulty making his way in the financial world. In “Are These Actual Miles?" Toni tells Leo as she pats her hair in the mirror, “You’re nothing" and “teasing" him, and later, after she returns from her “sale,” she screams at him “Bankrupt!” and, “She twists loose, grabs and tears his undershirt at the neck. ‘You son of a bitch,’ she says, clawing" (Whara 136). While this story describes the tenuousness of manhood within a threatening culture in an extreme WEY. to the extent that Leo considers hanging himself (“He understands he is willing to be dead" [132] ) , this story of male humilxiation and loss of manhood is a familiar theme in several 120 Carver stories. In only a relatively few stories do male characters transcend circumstances that, in effect, seem to question their manhood. The protagonists of “Where I’m Calling From" and “Elephant" and “Intimacy" find ways to redeem themselves in their own eyes, but in the earlier stories especially, many male characters suffer the psychological stresses of unemployment, alcoholic incapacitation, and the inertia resulting from a collapsed or collapsing marriage. This is not to say that, in many cases, the men are not at fault--in being alcoholics, or in being in debt, or in being unemployed, or in being apathetic. Even so, Carver’s stories are often realistic in their presentation of circumstances that tend to limit character growth and development; in particular, the theme of men belittled by their wives and by “society," which reinforces their lack of financial accomplishments by treating them as inferior. In “The Cabin," in my opinion, one of Carver’s best stories, the protagonist, Mr. Harrold, follows a pattern of past fishing vacations with his wife, but this time she is 'unaccountably absent; although Mr. Harrold tells Mrs. Maye that “She didn’t feel too well this week," when she tells him she’s Sorry his wife couldn’t come, he does not answer her (£11.35 147, 3L48). The implications of her nonappearance are various; although she may be simply sick, this seems unlikely because of tlme pointed way Mr. Harrold notices a man holding a woman’s arm 3&3 they go down steps, and by his pronounced negative response to 121 the young waitress, who seems preoccupied with other thoughts (146, 150). Clearly, something about his wife’s presence or absence has affected him subconsciously and unsettled him. It should be recognized here that the threat or menace affecting Mr. Harrold is internal: the disturbance and his responses are primary and subconscious, and exist close to his sense of self and this sense of self includes his sense of his own manhood. The inattentive young waitress has “touched a nerve" by first questioning his reservation and acting indifferently towards him, and the younger couple feel what he can not or does not feel now. Even Mrs. Maye, his only friendly acquaintance, looks more like Mrs. December now and hobbles up an incline to see him settled in. Telling him “You’re probably tired driving all that way" (148), she obviously regards him as being somewhat elderly, as well. But although he is conscious of all he observes, the story’s “clues" seem to suggest that Mr. Harrold is more vulnerable to future threats than he is willing to admit. In fact, “The Cabin" contrasts Mr. Harrold's own illusions of himself as a kind of knight-errant, with his fishing rod held up, to the reality of his own vulnerability at the hands of a small group of threatening youths with guns. As Ewing Campbell observes, “His response is a quixotic challenge to the barbarous who do not know or care about the traditional codes of hunting,” but he ends up experiencing the chilly river, a dry throat, uncontrollable yawning, and an emotional manifestation called ghaamha_hyatatiua and ‘L 122 in confusion, he rushes back to the cabin, losing his [symbolic male phallic] rod somewhere along the way. Back at the cabin he senses that he has lost something heroic, which existed only in his fantasies and nostalgic reveries of the past. (BMW 5) 4"“ Mr. Harrold’s emasculation is not just a physical feeling, but given his earlier feelings and sensibilities, this must change him in some more fundamental way--thus Carver’s story is not merely about losing one’s virility--it touches more fundamentally upon Mr. Harrold’s psyche: his sense of identity and male selfhood. Closely reading stories such as “The Cabin” allows readers to not only attend to the story’s textually, but to appreciate the stories “within" characters, those not explicated but bearing upon a character’s emotional and imaginative life. In fact, Carver’s realism is significant to the extent that it allows surrealism and expressionism to influence its presentation. Despite critical assumptions to the contrary, Carver's focus really is as he describes it, for readers, “a unity of feeling and understanding" (“Fiction of Occurrence and Consequence" 150), and as mentioned earlier, first an emotional connecting up and then an intellectual connecting up. But Carver's method for achieving this degree of reader engagement is not just what occurs on the surface of events present in his stories--the point made by his most negative 123 critics--instead, and in accordance with short story theory regarding what stories can succeed at best, Carver’s stories first engage readers almost at a subconscious level (for they use mythic or primal elements to engage primary concerns, such as identity loss) and also provide “clues” for readers to be challenged by, to better read and understand his stories. 6: Even so, Carver’s stories contrive to engage readers by their partial withholding of “certainties," which are, of course, l_ subject to interpretation. An element of mystery allows readers to construct their own precluding stories and tonalities. For example, Jeffrey Birkenstein citing Charles E. May's interpretation of Chekov’s dependence upon “a single situation in which everyday reality is broken up by a crisis" (“Chekov" 201), locates this crises in “The Cabin" at the point where the wounded deer first appears to Mr. Harrold: The deer represents his own foolishness with regards to the decisions he has made in his own life, and begins to address the issue of his missing wife: her absence is unexplained, but his longing for her is not. (51) Other commentators may locate the origins of this “story behind the story" having been presented forcibly earlier. For others, Mr. Harrold’s existential crisis does not begin until he becomes a threatened target himself by the delinquent and destructive young hunters. In all cases, however, it is clear that Carver presents not just a series of events realized 124 externally, but suggests another story (as Walton Beacham describes the task of short story writers), the “real story," lying “within the reader’s lower levels of consciousness (qtd. in Barry Menikoff 134)--and I would add, within the lower levels of the character’s consciousness, although that constitutes only part of the potential story for readers. Carver maintains that ‘h his literature is not just expression, but it is communication. However, what it communicates is often presented first in a language directed towards a reader’s subconscious or emotional world, and then later towards a reader's consciousness. One of the best ways to confirm this view would be to consider Carver’s early and middle career preoccupation with dreams in his stories: first with nightmares, often in a gothic vein and then later as less bizarre dreams. Although the role dreams play in Carver’s stories will be considered more fully in the next chapter, it is useful to note, in considering Carver as a neorealist, just how predominant they seem to be in his stories. In fact, they may be said to haunt his early and middle stories and exist on an imaginative spectrum that includes reveries, daydreams, and horrible, terrifying nightmares. This sensibility is far removed from the minimalist or Dirty Realist label, neither one of which is adequate to explore Carver’s aesthetic of human desire. Amazingly, daydreams, dreams, and nightmares inhabit the imaginations of a significantly large number of Carver’s characters. From “Fat” to “Night School" to “What's in Alaska" to “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" in 125 Carver’s first collection; from “So Much Water So Close to Home” to “Furious Seasons" from Faxigha_$aaaghs; from “Gazebo" to “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" in Carver's third collection, including James’ reveries in “After the Denim," dreams affect Carver’s characters, who reveal themselves as suggestible--if freely willful and autonomous--and highly and imaginative “people." Chapter 4 SHORT STORY THEORY AND CARVER'S STORIES Raymond Carver’s stories are neither merely superficial nor minimalistic, neither hyperrealistic nor nihilistic, but both realistic and expressionistic, a blending of the ordinary and the surreal; in short, complex and multilayered. However, their focus is upon the internal struggles and obsessions of their characters (whom Carver calls “people"). In my investigation of short story theory, this reference point of characters’ struggles will be used to determine how Carver’s stories work successfully to engage readers, both emotionally and intellectually. But in considering the internal struggles and imaginations of Carver’s characters, readers should also consider that these also are recognizably grounded in the real world of human experience. Although Carver’s stories are fictions and his characters fictive, when reading them from the contexts of short story theory, it is important to recognize this grounding, which gives Carver's stories much of their affective power. As Carver acknowledges to David Applefield: Every story I’ve written, with maybe one or two exceptions, has had its starting point in the real world. . . .There isn’t a story in any of my books that hasn’t really come from something I’ve witnessed, lived through, or overheard. (210-211) 126 127 Although Carver wrote stories as he says, in “the realistic tradition," his stories tend, especially, to foreground the imaginations and emotional concerns of characters, or to constantly suggest these and other menaces that exist “below the surface." According to most contemporary short story theorists, stories tend to foreground qualities, themes, and ideas, which exist below the surface of narrative; as Mary Rohrberger notes, “in the short story, meaning lies beneath the surface of the narrative" (“The Short Story: A Proposed Definition" 81). Of course, short stories typically do not contain complex or involved plots because of their brevity, but they reward readers in other ways. According to Richard Kostelanetz, the short story writer must depict “in depth rather than in breadth" the story that is there (215). For most contemporary short story theorists and general readers alike, the essence of storyness transcends the plots of stories. Carver’s first mentor and teacher of storywriting, John Gardner, asserts in Qn_Baggming_a_Ngyalist that one quality of an excellent work of fiction is that it is dreamlike in its working upon a reader’s imagination: We slip into a dream, forgetting the room we’re sitting in, forgetting it's lunchtime or time to go to work. We recreate with minor and for the most part unimportant changes, the vivid and continuous ataam the writer worked out . . ." (5). Other authors and critics have made a similar point about 128 short stories having attributes of dreams, even those about recognizably “real" characters. As noted earlier, Joyce Carol Oates describes the short story as a “dream verbalized" and a “manifestation of desire, perhaps only partly expressed," and having an element of “mystery" (214). Mary Rohrberger and Dan E. Burns add that a short story’s “images from the phenomenal world are transposed to the numinous realm, where they are free to operate in the reader’s mind metaphorically, as in a dream" (6). Clare Hanson adds to this view in her essay “‘Things Out of Words’: Towards a Poetics of Short Fiction" by describing the short story as a form that “is committed to the unknown, precisely to the Qhatata object of desire" (30). Even so, although a story may contain an element of mystery or obscurity, as Hanson observes, because of “the tight structure and strict requirements of the short story form," readers read this as a form that acts “in the widest sense as a frame, or limit, which allows a narrative to remain in a more fragmented but also in a more suggestive state than is possible in the novel" (25). Readers, according to Hanson, thus accept ellipses (gaps or absences) . . . in the story, which retains a necessary air of completeness and order because of the very existence of the frame. We thus accept a degree of mystery, ellision [sic], uncertainty in the short story as we would not in the novel. (25) Both writers and readers of this genre 129 allow images from the unconscious mind to fuel a short story and to present themselves in the text in a relatively nntranslatad state. Such images retain an air of mystery and impenetrability, an air of dream. They exist as much as figures of unconscious desires as consciously represented images. (25) Hanson adds that ellision [sic] in the short story relates to the movement of desire on the part of the Laadar. The imagination of the reader is stirred in a particular way by the elliptical structure of many short stories. Ellisions [sic] and gaps within a text offer a special space for the workings of the reader’s imagination, offer space for the image-making faculty which would otherwise lie dormant: the reader's desire is thus allowed, or rather invited, to enter the text. (25) Hanson, commenting upon the admission of authors as diverse as Kipling, Mansfield, Hemingway, Bowen, Frank O’Connor, and Flannery O’Connor, to the informing role of dreams in helping to construct their stories, goes further by suggesting that short stories may be structured like dreams (26), and that “in its connection with the unknown and with fantasy the short story is a form which is close to the unconscious" (31). According to Charles B. May, one of the functions of the short story is to question our everyday assumptions about the world and people, and a story's informing context might include “an encounter with the 130 sacred (in which true reality is revealed in all its plenitude) or with the absurd (in which true reality is revealed in all its vacuity)" (“The Nature of Knowledge" 133). The short story, according to May, “exists to 'defamiliarize’ the everyday” (133). Short stories tend to bring to the surface of consciousness, for characters and readers, aspects of reality interpreted by and related to the unconscious mind. Carver’s stories include characters who dream and tell stories, and these are incorporated into his stories to intensify shifts of sensibilities of characters to and from their conscious and subconscious minds. Additionally, Carver’s use of characters’ dissociation complements the ways stories act to defamiliarize the everyday: characters in Carver’s stories are suggestible and highly imaginative and open to explorations of unconscious desire. Images in Carver’s stories also act upon characters’ imaginations and upon those of readers. The role of stories to engage readers both textually (literally) and subconsciously--by images primarily, though also by narrative--is discussed in Hanson's essay. Hanson also suggests that language itself is at least partially interpreted within the context of human desire (24). The cumulative effects of one sentence building upon another in a narrative, whose frame gives it an additional resonance in a single reading, would seem to underscore the potential informing power of unconscious desire upon the short story’s text. Unconscious desire, whether located in specific tropes, images, imaginations, dreams, or stories- 131 within-stories, helps to constitute the story below the surface of plot or narrative, for Carver’s characters and for his readers. As Charles B. May observes in “Reality in the Modern Short Story," “indeed in the modern short story, idealized human desire-—unsayable, unrealizable, always hovering, like religious experience in the realm of the ‘not yet’--replaces the sacred revelation embodied in primal short-fiction forms" (372). And, in “Chekov and the Modern Short Story," May declares a “notion of character as mood and story as a hazy ‘eventless’ becoming is characteristic of the modern artistic understanding of story," and that “rather than plot, what unifies the modern short story is an atmosphere, a certain tone of significance" (200, 201). Walton Beacham’s definition of the short story, as a “‘process of anggaatign,’ with the real story ‘lying within the reader’s lower levels of consciousness'" (qtd. in Menikoff 134), describes two ways to read stories: stories as literary works of art and stories as processes within a reader’s psyche. What gives such tonalities and atmospheres coherence in a short story’s text has been described by Charles E. May and Suzanne Ferguson as the presentation and climax of a particularly meaningful experience--if not always for a character, certainly for a reader--the intensification of significance within a special moment. Ferguson comments that in the short story, we frequently see only one such privileged moment, which takes the place of the traditional ‘turning point,’ the climax of the plot. 132 Not much actual dramatized time passes, although in the memory and fantasy of the characters large reaches of ‘time' may be covered. (225) Working to give cohesion to this brief passage of time are selected details of an “impressionistic" nature, which according to Ferguson, may be used as settings to “metaphorically . . . .f. substitute for representation of action or analysis" (225). For Carver, as well, “the gradual accretion of meaningful detail" is an important criterion for a story’s success and overall quality; when added together, such details have a cumulative power (“All My Relations" 136). Together with a coherent field of impressionistic details and informing and symbolic imagery, short stories work to engage readers by what Donna Gerstenberger and Frederick Garber call “the truth of the imagination," which for them must necessarily reflect the contexts of human experience (3). And with respect to a story’s potential significance, there must be characters whose inner lives are subject to some “significant internal change," as noted by Jarvis Thurston (16). What is central to a short story, as described by most contemporary short story theorists, is an exploration of a character’s psychological world, and, specifically, his or her imaginative possibilities; stories act as venues for their expression and the working out of their desires, and the rendering of how characters encounter and handle their resultant conflicts. Michael Wood’s comment, that “Mr. Carver’s characters are imaginative in the extreme, almost 133 obsessively concerned with the minds of other people and their own fright" (34), emphasizes the difficulty of trying to analyze a collection of Carver's stories in_datail: their subjective imaginations are active as they live through, and narrate, their own stories. But according to May, one means by which short story writers who are realists can “express inner reality [is] by describing outer reality" through the use of informing objects and metonymic details, which because of the “thematic demands of the story" are “transformed into metaphoric meaning" (“Reality" 374). May cites “Why Don’t You Dance?" as an example of Carver’s technique of objectifying the “inner reality" of the unnamed man by his placing of furniture outside his house: the “inner reality" is thereby foregrounded within the story (377). By expressing a story’s concerns through the objectification of inner states of a character’s subconscious, and by obtaining a coherence of metonymic detail, readers are informed about what is at stake for characters. Even so, stories may also suggest more for readers than how a particular character is affected by his or her experiences. Stories may also suggest a deeper story than the character’s stories and additional ideas not specifically engaged by story characters. Because short stories may often act to question the world of “everyday experience," a reader’s response may sustain a story’s affect. For example, a story like “The Cabin" works to demythologize Mr. Harrold’s role as a knight- errant with the merest of details--as well as by his encounter 134 with the wayward youths--with the inclusion of his snack of cookies (Clarke 110). Readers know, perhaps, more about the influence of Mr. Harrold's fantasy life upon his behavior than “he does himself," at some point, and readers gain a larger perspective of his world than any character in the story does -.g (even though the author is not condescending to his characters). I John Gerlach comments that “story proper is more accurately defined by speculations it encourages on the part of the reader than by what actually occurs in the reported event. Plot is not necessary, nor is a fleshed-out sense of character and motive" (80). In this sense, stories should remain “open," for a time, for readers after the stories have been read. Characters, also, need not obtain complete closure within the confines of a story’s limited space-time frame, even though such potentialities should exist for characters to be able to benefit from their own significant experiences and from those of other characters. Thus, stories must provide a degree of potential emotional and intellectual closure for their characters, even though not all characters may actually obtain a significant degree of closure. While stories exist in one sense, at least, autonomously, what is more significant about them, about “fiction that matters," as Carver asserts, is how “the significance of the action inside the story translates to the lives of people outside the story [their readers]” (“Fiction That Throws Light on Blackness" 184). Readers also help to inform a story’s significance for themselves, even as they are informed and engaged by the story. If, as Clare and 135 May maintain, that a story suggests themes infused by unconscious desires, readers engage in reading stories both consciously and subconsciously. To sum up characteristics most contemporary short story theorists have used to describe how short stories successfully engage readers, Charles E. May, in his introduction to The New She;t_$tety_1heeties, gives the following description of what he calls their “family resemblances" and how (in general) short stories are related to their historic precursors: In their very shortness, short stories have remained close to the original source of narrative in myth, folktale, fable, and fairy tale. They, therefore, are more apt to focus on basic desires, dreams, anxieties and fears than novels are and thus are more aligned with the original religious nature of narrative. Short stories are therefore more apt to embody a timeless theme and are thus less dependent on a social context than novels. Consequently, short stories are more likely to identify characters in archetypal terms and are more patterned and aesthetically unified than novels are. For this reason, short stories are more dependent on craftsmanship and exhibit more authorial control than novels, making them closer to poetry and thus more “artistic." (xxvi) Because of their brevity, stories can achieve an immediacy and intensity that novels cannot; and also because of their run In di in St 31) St Dr 3 13 me] e”: 136 brevity, everything within them, including their formal elements, should cohere to create an aesthetic whole. (This, of course, includes every word and informing ellipse, as Allan Pasco stresses in “On Defining Short Stories," [125].) Although short story theorists do not always insist that short stories must be written to produce, as Edgar Allan Poe asserts, “a certain unique or single etteet" (47), reader engagement results from well- constructed stories that may work on various levels, complexly, and below the surface of conscious awareness: for example, their imagery may stimulate repressed desires for readers. A short story may contain a narrative that provides conscious meaning for a character and a reader, while additionally providing images, which because of their close proximity to the unconscious mind, work in an “adversarial relationship to discourse (narrative)--desire murders, condenses, freezes narrative” (Hanson 28). Regardless of the truth of the interaction of narrative and imagery, clearly it is possible for imagery and other formal elements to cause readers to question stories they read, and to continue to be engaged by their suggestions and implications. Most contemporary short story theorists find highly significant the emphasis in most short stories upon human desire and the unconscious. These stories provide an ongoing engagement for readers, which because of their openness, allow readers to imaginatively explore them. As mentioned earlier, short stories are not reducible to merely the exposition of plot, and this suggests the appropriateness of ‘1 137 Carver’s own goal regarding stories, that first there comes an emotional “connecting up" for readers, and later, an intellectual “connecting up." Although readers may disagree about the meanings located within his stories--some being established by inference, others by objectifications, others only hinted at-- repeated readings may help readers to better locate these; inasmuch as Carver informs his stories with an iconic intensity, which together with carefully rendered voices, give his stories a powerful imaginative affect for readers. Carver’s stories may thus describe a “truth of the imagination," even if declaiming such a truth adequately might prove to be difficult or impossible. Even so, when a coherence of formal elements occurs, some interpretations become more persuasive than others. Carver's imagery typically supports and coheres with his narrative, or becomes immediately a foregrounded or backgrounded context for his story. For example, in “The Fling,” the contrast between Les’s father’s need to be “understood”--for his past experiences to be seen in a more forgiving and illuminating context--is undermined by the proximity of an ashtray, whose bottom reads “HARRAH'S CLUB RENO AND LAKE TAHOE: good places to have fun" (£nxiene_$eaeehe 65). Other insistent images tend to crowd out the father’s narrative and compete for the son’s--and the reader’s--attention: 1) the forgotten white confectionery sack, recalling another informing image of the story, 2) Sally Wain’s “little paper sack” and 3) the woman at the airport bar, who 138 tosses her long red hair and snaps her fingers to music and gathers a crowd of applauding onlookers. In these contexts, Mr. Palmer’s “fling" looks, on one level, unimportant to his son, even though he clearly still resents his father for it. Readers, however, probably respond to the father more empathetically. Carver’s use of informing imagery is so interwoven with this story that it would hardly exist without it. When Carver rewrites and excises large portions of this story to make “Sacks" (included in What_We_Ialh_Aheht), he places the one framing image in his title, and it is the father in “Sacks" who notices the dancer and not the son--who even declines to reply to his question about her (“Did you see that?")--which makes the father now seem not only pitiful (an image projected by the forgotten sack on the bar) but also seem to be a less sympathetic character. As such, the later story suffers by «comparison, for readers of “Sacks" probably lack empathy for «either father or son. How characters respond to images gives readers distinct impressions of characters and about thematic Eilements within each story. Carver’s better stories allow these iJnages to help characters explore their concerns and lives imaginatively; readers, also, typically become engaged to do the same. George Tylutki maintains that no universally acceptable definition of the short story and its constituent elements is Possible and that it may take various forms; however, he concedes that of these two requirements of short stories, plot and 139 character, character is the more important (89). Even so, short stories cannot render characters fully, nor follow them through any sustained period of time. Readers know them intuitively, perhaps, from how their imaginative lives are rendered, and by the way short story writers inform readers, sometimes indirectly, about their specific dreams and desires. Various commentaries about how characters are represented in short stories seem to suggest that this genre is effective in focusing upon the individual rather than the group. As Randall Jarrell observes, the short story underscores the “primacy of [individual] wish fulfillment or desire over truth"; in fact, in “narrative [fiction], to understand everything is to get nowhere” (6,13). We have seen this kind of comment before: that for short stories to succeed, they must not only stir a reader emotionally, Jbut also involve a reader's imagination by their depth of .implication and suggestiveness. What makes stories work for readers, as Jarrell observes, is to allow them to move between tflae range of anticipation and complete fulfillment of desire (14). Short stories also seem to highlight a character who is in some special crisis, who is for a brief period undergoing some iParticular emotional stress or conflict. In Charles E. May’s introduction to Shnrt_Stnr¥_Thenries, he speculates: [Ilf the contemporary short story is fragmentary and inconclusive, perhaps it is because the form is best able to convey the sense that reality itself is 140 fragmentary and inconclusive. Such a view should be especially pertinent to the modern world. (5) The so-called open story, in which the ending appears fragmented or without seeming story closure, oftentimes, but not always, works to emphasize for readers a character’s own lack of closure; characters may, for example, in a Carver story, seem dazed or uncomprehending at the end of a story. However, I would maintain, such apparent similarity of nonclosure of a reader’s story and a character’s story, though perhaps intended by the author, is actually only momentarily “realized" in a reader’s mind. Carver’s stories do not provide obvious closure, at times, which may require readers to speculate about a story after reading its ending. Charles E. May describes the short story’s typical focus as one that “exists to ‘defamiliarize’ the everyday" because of its aability to focus upon and intensely render “moments when we are Inade aware of the inauthenticity of everyday life, those moments “Mien we sense the inadequacy of our categories of conceptual reality" (“The Nature of Knowledge” 133, 142) . If paradoxically, the short story is about a sensibility that may be called ‘transcendent, in its intensity, immediacy, and focus upon an authentic but unfamiliar self--and not subject to immediate Closure, as implied by May’s notion of defamiliarization--readers typically seem to anticipate a sense of storyness and closure (emotional closure, if not intellectual closure) at a story’s ending (May. Whine xxii). Austin Wright Ch ”Na .9. ti. HIE 141 describes this kind of “open-ended story”: “instead of being formless, as the term would suggest, [it] is recalcitrant in its rejection of conventional beginnings and ends, [and] is resolved by subtler notions of form” (119). These “subtler notions of form” are what I (and most contemporary short story theorists) would call a story’s formal elements--all elements of a story that contribute to our sense of its storyness, other than the primary element--the ending. Readers of stories apparently typically do not obtain immediate closure upon reading a story, as various short story theorists note, including John Gerlach, Charles B. May, Austin Wright, Susan Lohafer, Ian Reid, Valerie Shaw, and Mary Rohrberger, among others. Although Rorhberger agrees with Valerie Shaw, whom she quotes from W: “The short story’s success often lies in conveying a sense of unwritten, or «even unwritable things: the story teller accepts the limitations <3f his art, and makes his freedom an aspect of those same restrictions” (263—64); Rohrberger also asserts that readers of tflnese stories actively work to co-produce or “cocreate” the Imeaning within each story (“Between Shadow and Act” 43). Short Stories are thus designed, especially those of a more “open" Character, to require reader participation to locate the “unwritable things” as well as subtexts that convey thematic Content, including that of the unconscious through accumulated Metonymic details, which as May contends, “are transformed into metaphoric meaning" (“Reality” 374). 142 Rohrberger distinguishes between the “simple narrative" and “the short story proper,” and makes claims for stories that are appropriate for considering Carver’s stories as short stories: My own distinction between the simple narrative (I don’t like the term, but have difficulties with all others, too) and the short story proper is founded mainly on the presence or absence of symbolic substructures. Both categories partake of the qualities of unity and coherence; but in the simple narrative interest lies primarily on [the] surface level. There are no mysteries to be solved, no depths to be plumbed. Meaning is apparent, easily articulated and accomplished by simple ironic reversals. This kind of “plot” story, “character" story, or “setting” story is mainly representational and linear. Readers feel an immediate feeling of satisfaction in completion of the form. The short story, on the other hand, leaves readers with a set of emotions that cannot be easily sorted; readers are often confused as to meaning and find it almost impossible to state them. In this kind of story, reader satisfaction must be postponed until questions presented by the symbolic substructures are answered. In this way the short story makes of readers cocreators, active participants in the revelation of meaning, and it is in this interaction that a: ch “t to th: mo: tr: sit to 143 satisfaction ultimately rests. (“Between Shadow and Act” 43) One of the most contentious questions regarding Carver’s short stories is the degree to which Carver uses-~or fails to use--formal elements of the story to allow readers to achieve some measure of closure. As noted above, a primary means for readers to obtain story closure is to allow themselves to imagine what Carver’s characters are feeling and imagining in each story, and in each moment of crisis. What is “at risk” for each character? Horst Ruthrof suggests that readers can determine “the core situation of gravitational existential significance towards which the narrative material is organized” (he cites three situations: “final vision or revelation, rejection of false ‘moral premises, and the gain of a state of authenticity”-- typically, Carver’s stories involve the first and third taituations, whether realized or “de-realized” [102]). According tr) Ian Reid, a short story's text selectively focuses upon those “Kmnents for a character “when an individual is most alert or most alone" (28) . Readers of stories thus are given foregrounded “Knnents of an existential nature for characters. Even so, as Rohrberger contends, such moments are not immediately clear (or open) to readers: not only are these emotions not “easily sorted,” the other “meanings” of the story may be impossible to explain immediately afterwards (43). Readers must try to find closure--Dominic Head asserts, “a Consciousness of closure is operative in all short stories, even 144 those which are open-ended” (194)--to satisfy their need to benefit from the conflicts and problems presented in the stories, so will also look to other formal elements of a story to do so. Valerie Shaw’s description of the short story as an “impressionistic art . . . something complete yet unfinished” (13), underscores the implied role for readers to obtain story closure as a means by which stories are read--even as they find themselves engrossed by a story’s openness. Whether readers read a short story to openly explore, and sometimes resolve “our most urgent problems, even those we ordinarily shun,” as Simon Lesser contends (55), or, as Luigi Pareyson affirms, to enter in to it as a means of personal “performance" (qtd. in Eco, Ihe_Rele_et_the_Readet 63); readers need to engage in a short story’s tension between closure and nonclosure: the story needs to be suggestive yet deeply structured; informing, yet retaining a degree of mystery and ambiguity--all to more fully engage its readers. What Ian Reid states about “some short stories," is actually applicable to most engaging stories: that (as Shaw asserts) they are “complete," yet until read and worked over in the imaginations of readers, “unfinished”: Moreover, what makes some stories linger in the mind is that we are left uncertain about the nature and extent of the revelation, peak of awareness, that a character has apparently experienced. We sense that, while there has indeed been an important shift of 145 perspective in her/his view of things, its significance may not yet have been fully apprehended by that character. (58) Readers of short stories, then, sometimes have to work as detectives do (although if the stories’ concerns did not affect them on such an imaginative level, as well, they might be read merely as puzzles). Great stories, however, do provide readers with the satisfactions of “symbolic” clues (or as Rohrberger describes them, “symbolic substructures"), using “symbol” to mean any word that allows people to develop--imaginatively and intellectually--as human beings. Various critics find Carver’s stories indeterminate, lacking sufficient closure, with endings that seem arbitrary or inconclusive. But some short story theorists underscore the point that Carver’s stories actually do provide a measure of thematic closure, even if their endings do not typically give happy or tidy closure for a particular character. Short story theorists find that stories of quality require more from readers than simply attending to obvious expression of plot. Arthur Saltzman calls “the open-endedness or lack of resolution of his stories" one of “Carver’s ‘trademarks'” (13), and cites Carver's own comment from an interview with McCaffery and Gregory that “It would be inappropriate, and to a degree impossible, to resolve things neatly for these people in situations I’m writing about" (111). Carver adds, later in the same paragraph, On the other hand, I want to make certain my readers 146 aren’t left feeling cheated in one way or another when they’ve finished my stories. It’s important for writers to provide enough to satisfy readers, even if they don’t provide ‘the’ answers, or clear resolutions. (111) Of course, Carver's stories are not all the same with ‘r respect to their endings. Some, such as “Errand," provide a pointed closure--even though the story suggests as much as it portrays--others, such as “Where I’m Calling From,” may seem more tentative; while others, such as “Gazebo,” may seem puzzling. Even so, all provide “clues” to allow closely engaged readers to gain a reasonable degree of closure, even though it may be true of Carver's stories, as Thomas Gullason claims, that “great stories provide more questions than answers” (229). But in order to appreciate the story beneath the story and the questions a story presents, readers need to be able to begin to understand puzzling stories: if stories are too open-ended, they may resist a reader's expectations of closure; on the other hand, if stories are too closed, they disallow an engaging reading experience. Carver’s stories can both engage readers, even after an initial reading, and provide tentative closure. Most do not provide full and immediate closure, but can provide greater closure for readers sometime after their initial reading, as readers work out their clues, details, and implications. In this way, in how they are read (processed) and structured, they exhibit a pronounced semiopenness. 147 Short stories also, according to May, accommodate a reader’s sense of the mythic by remaining the genre “closest to the primal narrative form that embodies and recapitulates mythic perception” (“The Nature of Knowledge" 139). A story such as “The Cabin,” which debunks Mr. Harrold’s mythic sense of self, must first allow informing images, such as a poetically rendered landscape of the natural world to stir a reader’s imagination and sensibilities. Carver’s facility as a poet is evident here (Raymond Carver was awarded Eeetty magazine’s Levinson Prize in 1985 and authored six collections of poetry), and his prose, though firmly grounded in the real, suggests a mystical beauty-- and presence—-in Nature: Pine trees whose branches were heavy with snow stood on either side of the road. Clouds mantled the white hills so that it was hard to tell where the hills ended and the sky began. (Fitee 145) Likewise, “The Cabin” includes a mythic image of hunters, a primal, informing image in this story: “a big Frederic Remington representation hung on the wall at the far end of the room. You watched the lurching, frightened buffalo, and the Indians with drawn bows fixed at their shoulders" (146). The timelessness of this imagery is underscored by the drawn bows fixed to the shoulders of the Native American hunters, which while seen across the room, still helps to inform the moment when Mr. Harrold is caught or trapped in the river, his spirit hunted by the boy pointing a rifle towards his stomach “or else a little lower 148 down” (154). Although the mythic spell of Mr. Harrold’s world is debunked by his abandonment of his fishing rod--he really forgets about it as he is shocked and dislocated by his intense physical and psychological crisis--the story first requires a clear sense of this realm of myth, in order for readers to care about and empathize with Mr. Harrold: without this dimension (or sensibility) the story would lose its intensity for readers. May refers to the centrality of the heightening of a moment in which experience is concentrated (“The Nature of Knowledge” 139). When Mr. Harrold experiences himself as the object of this hunt, he, both biologically and psychologically, loses touch with his surroundings in a moment in which he imagines his death, a situation implied in the text but never stated. Mr. Harrold remains transfixed, unable to act normally: “Mr. Harrold nodded his head dreamily. He felt as if he wanted to yawn. He kept opening and closing his mouth” (155). Significantly, “The Cabin" concludes optimistically, unlike its prototype “Pastoral,” with Mr. Harrold warming to the little fire that Mrs. Maye provides for him in his cabin stove, a reminder of human warmth (Meyer, Raymend_gatyex 116). I would add that this restoration of Mr. Harrold’s sense of self by being symbolically reclaimed into the human family, represented by Mrs. Maye's fire, also works upon Mr. Harrold’s subconscious: “He let the warmth gradually come back into his body. He began to think of home, of getting back there before dark” (156). The ending may also suggest that Mr. 149 Harrold’s desire to return home before dark is prompted by the warming fire, an informing image of the story that also represents his unconscious desire for his wife. Although the nature of Mrs. Harrold’s absence is presented ambiguously, readers can reasonably infer that Mr. Harrold clearly associates her with their home. The woodland cabin and its warming fire are informing metaphors for her and their home. “The Cabin," read as Mr. Harrold’s story, is both an existential narrative and an exploration into a mythic unconscious realm: it also reads as an aesthetic whole by using various distinct formal elements, including the foregrounding of its title, and by compressing a particular moment or “single point" of narrative, which according to Ernst Cassier, “is the prerequisite for all mythical thinking and mythical formulation" (qtd. in May, “The Nature of Knowledge" 139). As such, it is deeply constructed, both by the accretion of informing details and by its depth of psychological engagement for Mr. Harrold. As such, the story’s imagery and narrative cohere and provide readers with a text that is open and easily readable. But it does provide sufficient ambiguity, with respect to the role of Mrs. Harrold and his relationship to her in the story (and the reasons why she doesn’t go fishing with him now), to allow readers to continue to be engaged by it after the first reading. Likewise, readers may remain unsure just what the story tends to suggest about the role of Mr. Harrold as a “hunter" of fish: elements in the text tend to suggest that such a role is 150 “natural" in the natural world but that the contemporary human world makes such roles into a self-destructive sport (the threatening boys are also clearly disliked by Mrs. Maye, who accuses them of vandalizing her shed). However, this theme is also undercut by implying people like Mr. Harrold, who wish to escape back to a mythic past role--not just as a knight-errant but as a hunter--can never do so again. In these ways, “The Cabin” invites new questions and provides readers with tentative closure but not final closure. Ewing Campbell maintains that Mr. Harrold’s name recalls “the milieu within which everything occurs and evokes a long list of Norse and Saxon heroes who, like King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, ended their lives in defeat” (Raymend_§atye1 6). The camp's name, Castlerock, and the act of vandalism, which brands the boys a group of latter-day vandals, and Mr. Harrold’s reveries as a knight-errant (“The sun and the sky come back to him now, and the lake with the lean-to" [151]) all cohere to deepen a reader’s sense of Mr. Harrold’s worldview and help to inform our reading of his story, as Campbell observes (6-7). While the story may suggest this milieu, Mr. Harrold’s name may only be coincidentally related to King Harold, and calling the destructive boys vandals may add little to the story. Even so, such details may actually be linked within the story and affect a reader subconsciously; if so, they help to inform the aesthetic value of a story that is neither completely open nor completely closed; but is both clear on its surface and ambiguous and 151 suggestive below its surface. The degree to which a story remains open or closed, and the manner in which it informs and coheres around a single compressed moment will vary from story to story in Carver’s work. “Everything Stuck to Him” is an interesting frame story whose focal point in time is ostensibly when the boy accidentally turned his breakfast plate into his lap, so that “everything stuck to his underwear” (What 134). The man relates this, his own story, to his daughter. “Everything Stuck to Him” emphasizes this moment by its title. Although Carver’s “Everything Stuck to Him" contains some omissions not found in “Distance” (in the original version in £3;ieue_$eaeene or in the later published versions), the basic plot is similar to that of the original story; although, some important events are lacking (depicted below). Both the first and third versions emphasize the distance of time from that incident by the stories’ titles. The word “distance" also recalls an experience of the young husband, which occurred soon after he had left to go hunting and several hours after he had talked to his wife about the fate of one of a pair of geese-~just after the other had been shot (“I’d see another goose turn back from the rest and begin to circle and call over the goose that lay on the ground” Whexe 190): The temperature had dropped during the night, but the weather had cleared so that the stars had come out. The stars gleamed in the sky over his head. Driving, the boy looked out at the stars and was moved 152 when he considered their distance. Carl’s porchlight [sic] was on, his station wagon parked in the drive with the motor idling. Carl came outside as the boy pulled to the curb. The boy had decided. (193) The man at the story's close has obviously changed from who he once was: as he stares through the window and sees through the darkness the snow falling outside, and sees the girl’s reflection in the glass as she studies her fingernails, he is no longer a naive young man. The title “Distance" emphasizes, also, the distance the young man once felt between himself and the rest of the universe after fighting with his wife and looking out at the stars. Both scenes are metaphoric in their representation and psychological embodiment of that (early) potential, and (later) actual, loss of closeness. This is made clear by the boy’s decision to forego the hunt and return to his wife and baby. He had told his wife that he would always try to shoot the bereaved goose circling his or her dead mate; looking at the stars and feeling alone, perhaps getting a premonition of loss, he returns to his mate as soon as he can. Carver’s restoration of the title and missing scenes also gives ”Distance” a depth and coherence “Everything Stuck to Him" lacks. However, some readers looking for story closure in “Distance” may feel unsure about the focal point of this story. Some questions are left unexplained. Austin Wright comments that “Distance” is “a typical recent example of a story with an I I ti di Si 153 unexplaining explanation” (125). Recalling that “in a story, everything should count” (123), Wright points out that the story seems intended to explain what went wrong in the marriage, yet in the anecdote, the couple, after a brief conflict, reconciles. The explanation does not explain. The reader is forced to fill in, to discover perhaps the narrator’s regret and mourning for a naive past when his problems seemed to have solutions. (125) “Distance” provides for Wright the recalcitrance of an “unexplaining explanation"--one of five varieties of resistance Wright locates in stories, whose effect is to stop our automatic processing of them while slowing down and deepening our engagement with them. By having to work through such resistance, the story seems to forestall immediate semantic processing, but because readers are encouraged by the open nature of the story to remain engaged by it, this story and others like it allow readers to carefully read them and think about them, so that for these readers, such stories remain more open than closed. Other readers may locate more closure in “Distance.” Carver’s story titles are among his most informing tropes. This kind of formal element may be employed in more than one way in a short story. In “Distance," “distance” not only refers to the boy’s sense of potential abandonment and his feelings of diminishment in a vast universe; the narrator of his story, the man of twenty years later, looks back from a distance more significantly marked for him by a measure of psychological 154 distance than by time. An indication of this is that he refers to himself in his narrative simply as “the boy" and to his former wife as “the girl." The narrator emphasizes their loss of names by referring to each of the girl’s sisters, whom he also found desirable, by name (“Sally was the girl’s sister. She was ten years older. The boy was a little in love with her, just as he was a little in love with Betsy, who was another sister the girl had. He’d said to the girl, ‘if we weren’t married I could go for Sally'” [Whete 189]). This “distant scene” of not naming a character has more than one implication, but one that fits the story is that the man wishes to objectify their story in his mind--to displace himself, perhaps in order to reintegrate his experiences then with his own now--or that the memories are so closely and disturbingly tied to his own psyche that to tell the story, he is compelled to find as much distance between then and “now" as possible. But “distance” is also a reference, clearly presented in the story's subtext, to the “distance”--the emotional differences-- between the boy and the girl. The boy is clearly infatuated with her and is immature, and their laughter over the spilt waffle, syrup, eggs, and bacon, and the spill itself, serve, as Adam Meyer observes, to remind the man that this “idyllic scene was fragile and destined to be short-lived” (Raymnnd_§axye1 108). Meyer cites the discussion about shooting the bereaved goose as at foreshadowing device, which it is; but the spill scene--as luaPPY and relieving as it is--is really a more relevant and more 155 informing scene, one that is vividly re-envisioned by the narrator through a distance of time and experiences. The scene is powerful because it displaces, almost instantly, the obvious tension in the couple’s uncertain and precarious relationship. Not only is the boy immature; the girl is immature, as well (“But who do you really love?” the girl asked. “Who do you love most in the world?” “Who’s your wife?” “And will we always love each other?" the girl asked [189]). She is troubled by his desire to shoot geese and by his defensive reply (“You can’t think about the contradictions" [190]); and more importantly, by his willingness to abandon his sick baby and upset wife. Readers who read between the lines (and who read the lines alone) can determine the fragility of a relationship in which the girl gives the boy an ultimatum: “You’re going to have to choose,” the girl said. “Carl or us. I mean it, you’ve got to choose.” “What do you mean?” the boy said. “You heard what I said,” the girl answered. “If you want a family you’re going to have to choose.” They stared at each other. (193) Lastly, “distance” clearly underscores the distance between the man who narrates his story and his daughter, who is visiting him in Milan for Christmas. The omniscient narrator describes her as “a cool, slim, attractive girl, a survivor from top to bottom" (186). The man, after the conclusion of his narratiAna, observes her reflection in the window and sees her studyilng laer 156 fingernails (197). When she does talk, she is “speaking brightly” and forcefully, but her father, almost a stranger now, is still caught up in his own narrative, and though he replies to her request to “show her the city. . . . [He] stays by the window, remembering that life" (197). The distance between father and daughter is underscored by his present reluctance to call her by name. Readers only learn about her name, and only once, from her mother, and in his narrative he calls her simply “the baby” (188). Carver uses tropes carefully, such as in titles. Bill Delaney observes how titles such as “Fat,” “Gazebo,” “Vitamins,” “Feathers,” “Cathedral,” “Boxes,” and “Menudo” act as external symbols of characters' subjective states (439). Many titles are concise or incisive, a number are questions or one-word titles, and all carefully focus upon a story’s thematic concerns to provide increasing coherence or complexity (as with “Distance”). For example, in “What's in Alaska?” Mary announces to Jack, at the story’s beginning, that she may be accepting a job in Fairbanks, Alaska. This opportunity seems to be exciting to her as she intrudes on Jack while he is bathing, gives him a beer, then asks for his acceptance. (She nodded. “What do you think of that?" [Where 71]). But at the story's conclusion, she asks Jack, “What's in Alaska?" (85). The title question underscores her own transient focus upon their relationship. Her complaint to Carl and Helen, that “Jack's on a little bummer, tonight” appears to come from nowhere, and Jack responds, “Why do you say 157 that?” (73). Although Carver's incorporation of humor throughout this story prevents it from being a darker drama, from Jack’s point of view, it clearly suggests Mary’s desire to leave Jack. Various clues about this are presented in the story, such as Jack noticing Mary and Carl in the kitchen: “He saw Mary move against Carl from behind and put her arms around his waist” (78). The answer to the title question, however, gives this story its focus: someone other than Jack. Rereading “What’s in Alaska?” helps to confirm for readers the state of Mary and Jack's relationship by locating additional “clues," but the story's title is initially suggestive to readers of Carver's stories in locating overarching meaning. The significance of names and naming in Carver’s stories can scarcely be overemphasized. Characters who are belittled by others are given abbreviated names or nicknames; thus, the middle-aged man in “Why Don't You Dance?” is called “the old guy” (What 10). Likewise, Ross in “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit” is referred to as Mr. Fixit: “Mr. Fixit did okay for a little guy who wore a button-up sweater” (What 19). Also, in “The Calm,” Charles, a guard, refers patronizingly to the deer he shot as “old Mr. Buck” (What 117), and thereby gives more force to the cruelty of his kill, which works as an informing image in this story. In “One More Thing,” L. D. ’5 reduced status in the story is marked by his abbreviated name. In “Feathers” Jack hangs up 158 the telephone on Olla because he cannot recall her name, and this failure “to connect” phatically foreshadows the failure of his marriage to Fran and their failure to become friends with Bud and Olla. Likewise, when Jack stops calling his wife “Swede,” after she cuts her long, alluring hair, readers sense that the conclusion of the story will suggest that their relationship, f. too, has been severed. ‘ Many readers are puzzled by the ending of “Gazebo”; however, knowing the importance names and naming have in Carver's stories, it is possible to give this seemingly wide-open and inconclusive ending a greater degree of closure, although, perhaps, not final closure. Of significance is the couple’s phatic use of language and the role their names play in this usage. At the story's beginning, the first word of dialogue is Duane’s: “Holly, this can't continue. This has got to stop.” Holly replies, “Duane, this is killing me” (What 21). What is somewhat unusual in this first conversation is how each partner begins a spoken sentence using the other partner’s first name. And, after Holly says, “I’m no good anymore,” Duane just replies, “Holly” (22). Apparently, the inflected tone is meant to convey as much as the name itself, for Duane and Holly exchange each other’s names throughout this short story: this is how they communicate. At one place, Holly's name is used to express missing dialogue, which for Holly and Duane is completely understood, for example: “I'm not talking crazy” she goes. “Nothing's crazy 159 about Nevada. You can stay here with your cleaning woman. I'm moving to Nevada. Either there or kill myself.” “Holly!” I go. “Holly nothing!" she goes. (25) Complementing such increasingly cryptic dialogue are instances between the couple of nonverbal communication: “She sets her lips and gives me her special look” (25). (Reading “Gazebo” is a lesson itself in close reading.) Again, Duane, the narrator, unintentionally recounts their own private use of language: I don’t have anything to say. I feel all out of words inside. I give her the glass and sit down in the chair. I drink my drink and think it's not ever going to be the same. “Duane?” she goes. “Holly?” My heart has slowed. I wait. Holly was my own true love. (26) Although it appears that Duane is a poor narrator; in fact, he clearly tells the implied reader some vital information. What is clear is that he addresses his reader differently than he does Holly, and may not want the reader to read his private dialogue too closely. He does leave readers “clues," however, as to the ending: “There was a funny thing of anything could happen now that we realized everything had” (27). Another clue given is his 160 narrative overview of his sexual encounter with Juanita, the woman who worked as a maid at the motel. He tells readers he “hadn’t noticed the little thing before, though we spoke when we saw each other. She called me, I remember, Mister” (23). But after “one thing and another,” their relationship changed in a distinctive way as soon as she called him by name: “She started calling me by name” (23). After their first meeting (when they were both working), Duane recalls, “She smiles and says my name. It was right after she said it that we got down on the bed” (23). Clearly, Duane is telling the reader about his own suggestibility and the effect hearing his name being called has for him, throughout this story, that he and Holly seemingly only have to say the other’s name in order to communicate clearly to each other. At the story's conclusion, Duane tells the implied reader the following: I stay there. I pray for a sign from Holly. I pray for Holly to show me. I hear a car start. Then another. They turn on their lights against the building and, one after the other, they pull away and go out into the traffic. “Duane," Holly goes. In this, too, she was right. (29) Recalling the emotional power hearing his name has on Duane, that this one word triggered his sexual arousal towards the maid, readers might conclude that “Duane”--in Duane's mind-- stands for a request for lovemaking, although this cannot be 161 proven. Significantly, the story’s beginning is equally ambiguous as to Holly's feelings: “That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window” (21). Recalling the story’s beginning and reading about how Holly describes her feelings, readers might conclude that Holly either will leave Duane or make love to him. Because the story concludes at night (the cars pull away from the motel with their light on), and because of Duane’s assertion that “anything could happen now," and because of his lack of expressed grief in his last statement (“In this, too, she was right"), readers might conclude that this story ends (as do some others) with an unnarrated but exciting act of lovemaking. The seemingly completely open ending of “Gazebo” is an extreme example of Carver's stories' endings that seem to preclude possibilities for closure (some critics, such as Adam Mars-Jones, Peter LaSalle, and John Aldridge strongly complain that Carver’s stories' endings lack closure). But here, too, closure is possible, and, I would maintain, all of his other stories provide more clearly interpretable instances of story closure. Various critics contend that Carver never uses metaphors in his stories. For example, Robert Towers asserts that Carver's “style is sternly denotative, allowing no scope for metaphor or linguistic exuberance” (37). William L. Stull's often-quoted description of Carver's typical stories as “elliptical, understated, and studiously opaque" suggests the same point (“Beyond Hopelessville” 1). Kirk Nesset’s assertion that 162 “Carver’s metaphors refute resemblance even as they seem to assert it, with likeness toned down to the point of denial” (44) is a familiar kind of comment one reads from many of Carver's critics. Nesset asserts that though readers may find metaphors-- he lists the fat man in “Fat,” the shiny convertible in “What Is It?" the steelhead in “Nobody Said Anything,” the peacock in p “Feathers," a broken icebox in “Preservation,” and a cathedral in “Cathedral”--they lack sufficient metaphorical density and coherence. According to Nesset, although such informing images serve as tropes, they do not serve as metaphors (44-45). But within the context of stories in which characters are highly imaginative, such informing images clearly act suggestively and metaphorically in the minds of these characters. In “Nobody Said Anything,” what Nesset describes as a “sickly green steelhead” is much more in the eyes of the boy (as I have described above). Nesset comments that “while the fish tends to glow with tentative meaning, Carver the author chooses not to spell it all out” (44). But, again, Carver's method works better by not “spelling it all out,” and so conveys a sense of wonder of Nature’s processes for both the boy and the reader: both the boy and the image (as indicated earlier) seem transfigured in the last scene: in fact, the boy holda_up this mythic image--no longer green now, but “looklingl silver under the porch light” (Whara 20). Nesset’s assertion regarding Carver's use of informing metaphoric images, that “whatever connections are to be made Carver implies, we must make for ourselves" (44), fails to “E St< fa: 01( am as 163 recognize their resonance for Carver’s characters. William Delaney mentions two objects that act as metaphors: the bridle in “Bridle” and cardboard boxes in “Boxes.” In “Bridle," Delaney asserts: The naive narrator does not understand the significance of the bridle but the reader feels its poignancy as a symbol. The bridle is one of those useless objects that everyone carts around and is reluctant to part with because it represents a memory, a hope, or a dream. (441) Yet, Marge, the manager of the motel and narrator of this story, is a highly imaginative character. She also seems fascinated by the Holitses, who have driven from Minnesota in an old station wagon to her and her husband’s motel (somewhere in Arizona). She receives their payment in cash (“U.S. Grants”), and after noticing Mr. Holits carrying in a bridle, she, lacking as she says, anything to do, writes her name in ink on each bill: [across] Grant’s broad old forehead: MARGE. I print it. I do it on every one. Right over his thick brows. People will stop in the midst of their spending and wonder. Who's this Marge? That’s what they’ll ask themselves, Who’s this Marge? (Cathadral 192) This story is fully developed and narrated, and when Marge goes to check and clean the Holitses' motel unit after their departure, she notices the bridle left behind. Just as when she 164 was marking up the “U.S. Grants,” she now speculates about whether it was left behind accidentally or on purpose, and describes it, its use, and how it might feel if a person were to experience it as a horse would: The rider pulls the reins this way and that, and the horse turns. It’s simple. The bit’s heavy and cold. f If you had to wear this thing between your teeth, I guess you'd catch on in a hurry. When you felt it pull, you'd know it was time. You'd know you were going somewhere. (207) Again, a story's informing object works to transform a character's imagination, and here it serves to emphasize Marge's feelings about her not going anywhere, of being stranded with an oblivious husband (“He acts like nothing has happened or ever will happen” [207]). Marge understands, feels deeply, and imagines what it might seem like to go someplace and do something interesting and different. Just before she describes her marking up the fifty-dollar bills, Marge tells the implied reader “All I know about Las Vegas is what I see on TV--about enough to put into a thimble” (192). Because of her imagination and strong desire for a fuller life, such an object symbolizes a hope for a significant change in her life. In “Boxes,” the narrator’s mother's situation is the opposite, in some ways. The informing image of cardboard boxes underscores her lonely, transient, and disturbed lifestyle, moving from place to place and never finding the means to get 165 along successfully with others, including her son (the narrator), who seems unable to help her “settle down.” Delaney sees these boxes as a metaphor for homeless people of different kinds, including those “who are considered by some to be useless in their old age and a burden to their children” (442). Ewing Campbell points out the “implied metaphor of the father's adultery” in “Sacks” (Baymgnd_§aryar 33), and readers of the story may recall that the affair began with this informing object (“this little paper sack" What 39), and the story ends with the narrator recalling how he left his sack of gifts on the bar (45). The forgotten gift sack serves as a means for readers to remember the adulterous father, even though for the son, the narrator, its power of suggestion, that he has abandoned his father--which, for readers, is evident in the story--is repressed; instead, he uses it to complain about his wife’s weight problem (45). Carver's use of objects is almost always careful and purposeful, and helps to inform the thoughts and feelings of his imaginative characters; likewise, imagery in Carver's stories is often compelling for characters and readers. In “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" disturbing feminine images haunt Ralph, the cuckolded husband, who after learning from Marian about her past infidelity, leaves his home, gets drunk, and acts out his repressed former alter-ego, “Jackson." In the ending, Ralph returns to purposefully seek to connect with Marian once again-~physically and imaginatively—-from a deeper sense of self (one that has been reintegrated). Campbell obsex works supp] Ralp effe impc mere imag imag give is i 166 observes how such a shock of realization of his primal desires works to dissociate Ralph, and in so doing, his formerly suppressed imagination explodes: His imagination, dormant for so long, invests otherwise innocent sounds and objects with the power to accuse: traffic proclaims his cuckoldry; a rack of r antlers confronts him with deception. His measurement of himself is displaced by suffering, and for the first time in his life, Ralph Wyman is alive. (Raymgnd Carya; 29) What binds this story together, giving it coherence, is Ralph's disturbed imagination, which is hallucinatory in its effect on him. Dorothy Wickenden makes a related and an important point about Carver's stories: “These characters don't merely observe and exist; they actively suffer” (38). Carver’s imagery in this story is surreal, and the intensity of such imagery, a manifestation of Ralph’s highly charged imagination, gives attention to Ralph’s suffering: the conflict of the story is internal and psychological. Even though Ralph gets mugged, and lies sprawled on the pavement, his suffering is internal, as he is forced to acknowledge his own fear of his wife’s sexuality: “Why did you, Marian?” he asked. She shook her head without looking up. Then suddenly he knew! His mind buckled. For a minute he could only stare dumbly at his hands. He knew! His mind roared with the knowing. (Will? 238) inve accu with call actx his SUI mar hit in he ca: ca: see u re sex: 167 As Campbell comments, Ralph’s highly charged imagination invests otherwise innocent objects with a disturbing power. The accumulated number of them also gives this story a strangeness within a formerly familiar and an ordinary setting, which Stull calls Carver's “trademark.” But Carver's intensity of imagery actually precludes any such synthesis: Ralph is transformed by his experiences after learning of his cuckoldry, and these surreal images move his psyche in an ominous and disturbing manner. Not only does he imagine--the subtext being in italics-- himself striking his wife; he is terrified by surreal imagery, and especially, for him, a suggestive “emasculating” series of feminine images. He is “disturbed” by seeing Marian’s “breasts pushing against the white cloth” of her blouse in Mexico, “an intensely dramatic moment into which Marian could be fitted but he could not” (229). When leaving a bar, during his nighttime carousal, Ralph sees a “woman toss her hair as she got into the car: He had never seen anything so frightening” (240). The scene of Ralph feeling himself about to vomit, and his “remembering” Marian’s surreal presence, is a blending of images sexual and violent. Surreality, as an evil presence, fills Ralph’s imagination as he stares at his tablecloth with its tiny black coaches; and after he returns from his nighttime carousal, and showers, and looks at “the clipper ships making their way across the wide blue sea of the plastic shower curtain," and remembers the little black coaches on the tablecloth, he almost cries out “Stop!” p—i’x-v—phv-a-w .. — 168 (250). Carver’s use of informing imagery works to objectify--and sometimes transform-—the subjective selves of his character, and, as such, works to inform an imaginative subtext in the minds of readers. Such imagery may work, seemingly, independently of the narrative events presented, as the coaches and clipper ships in “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" which may be reminders for Ralph of the car in which Marian cuckolded him; although such powerful imagery may seem inconclusive for readers, their affect upon a character can give readers an insight into a character’s psyche. In so doing, Carver invites readers to first connect with the imaginative subtext, then to reprocess and speculate upon the narrative portion of the story, giving the story greater depth and significance for readers. Julio Cortazar describes the role of informing imagery: to help engender an intensity and a tension in stories, “like a dynamic vision that spiritually transcends the camera’s field of vision,” with its tension being there “from the first words or first scenes” (28, 29). This recalls Carver’s own method of beginning a story: with an evocative phrase or image incorporated into a story’s formal elements to give readers and characters a feeling of coherence and sense of storyness. Other informing images that work upon characters in a transforming manner, preserving for these characters a “memorable moment,” include the ugly baby, a plaster cast of teeth, and the peacock in “Feathers" for Fran-~even though the change in their relationship came after “the kid had come along, all of that, 169 Fran would look back on that evening at Bud’s place as the beginning of the change” (Where 354): Indeed, these images seem to take a strong hold upon Fran's psyche: “Goddamn these people and their ugly baby,” Fran will say, for no apparent reason, while we're watching TV late at night. “And that smelly bird, she'll say. “Christ, who needs it!” Fran will say. She says this kind of stuff a lot, even though she hasn't seen Bud and Olla since that one time. (354-55) In other stories, one object or image plays a dominating, informing role in a character’s imagination; some examples include: a vacuum cleaner in “Collectors”; Dummy's drowned corpse in “The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off," (which immediately prompts the narrator's father to tell his son: “Women. . . . That's what the wrong kind of woman can do to you, Jack” [211]). In “Are These Actual Miles?” the informing image in Lee's mind is not just a disappearing convertible; rather it is Toni’s stretch marks, which refer back to the title, and, imaginatively juxtaposed with the one shiny car, metaphorically question the fidelity and “value” of Leo’s mate, and the value of his own life, which he has spent with her over a period of time: They are like roads, and he traces them, in her flesh. He runs his fingers back and forth, first one, then another. They run everywhere in her flesh, dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. He remembers waking up the 170 morning after they bought the car, seeing it, there in the drive, in the sun, gleaming. (Whfilg 137-38) Other transforming images in Carver’s stories include Susan Miller's floating, naked corpse, especially for Claire, in “So Much Water So Close to Home,” provoking Claire to try to reestablish her relationship with her husband. “Menudo” and “Intimacy” contain autumn imagery of fallen leaves, leaves that signify the passage of time and the need of the protagonists to “move forward” in their lives before they each conclude prematurely. Various other images inform Carver’s stories, some of which require that readers work through their implications. For example, in “Where I'm Calling From,” readers may wonder whether or not the narrator/protagonist will succeed in surviving the threatening cold of alcoholic withdrawal and isolation, metaphorically detailed in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire": most critics suggest that he will. Even so, the metaphorical image means more to the narrator than just a “story”: life or death, growth or withdrawal, hang in the balance. Such images are compelling for Carver's characters, who because of their active imaginations, serve to give coherence to their individual stories and, thereby, help to structure each narrative, giving each the status of an open-~and engaging--story. One final element that Carver uses effectively to help to frame or inform his stories, in order to give them a greater sense of storyness, is his use of light and darkness. Readers 171 may be surprised to know that over half of his stories’ conclusions take place at night. Not only does this technique give a sense of closure or unity to many stories; the dark settings, even when the scenes are indoors, give such stories a special stillness or vibrancy: characters (and readers) are more suggestible at night, a period just before sleep, when their conscious minds rest, while their subconscious minds are more active, especially during dream states. Special scenes in darkness gain power for characters and for readers. For example, in “The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off,” the view inside Dummy's barrels full of baby bass is primal in its presentation of the potency of these living beings. The mystery of life itself is suggested by their furious and ongoing swimming in the darkness--underscoring, as well, the contrast between Dummy’s fertile pond and his own unfruitful and troubled marriage (which leads to his murder of his wife and his suicide): “a million bass fingerlings were finning inside. It was the strangest sight, all those live things busy in there, like a little ocean that had come on the train” (Where 201). In “I Could See the Smallest Things,” Nancy, the narrator, who is awakened by the sound of her gate, goes to her window and beholds a familiar scene transformed by moonlight: There was light enough so that I could see everything in the yard-~1awn chairs, the willow tree, clothesline strung between the poles, the petunias, the fence, the gate standing wide open. 172 But nobody was moving around. There were no scary shadows. Everything lay in moonlight, and I could see the smallest things. The Clothespins on the line, for instance. (What 31). The special surreal quality such a scene evokes in Nancy's mind also stirs her imagination. Outside, in Sam’s yard, Nancy observes a plane flying overhead, and envisions the scene inside the cabin: (I imagined the people on it sitting belted in their seats, some of them reading, some of them staring down at the ground [34]). Later, after returning to bed, she notices some dribbled saliva coming from Cliff’s mouth (whom she tries again to waken), which she associates with the slimy slugs Sam was poisoning. Much of the menace that Carver's characters face is often associated with changes in light and darkness. Insomnia, fatigue, anxiety about her marriage, and nightmares plague Nan in “The Student’s Wife." Her psychological tension leaves her on her knees by the time morning arrives, begging God to help her and her husband. What would ordinarily be a calming or refreshing morning is menacing to her: no sunrise she had ever seen or read about “was as terrible as this” (Where 42). Even within her bedroom, the light is disturbing to her as she beholds her husband in sleep: “He looked desperate in his heavy sleep, his arms flung out across her side of the bed, his jaws clenched. As she looked, the room grew very light and the pale sheets whitened grossly before her eyes” (43). 173 Menace, as a threat to the psyche, is often typically associated with oncoming darkness or with darkness itself: most young children, at some point, are afraid of the dark, and images shown in darkness usually have the potential to appear more threatening. In “What’s in Alaska?" Jack's heart turns as he thinks he sees a pair of small eyes looking his way from the darkened hallway. In “So Much Water So Close To Home,” the flashlights of the fishermen, whose light beams “play over the girl’s body” (as well as their leaving her tethered nude corpse facedown in the river for two days while they got drunk, told coarse stories, and caught fish), underscores for Claire their male callousness (Enziehe_seaeehe 43-44). Claire recalls another victim murdered near the town where she grew up when she was a girl, whose image is reflected, perhaps, in Claire’s last words in this version-- and in Carver's final version in Where_1;m_galling_firem :“For God's sake, Stuart, she was only a child” (61). Learning that the fishermen found her at night helps to fix this image, I suspect, more disturbingly in Claire's imagination. Carver uses diminished natural light to underscore a shift of tone or mode in stories, also. In “Chef’s House,” the idyllic summer setting, in which Wes and Edna try to live as husband and wife again after Wes's “recovery" from alcoholism, has an oceanfront view and the rousing smell of salt air. But with the fall afternoon clouds that “hung over the water” comes bad news for the couple. After giving up hope because he is asked to 174 leave the borrowed house, Wes closes the drapes inside, signaling his withdrawal, again, into alcoholism, because, unlike Edna, he lacks a necessary belief in his own possibilities for growth: “Wes got up and pulled the drapes and the ocean was gone just like that” (What: 302). In “Popular Mechanics,” the actual scene of a baby being ,9 torn apart is never actually presented, but the story recalls Solomon's decision (in 1 Kings 3) to give to the just woman her baby by threatening to divide it; although, as Norman German and ‘ Jack Bedell observe, “In Carver's story, the baby's welfare is obviously not the ‘issue'" (259). The growing darkness in which this story takes place and the snow melting into dirty water inform the tone within the scene: dark and ominous. German and Bedell contend that “What was snowy pure is now corrupt” (259). Not only do the parents become more upset toward each other, with their raised voices; the other “meteorological metaphor” of streaks of dirty water running down from a window that faced the backyard helps to inform the mood of this story of angry and corrupted characters' sensibilities (260). “Intimacy" is another story with a mythic quality about it, according to Ewing Campbell (Raymend_§aryer): [the writer-narrator] goes to his knees and, like the diseased men of Gennesaret seeking wholeness by touching the hem of Christ's garment, grasps the hem of her dress, refusing to let go. It is in such gestures that Marilynne Robinson finds “the germ of 175 myth and archetype” within Carver's fiction [35]. His act also reminds us of Jacob refusing to release the angel until he is blessed. “It's crazy, but I’m still on my knees holding the hem of her dress. I won’t let go. I’m like a terrier, and it’s like I’m stuck to the floor. It’s like I can’t move” [Where, 451]. (73-74) Campbell also notes the presence of autumn leaves as symbols of loss: “lost youth, lost love, lost lives--and Carver’s late fiction makes use of this tradition, but with a twist. In his work, leaves also engender guilt” (72). Campbell adds that at the story's conclusion, the narrator complains that “‘Somebody ought to get a rake and take care of this' [Where 453], as if these leaves are the scattered remnants of an intimacy that could be gathered up and restored or, at least put into some sort of order” (72). Campbell may well be correct about this element of the narrator's guilt being imaginatively associated with the fallen leaves. In the fourth-to-the-last paragraph, however, the narrator comments about the morning light: So she walks me to the front door, which has been standing open all this while. The door that was letting in light and fresh air this morning, and sounds off the street, all of which we had ignored. I look outside and, Jesus, there's this white moon hanging in the morning sky. I can't think when I've 176 ever seen anything so remarkable. But I’m afraid to comment on it. I am. I don’t know what might happen. I might break into tears even. I might not understand a word I’d say. (452) Carver's use of informing light gives this story's conclusion a hopeful quality, as with other stories in his later period that end in morning scenes (“Menudo” and “Elephant”). Unlike so many stories that end with characters in darkness, some joy has been revealed to these characters, and for readers. The primary affect that light has upon human beings, once the province of the unconscious, is now also being studied scientifically (phototherapy increasingly is being used to cure fatigue and depression, for example). Light itself--and light's absence--are among the most powerful images and symbols in human experience. (Art, religion, literature, and science are all closely associated with its ramifications.) Carver’s sensitive use of light and darkness works upon his characters' subconscious imaginations and helps to inform stories, as well as to frame them. Thus, readers see how Carver's focus is not looking upon characters externally, per se (photo-realistically), but rather looking within them, locating their stories within them as “people.” Regarding Carver’s use of symbolism in “A Small, Good Thing,” Kathleen Westfall Shute’s essay “Finding the Words: The Struggle for Salvation in the Fiction of Raymond Carver" details how grieving parents, grieving over the death of their innocent i.‘ 177 son, find a means “of salvation through communion” (126) with the formerly ominous baker, who offers them some comfort, and, in the process, achieves some relief of his own. As Shute observes, the baker breaks open the heavy bread “like the Eucharist” (126). Readers of this story will also note the comforting early morning light (“the high, pale cast of light in the windows”), which like the sweet rolls and warmth within the bakery, give the Weisses a means of comfort (for both their hearts and spirits). In “Cathedral," a kind of story closure is obtained, paradoxically, by the narrator no longer feeling enclosed with his house: “I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything” (Where 375). The liberating feeling of helping to imaginatively construct a cathedral by putting his hand to work to draw one, and Robert (a blind man) following his progress and, at the end, actually placing his fingers on top of the narrator’s fingers, underscore a point Robert makes: “What's a cathedral without people?” (374). In this scene, the blind man helps the narrator to see how such meaningful structures can liberate oneself from the imaginative confines of selfishness (the narrator’s wife even tells him that he does not have any friends [359]). The symbolic act of building by drawing allows the narrator to understand something about his world that he had not realized before: the liberating power of friendship and the subsequent release from self-imprisonment. The ending here is semiopen, for although the narrator gains some measure of closure with Robert 178 and is realizing other dimensions to his social world (the story also suggests a spiritual awakening through communion), he is free to explore his imagination more deeply. Likewise, readers may imagine his psychological “release," yet still need to ask more questions about this story. Readers know the narrator's world is changing, even though he has difficulty telling the implied reader his state of sensibilities: “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. ‘It’s really something,’ I said.” (375). Carver’s stories also really provide “something”--namely, storyness. Storyness, as described by Gerlach and others above, is also an interactive process between characters’ imaginative internal and external worlds, giving coherence for readers by informing formal elements. In such stories, characters’ desires and imaginations lead them to explore their worlds, in which they can also receive a measure of psychological closure. Carver's stories allow us to come closer to the story “below the surface" with each reading, exploring more deeply a Character’s desires and psyche. In this process, these fictive constructs become increasingly open to us psychologically; likewise, by rereading, we may obtain an increasing measure of story closure, if not ultimate closure. Chapter 5 CARVER'S MORAL VISION AND HIS SEMIOPEN SHORT STORIES In “Reality in the Modern Short Story,” Charles E. May notes how “in the realistic short story, metonymic details are transformed into metaphoric meaning by the thematic demands of the story that organize them by repetition and parallelism into meaningful patterns” (374). Of course, the author of such stories must be selective in choosing some details to present while ignoring or omitting others, which might detract from a central theme or imaginative impression. Carver’s use of objectification and selection of informing images are examples of metonymic detail and formal elements that do this. May also maintains that the unified tone of the short story suggests that by breaking into the temporal flow of life and infusing it with the perspective of the talker, the realistic short story creates not a “slice of life” (which suggests an arbitrary delimitation), but rather a subjectively charged experience motivated by the teller's need to discover and reveal meaning. The problem for the writer then becomes how to transform a series of real events into something more than mere events, something that has meaning. Although 179 180 generally the realists rejected the Emersonian belief that every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact, short-story realists still insisted that natural facts arranged within an aesthetic pattern can resonate with meaning. Thus, in the modern short- story, the only order possible is aesthetic order, and the only resolution possible is aesthetic resolution. It is as if short story writers, while dismissing the supernatural as unknowable, focus on another kind of unknowable: the unsolvable and unsayable elements of idealized human desire. (375) May includes Carver as such a realist, whom he describes with Chekov and Hemingway, as being writers who self-consciously are practitioners of these characteristics: a literary technique that insists on compression, a rhetorical method that reveals meaning by leaving things out, and a language style that creates metaphor by means of metonymy. Moreover, all three authors attempt to express inner reality by describing outer reality, and frequently thematize the human dilemma of trying to say the unsayable (369). May's analysis is more insightful than most any other regarding Carver’s method and structuring of story, particularly with regard to his use of objectification to display inner desire. (After all, from a person’s behavior, we might infer his or her desires. Also, a person's possessions--such as the 181 middle-aged man’s records and furniture in “Why Don’t You Dance?"--can also help to inform readers about his or her state of mind.) However, it is doubtful if a first person narrator would by himself or herself be such an “artist” as to provide an aesthetic resolution to his or her experiences or even to an experience—-the typical focus of a short story. Although, Carver's narrators do, in the process of their narratives, explore their own desires and the implications of these. Looking at “Errand," for instance, Carver’s last story--a tribute to Chekov and a premonition, perhaps, of his own death from cancer--Carver joins an original historical account to his own fictive narrative, both of which are woven together as one and written, as Campbell asserts, “in the articulate idiom of the historian with complete sentences, elevated diction, scholarly coherence, and omniscient authority" (Raymend_§aryer 83). Because the narrator is omniscient, readers might look to the various characters to get a sense of their stories. And critical readers do realize that Chekov's death and the resultant errand that the young waiter is asked to perform shifts the focus of the story: whose story is it? Although, in a sense, it is everyone's story--Chekov is both a literary and historical figure-—it is also the story of an “everyman”: the waiter, whose imagination is stirred by his noticing a cork lying inappropriately on the floor. The final action of the story takes place with the waiter inconspicuously covering and removing the offending object: “Without looking down, he reached out and closed it into his 182 hand” (Where 526). The action is Carverian in its appropriateness and as a dignified gesture toward his character(s). The waiter pays his own respect to Chekov nonverbally. But what are readers to make of the memente_meri of the story? At Chekov’s moment of death, a large, black-winged moth flies into the room through a window and bangs wildly against the electric lamp; shortly after the doctor leaves the room, the replaced cork pops out of the champagne bottle, and the champagne spills over. Dr. Schwéhrer’s diagnosis of death, at three in the morning, while waiting for Chekov to show a pulse after looking at the second hand of his watch go around three times, included with the other metaphors noted, seem symbolically ritualistic, and improbable as real events. What subjective consciousness is being objectified here? How can the boy’s gestures be made a part of an aesthetic whole with those of the other characters and informing objects (and the moth)? The text suggests the presence of a spiritual or mystic dimension by these successive events, and a moral dimension by the waiter's gesture. In this way, the story seems, inexplicably, to suggest two realms: the “ordinary” or everyday world and the world of spirit or myth, both of which, from time to time, intersect. In my reading of Carver's stories, they do seem to embody two traditionally distinct ways of describing the world: first, Carver's stories focus on their characters’ desires. Presumably, these would move the characters about, until, eventually, they 183 became engaged in conflicts, which they would try to resolve. But short story theorists have pointed out how and the extent to which contemporary stories may be almost exclusively about a character’s inner reality; stories may even defy clear and easy interpretation because of this reality. Carver’s stories respect characters as “people”; they are, in Carver's words, “recognizably human.” Indeed, Carver's focus throughout his writing career has been to use short stories to investigate his characters in depth and let them explore their own unconscious and conscious desires. Short story theorists underscore that the genre of the short story allows characters, by virtue of a crisis or other intense or significant experience, to express these primal desires. Carver's stories describe these desires and inner realities, but also they suggest a depth of psychological resolution possible for characters: psychological growth. In other words, this psychological maturation is something net described in any detail by short story theorists, almost all of whom stress the open or impressionistic nature of stories, that such coherence as exists in stories is provided aesthetically, by the genre's brevity, and so forth, and by their effect upon a reader’s imagination and intellect. I am not suggesting here that short story theorists, such as May or Gullason and others, do not allow for epiphanic endings, in which characters--as well as readers-—gain some insights or, more typically, strong impressions about their lives or experiences, although relatively 184 few contemporary short stories end this way (Thomas M. Leitch remarks that “[r]eaders . . . search in vain through their weekly issues of the NeW_Yerker for stories that actually tell a story” [131]). Rather, my point here is that Carver's stories provide a process of “guided closure” for readers to discern moral dimensions within his stories and that as characters are impelled by their desires, they are also acting in a fictive but moral world in which their desire to connect with others allows them possibilities for personal growth. Carver presents to readers characters who struggle to “move forward” to achieve better relationships with others, and these struggles have a moral aspect to them, for they involve the whole lives of his fictive “people.” Carver’s semiopen texts provide for possibilities for a kind of closure not mentioned by May and others, but important for characters and readers alike: moral growth or closure. Carver seems to suggest in his stories that although characters can obtain meaning from their experiences, it is not the kind of meaning that relates to aesthetics--other than in a tangential way. Their concerns are not textual--and it is their concerns Carver’s stories return to. Carver’s stories seem to demonstrate how human desire is a necessary if not sufficient condition for moral growth and how characters, simply put, need the trust and love of others. In Carver’s later stories, in particular, readers observe how characters grow as they reach out to others. For example, in 185 “Fever” the omniscient narrator begins the story by informing the reader that “Carlyle [the protagonist] was in a spot. He’d been in a spot all summer, since early June when his wife had left him” (Where 303). Carlyle's problem, it seems, has to do with finding a good babysitter now that Eileen, his former wife, has left him and their children. But Carlyle’s resentment towards Eileen’s abandonment grows, along with his real problems in finding a sitter; he finds kindly Mrs. Webster, whose conversation and care for him and his children he especially appreciates when he becomes ill with a fever and is forced to remain in bed, unable to care for them or himself. Mrs. Webster listens to Carlyle’s story as a mother or grandmother might, for Carlyle’s psychological state is that of a hurt child or adolescent: “Carlyle was afraid she’d move into the other room and leave him alone. He wanted to talk to her" (329). Just after he begins his story about his life with Eileen, Mrs. Webster pats his hand, a comforting gesture for a child, and she tells him, “There, it's all right” (329). In telling his story to a willing listener, Carlyle is re-visioning his past experiences, his story being a “revision" of his experiences (a “looking again" at them). In the process, Carlyle acts to relieve himself of his past and present anxieties; the storytelling is a necessary component of his catharsis, his release from the pain Eileen's loss had caused him. When he says good-bye to Mrs. Webster, waving good—bye to her, it is as though he were saying-~at long last—“good-bye” to his former wife: 186 It was then, as he stood at the window, that he felt something come to an end. It had to do with Eileen and the life before this. Had he ever waved at her? He must have. Of course, he knew he had, yet he could not remember just now. But he understood it was over, and he felt able to let her go. He was sure their life together had happened in the way he said it had. But it was something that had passed. And that passing--though it had seemed impossible and he'd fought against it--would become a part of him now, too, as surely as anything else he'd left behind. (331) In other stories, sympathetic listeners allow protagonists to grow as “people” as they connect with others. In “Cathedral,” Robert, a friend of the protagonist's wife, is troubling to the narrator protagonist because he is blind and because Robert has known her for years, the implications being that Robert knows his wife in ways he does not (his wife tells him about how she met Robert, how he “read” her face with his fingers, and that they had been exchanging letters and telephone conversations for years). But the insecure and withdrawn narrator begins to enjoy Robert's conversation and company. In this process, the narrator opens up to Robert and is prompted to suggest drawing a cathedral--something Robert cannot accurately envision. The two men work together to draw a cathedral, and by conversing and by imagining and talking about the cathedral 187 (being discussed on a television program), they create a dramatic scene: I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn't stop. The TV station went off the air. I put down the pen and closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt around over the paper. He moved the tips of his fingers over the paper all over what I had drawn, and he nodded. (Where 373-74) But Robert and the narrator go on to complete the drawing, with Robert's fingers on top of his, almost guiding him; as the narrator draws the people inside, Robert comments, “I think that's it. I think you got it. Take a look. What do you think?" (374). Clearly, the narrator’s concern for Robert's knowing what a cathedral looks like allows this character, whom his wife says doesn't have “any friends” (359), to become friendly to Robert and to “open up” to the outside world. Robert-~like Mrs. Webster in “Fever," and the baker in “A Small, Good Thing,” and a former forgiving wife in “Intimacy,” and the narrator's childhood memory of his father in “Elephant”--works as a mediator for a protagonist, who tells his or her story, in order to heal recent or past emotional traumas or just to bring release from a state of isolation or withdrawal. When, at the conclusion to “Cathedral," the narrator exclaims that his eyes were closed, but he thought that he would keep them that way for a little longer, that it was something he felt he “ought to do,” 188 readers understand that his sensibility has shifted from what he ean do or enjoy--smoke marijuana, watch television, drink, and so forth-~to what he ahenld do. In the process of opening up to Robert, the narrator no longer feels enclosed within his own limited world, inside his house: “‘My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. It's really something,’ I said" (375). Carver’s stories are semiopen in that his characters have free will, but it is up to them to “move forward" to exercise it or not, and to look for like characters to listen to and talk to (especially, for alcoholics) and to tell their stories to: increasingly, to obtain this connectedness or closure with others. Carver’s stories are studies in moral development through their characters’ successful or unsuccessful exploration of human desire that affirms each life and loving interaction with others; Carver's stories embody what some might call a humanist perspective. William L. Stull mentions that “Love has been the overarching subject of Carver's stories” (“Beyond” 11), and I would certainly agree. Carver's later stories also seem, in places, to underscore a spiritual dimension to this moral growth. As in “Fever,” “Cathedral,” and “A Small, Good Thing”--stories in which, significantly, prayers are involved--individual characters can grow morally and spiritually with others to help them, but they also must first be trying to do so. Experiences of characters within stories become meaningful for them (and for readers) as they become vehicles for the exaltatien_and 189 MW: allowing characters to move toward connecting with others, to live more compassionately, while simultaneously growing as mature human beings. Even so, just as Carver sees such stories as describing a process of “forward movement” or personal growth, they do not provide final closure, but imaginatively offer room for continued growth (a process itself, in biological and psychological terms, involving both openness and closure). Victoria Aarons comments that Carver’s characters fail to grow or move forward because of their failures of communication (and some other critics have said much the same thing). Aarons observes that although they generally fail in this, and that Carver's stories thereby lack resolution, readers admire their attempts: “Despite their inability to connect with others, the characters' determination to voice their feelings--and thus give them meaning and validity--surprisingly redeems them” (150). And Aarons adds that a reader’s identification with Carver’s characters and events gives the stories an important verisimilitude, one that holds the reader’s avid attention throughout the collection (150). Certainly, because Carver focuses upon his characters' desires, readers will seek to identify or empathize with them. But even in What_We_Ialk_Ahent, some characters do move forward and obtain some small measure of growth by listening to and communicating with others. For a brief moment, the middle-aged man in “Why Don’t You Dance?” gets some satisfaction and comfort 190 in seeing this couple drink and dance, and readers may suspect this to be a small comfort, which may be better than none at all for him. In “Viewfinder" the formerly immobilized homeowner asserts himself and releases pent-up hostility in a manner, perhaps, cathartic. In “Gazebo,” Holly was “right” about calling Duane’s name again at the story's end, which possibly leads to their reconciliation. In “The Calm,” after listening to different people in the barber shop, the narrator experiences a calm at the story's conclusion after making up his mind to leave Crescent City, California. Lastly, in “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” the narrator learns some things about love that are significant: that it is more than an idea, and that it may be easier to feel than to define. The process of storytelling, in which one tells a story to another person, allows the teller to also tell himself or herself about his or her own desires and conflicts. Not completely different from dreaming, in which one tells a story to oneself in a more imaginative way, both are related to the short story proper, which underscores their similarities. This process of storytelling allows narrators of a recent past to build upon their lives (such as the waitress to the fat man in “Fat"); or allows them to review the past to try to reconstruct a future (such as the narrators of “Feathers," “Fever,” “Where I'm Calling From,” or “Nobody Said Anything”). As mentioned earlier, many of Carver's characters are alcoholic, and, consequently, it seems, withdrawn from others. 191 Male loneliness and feelings of loss of manhood are also related themes. Reamy Jansen observes: Society no longer embodies a sense of the past, and the sense of retrospect that fiction traditionally offers us seems no longer possible. The contemporary short story articulates this loss of the integrated self, this sense of marginality. (394) In Intimaey_ana_1dentity, William Kilpatrick asserts that male-female relationships have suffered because males increasingly have been focused upon the present to the exclusion of a purposeful future (99). Kilpatrick also asserts that adding to this problem, for males without strong fathers, and without fathers, generally, is the increasingly matriarchal character of contemporary American culture, its concurrent tribalism, and its increasing violence (157,152). Kilpatrick concludes: “The important thing is that one has a sense of being involved in history and in the future” (191). If Carver's male characters, especially those who have withdrawn, have trouble freeing themselves from their limiting--but protecting--worlds, Kilpatrick might assert that the culture has contributed to their problems. Carver writes about men unemployed, who passively wait for mail (job offers) that never comes, and about male characters whom their wives sometimes verbally abuse. But Carver also writes about characters who confront their circumstances by connecting with others and by “reconnecting” with themselves--by reintegrating themselves through shared storytelling--even if the 192 only listener is the implied reader. Both kinds of stories are informed by a moral dimension: one that can reward the person who actively seeks or asks others-~and their help, as well. Likewise, Carver’s female characters may be stuck in relationships with men who are disconnected from a future tense in their thinking, who waste their lives drinking and watching television. Even so, Carver testifies to the small victories of some of these women. When Marge goes to clean up after the Holitses, for example, she finds the unit already clean: The counters have been wiped down, the sink and cupboards are clean. It's not so bad. I leave the cleaning things on the stove and go take a look at the bathroom. Nothing there a little steel wool won't take care of. Then I open the door to the bedroom that looks out over the pool. The blinds are raised, the bed is stripped. The floor shines. “Thanks," I say out loud. Wherever she’s going, I wish her luck. “Good luck, Betty." (Cahhfidlal 208) Nonverbally, Betty has communicated to Marge her own optimism, or perhaps, just determination for a better life. Michael Gearhart notes how some characters communicate to one another by their actions (440-41). Stories such as “Whoever Was Using This Bed” and “A Small, Good Thing” underscore the power and comfort of shared nonverbal communication, enabling couples to “move forward" together. In “A Small, Good Thing,” Ann constantly seems to be looking 193 for signs of reassurance, and engages not only doctors and other staff at the hospital, but the family of another patient, as well as her husband. Gearhart observes that characters in this story, and especially Ann, “become increasingly self-conscious in regard to body language, [and] their ability to use it as a substitute for verbal shortcomings increases accordingly” (441). Laurie Stone comments that “Carver conveys how the parents feel through their actions” (55), allowing readers to understand them (or “read them”) this way, as well. Not only do some characters communicate effectively with each other nonverbally, readers of Carver’s stories are seemingly able to read their feelings by how they behave; they act in ways that make them seem, in Carver's words, “recognizably human." Alan Davis insists that despite the impositions upon Carver's characters and those they impose on themselves, they do “attempt ‘to get it talked out,’ to connect authentically in a damaged world” (655). Talking and listening help characters in “Where I'm Calling From" to make it on their own, in the world outside. A recovering alcoholic for his last decade and more, Carver writes with authority about the encouragement of others-- even a kiss can help characters gain a strong sense of self. Peter Donahue notes how, in particular, through the language of storytelling, characters psychologically work through their impairing sensibilities. Among recovering alcoholics, such stories are not criticized but are respectfully listened to. This may be because narratives imply a future tense and room for 194 personal psychological development. “In both AA and Carver's ‘Where I'm Calling From,’ the recovering alcoholic does not try to reason out his disease or make judgments on himself or others when he narrates his story” (56). In fact, according to Donohue, [an] alcoholic who is recovering is always in a process of potentiality with respect to his or her use of language, with each word possessing an inherent ambiguity, a non-ideological openness or using umberto Eco's phrasing, “a poetic function" [A_Iheery_ef_sign £r9ductign 262]. (53) Warren Carlin describes how the characters benefit by their communions and conversations. What is beneficial, according to Carlin, is their being together and listening to one another; what they say is less important: for their social communion is itself really an act of love and represents their searching for some understanding, also: “Their talk about love produces unity among the participants” (92). “A Small, Good Thing," “Cathedral," and “Fever” seem to offer Christian motifs and symbols. One part of these involves the drawing together of people who share common, recognizable goals and aspirations. In “Cathedral” two unlike characters--but both related to an obviously kind and caring woman--are drawn together, and by communication and communion together draw an embodiment of spiritual unity: a cathedral with imaginary people in it. In “Fever” the saintly Mrs. Webster draws out Carlyle’s fever, and draws out his story from him: her listening and approving and 195 soothing comments minister to his troubled spirit. His story-— for him, subconsciously, doubtless a kind of confession-~allows him to begin to “let her [his wife] go” (Where 331). Mrs. Webster’s encouraging ministry here is one highly valued throughout Carver’s stories: to listen to others sympathetically. Mrs. Webster’s listening to him is the very thing Carlyle needs the most, and she helps him to recover physically and spiritually: she encourages him to “go on” with his story because she wants to hear it and because he will feel better afterwards (330). When he concludes, Mrs. Webster says to him, “Good. Good for you. . . . You're made out of good stuff. And so is she—-so is Mrs. Carlyle. And don't you forget it. You’re both going to be okay after this is over" (330-31). Not only do Carlyle's anxieties leave him, in the last sentence of “Fever," Carlyle is able to focus with confidence upon his children. In “A Small, Good Thing” commentators such as Kathleen Westfall Shute, William L. Stull (“Beyond Hopelessville”), and others have described how explicit the Christian tropes and symbols are in this story. Shute perceptively describes the journey of the Weisses as a “contemporary yia_delereea by which the characters may trudge toward salvation” (123). Even Scotty's death is seen as a redeeming force that allows the baker and the Weisses to come together in a deeply felt way. Stull comments how deep Ann Weiss's need is for community in this story, and how her praying together with her husband helps her gain a measure of strength and unity, and allows her to receive the baker’s own 196 story. Confrontation gives way to communication, confession, forgiveness, and communion in the final scene of “A Small, Good Thing.” No longer alone, Ann receives comfort inside the warming and gradually brightening bakery and “did not think of leaving" (Where 405). Thomas Haslam contends that Carver understands people “as intrinsic story-tellers, as dialogic selves who find their meaning, value, and identity through and by interaction with other selves, other stories” (57). Their efforts to tell stories and to work through conversations with others, to attend to and to listen to others carefully and respectfully, seems to mimic how people actually obtain psychological closure in our real world. Also, Carver’s focus upon his characters’ imaginations make his stories fascinating for readers, who first connect emotionally with his characters, and then work to connect up intellectually with them--that is, readers are engaged not only with the stories as a whole, but imaginatively with the “people” in them. Such connecting up is viewed by readers of Raymond Carver as both a process of communication and a measure by which readers can understand the nature of the changes characters experience within themselves in moments of growth. As Nelson Hathcock observes, Carver's narrators even have the potential power to reconstruct their lives through the language “and, in the process, arrive at some understanding or intuitive accord" (31). Carver's readers, by reading their “reconstructed” language, can 197 also better understand the means by which such narrators obtain a measure of psychological closure: both by their storytelling and by their reaching out to others (including the implied reader). Lastly, readers of Carver’s stories understand that, along with desire, what is needed to facilitate a stronger, more purposeful self is a willingness to listen to others carefully and, thereby, to respect them. Unlike the photo image and camera, which tend to pass judgment by their literalness, the listening ears of characters are sympathetic. Because Carver has so fully overheard and carefully listened to his characters' imaginary and imaginative voices (in addition to portraying their “worlds” using a variety of iconic imagery), readers can do the same. Listening is a selective process of perception, neither wide—open nor closed, but semiopen. Raymond Carver’s stories engage readers by these fictive voices and visions, which represent, ultimately, people in our world. BIBLIOGRAPHY BIBLIOGRAPHY Aarons, Victoria. “Variance of Imagination." Ihe_Literary_ReyieW 27.1 (1983): 147-52. Abrams, Linsey. “A Maximalist Novelist Looks at Minimalist Fiction.” Mienieeippi_fleyieu 40/41 (1985): 24-30. Aldridge. John W. Ialents_and_Teehnieiansi_Literar¥_ehie_and_the New_Assemle;line_Eietion. New York: Scribner’s, 1992. Alton, John. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Literature: An Interview with Raymond Carver.” Gentry and Stull 151-68. Applefield, David. “Fiction & America: Raymond Carver.” Gentry and Stull 204—13. Barth, John. “A Few Words About Minimalism.” New_Xerk_Iimee_Beek Reyiem 28 Dec. 1986, 1-2, 25. Barthelme, Frederick. “On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Bean ” New_York_Timea_Bogk_Reyiew 3 April 1988: 1, 25-27. Beacham, Walton. “Short Fiction: Toward a Definition.” Ed. Frank N. Magill. Vol. 1. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem P, 1981. 1-17. Beattie, Ann. “Carver's Enriene_$eaeene.” gante 2.2 (1978): 178-82. Begley, Adam. “Less or More." Lenden_ReyieW_ef_Beeke 10.16 (1988): 17-18. Bell, Madison. “Less is Less: The Dwindling American Short Story." Harperis 272.1631 (1986): 64-69. Bethea. Arthur. Baxmond.Caryer1_A_Stud¥_of_£re;Cathedral Ergse and_EQetry. Diss. Ohio University, Athens, 1996. Birkenstein. Jeffrey Kenneth Raxmond_earyeris_eteriesi Essentialist1_N9t_Minimaliat Thesis California State U Long Beach, 1996. 198 "P 199 Boddy, Kasia. “A Conversation.” Gentry and Stull 197-203. Bonetti, Kay. “Ray Carver: Keeping it Short.” Gentry and Stull 53-61. Boxer, David and Cassandra Phillips. “Will_19n_£leaee_3e_Qniet, Bleaeez: Voyeurism, Dissociation, and the Art of Raymond Carver.” IeWa_ReyieW 10.3 (1979): 75-90. Broyard, Anatole. “Diffuse Regrets.” Wew_1erk_Iimee 5 Sept. 1983: 27. Buford, Bill. Editorial. Granta 8 (1983): 4-5. Buzbee, Lewis. “New Hope for the Dead——Raymond Carver 1939-- 1988.” San_Eraneiseo_3eyiew_of_eooks 13.3 (1988-89): 31-32. Rpt. in Stull and Carroll 114-18. Campbell, Ewing. “Raymond Carver and the Literature of Subtraction." Baleenee_Reyiew 1.1 (1987): 69-71. ‘n-.EummdLmmmuJLflmmLMmeJmmiJflflimLimamvs Studies in Short Fiction Series 31. New York: Twayne, 1992. Carlin, Warren. “Just Talking: Raymond Carver’s Symposium." green Qurrente 38.1 (1988): 87-92. Carpenter, David. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Carver." Deeeant 56/57 (1987): 20-43. Rpt. in Stull and Carroll 166-86. Carver, Raymond. “All My Relations.” We_Hereieer_£leaee. 134-45. ---. cathedral. New York: Knopf, 1983. New York: Vintage, 1984. ---. eon1ersations_with_8a1mond_2arxer. Ed. Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. ---. “Fiction That Throws Light on Blackness.” Ne_HeIeiCel Eleaee. 184-86. ---. Eires1_Essaxsl_29emsl_5tories. Santa Barbara: Capra P. 1983. New York: Vintage, 1984. ---. Enrigus_Seasons_and_cher_Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra P, 1977. 2M) -. N9_HerQ1es1_Please1_Uneolleeted_Wr1t1ngs. Ed. William L. Stull. London: Harvill, 1991. New York: Vintage, 1992. ---. “On Writing.” Eiree. 22-27. ---. What_We_Ialk_Ahout_When_We_Ialk_Ahout_Loye. New York: KnOPf, 1981. New York: Vintage, 1982. -. Where_ILm_Ca1l1n9_ErQm1_New_and_eeleeted_5tor1es. New York: Atlantic Monthly P, 1988. New York: Vintage, 1989. A. ‘ ---. W1ll_Xou_Please_8e_enietl_21ease2 New York: McGraw-Hill. 1976. New York: Vintage, 1992. Carver, Raymond andzTom Jenks. “Fiction of Occurrence and Consequence."-Carver, We_Hereieer_21eaee. 147-51. Cassier, Ernst. Language_and_Myth. Trans. Susanne K. Langer. New York: Dover, 1946. Chénetier. Marc, ed. Cr1t1eal_Anglesi_Euronean_y1ewe_gr Q9nLsmporar¥_Ameriean_L1teratnre. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1986. ~--. “Living On/Off the ‘Reserve': Performance, Interrogation, and Negativity in the Works of Raymond Carver.” Chénetier 164-90. Clark, Miriam Marty. “Raymond Carver's Monologic Imagination.” Modern_Eiet19n_Stnd1es 37. 2 (1991): 240-47. Clarke, Graham. “Investing the Glimpse: Raymond Carver and the Syntax of Silence." Clarke 99-122. ---, ed Ihe_New_Amer1ean_Wr1t1ng1_Essaxs_on_Amer19an_L1teratnre Sinee_1219. New York. St. Martin' 8 P, 1990. Cortazar, Julio. “Some Aspects of the Short Story. ” Trans. Naomi Lindstrom. Ihe_Eey1ew_of_eontempgrarx_fiietion 3 (19a83): 27- 33. Davis, Alan. “The Holiness of the Ordinary.” Ihe_Hndeen_Beyiew 45.4 (1993): 653-58. Delaney, Bill. “Raymond Carver." Cr1t19a1_enryex_of_ehort Eietien, Ed. Frank Magill. Pasadena: Salem P, 1993. 434-43. 201 Donahue, Peter J. “Alcoholism as Ideology in Raymond Carver’s ‘Careful’ and ‘Where I’m Calling From.'” Extrapelatien 32.1 (1991): 54-63. Eco, umberto. A_Iheery_et_sign_2regnetien. Bloomington: Indiana UP,1976. ---. Ihg BQJe 9f the Reader. 1979. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984. Facknitz, Mark. “Raymond Carver and the Menace of Minimalism." CEA_Critie 52.1-2 (1989/1990): 62-73. Rpt. in Campbell, Raymond_earxer. 130-43. Ferguson, Suzanne C. “Defining the Short Story.” May, Ihe_NeW Short_Stor¥_Iheories. 218-30. Flower, Dean. “Fiction Chronicle.” Hndeen_3exieu 29.2 (1976): 270-82. Fluck, Winfried. “Surface Knowledge and ‘Deep’ Knowledge: The New Realism in American Fiction.” Versluys 65-85. Gardner, John. Qn_Beeemrng_a_Neyeliet. New York: Harper, 1983. Gearhart, Michael William. “Breaking the Ties that Bind: Inarticulation in the Fiction of Raymond Carver.” Studiee_in Short_Eietion 26.4 (1989): 439-46. Gentry, Marshall Bruce and William L. Stull, eds. genyereatiena With_Raymend_Qarxer. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. Gerlach, John. “The Margins of Narrative: The Very Short Story, the Prose Poem, and the Lyric.” Lohafer and Clarey 74-84. German, Norman and Jack Bedell. “Physical and Social Laws in Raymond Carver’s ‘Popular Mechanics.’” gritlgne; agndjgg jn Modern_E1etion 29.4 (1988): 259-60. Gerstenberger, Donna and Frederick Garber. Introduction. M1eree9sm1_An_Antholog¥_of_the_ehort_etorx- EdS- Gerstenberger and Garber. San Francisco: Chandler, 1969. 1-6. Gorra, Michael. “Laughter and Bloodshed.” Hndeen_Reyiew 37.1 (1984): 151-64. 202 Gullason, Thomas A. “The Short Story: Revision and Renewal.” Stnd1e8_1n_Short_Eietion 19(1982): 221- 30. Hallet. Cynthia J- Whitney. Minimalism_1n_the_Short_Storyi Raxmond_Car1er1_Amz_Hempe11_and_Mar¥_Robison. Diss. U of South Florida, 1996. Hanson, Clare, ed. Reereading_the_$hert_§tery. Houndmills, U.K.: MacMillan, 1989. 5? ---. “‘Things out of Words': Towards a Poetics of Short Fiction.” Hanson 22-33. Haslam, Thomas J. “‘Where I’ m Calling From’: A Textual and Critical Study ” Studies_1n_ehort_Eiet1gn 29 1 (1992): 57- 65. Hathcock, Nelson. “‘The Possibility of Resurrection’: Re-Vision in Carver’s ‘Feathers’ and ‘Cathedral.'” Studiea_in_$hert Eietign 28.1 (1991): 31-39. Head, Dominic. Ihe_Modern1st_Short_Stor¥1_A_Stnd¥_1n_1heorx_and Braetiee. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 1992. Henning, Barbara. “Minimalism and the American Dream: ‘Shiloh’ by Bobbie Ann Mason and ‘Preservation’ by Raymond Carver.” Modern_Eiction_Stnd1es 35.4 (1989): 689-98. Herzinger, Kim A. “Introduction: On the New Fiction.” Mississippi Beyiew 40/41 (1985): 7-22. Hills. Rust. Wr1t1ng_1n_General_and_the_5hort_5torx_1n partienlar. Boston. Mifflin, 1977. Hornby. Nick. Contemnorar¥18meriean_ziction. London: Vision P, 1992. Houston, Robert. “A Stunning Inarticulateness.” Watien 4 July 1981: 23-25. Iser. Wolfgang- Ihe_Aet_of_Read1n9118_Iheor¥_9f_Aesthet1e Reapeneer Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Jansen, Reamy. “Being Lonely--Dimensions of the Short Story." greee_§nrrente 39.4 (1989/1990): 391-401, 415. 203 Jarrell, Randall. “Stories.” May, The_New.$hort_etor¥_lheories. 3-14. Karlsson, Ann-Marie. “The Hyperrealistic Short Story: A postmodern Twilight Zone.” Cr1t1c1sm_1n_the_Iw1l1ght_zgne1 '. ll'!‘ 0 " ‘0‘ "‘ .9 ' ‘ -. ‘ 1!. .011 . . Eds. Studies in English 77. Stockholm: Almqvist, 1990: 144-53. Kilpatrick, William. Identity_ana_1ntimaey. New York: Delcourt P, 1975. Kostelanetz, Richard. Ihe_Qld_Eietiene_and_the_NeW. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1987. LaSalle, Peter. “Review of L1ars.1n_Loye and What_fle_Talk_AhQnt When_We_Ialk_Ahont_L91e.” America 30 Jan. 1982: 79-80. Leitch, Thomas M. “The Debunking Rhythm of the American Short Story.” Lohafer and Clarey 130-47. Lesser, Simon. E1cLion_and_the_unconseious. Chicago: U of Chicago 8, 1957. Lipsky, David. “News from an Unremarkable World." Watienal_Reyiew 5 Aug. 1988: 50-52. Logsdon, Loren and Charles W. Mayer, eds. Sinee_Elannery Macomb: Western Illinois UP, 1987. Lohafer. Susan. Com1ng_to_Terms_w1th_the_ehort_5tor¥. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989. Lohafer, Susan and Jo Ellyn Clarey, eds. ahert_$tery_1heeriee_at a_Qreeareade. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989. Lonnquist, Barbara. “Narrative Displacement and Literary Faith: Raymond Carver’s Inheritance from Flannery O’Connor.” Logsdon and Mayer 142-50. Mars-Jones, Adam. “Words for the Walking Wounded.” Timee_hiterary Supplement 22 Jan. 1982: 76. May, Charles E. “Chekov and the Modern Short Story.” May, The New Short.$tor¥_1heor1es. 199-217. 204 ---. Introduction. May. Ihe_New_Short_Stor¥_Iheories. xv-xxvi. ---. “The Nature of Knowledge in Short Fiction.” May, Ihe_NeW Short_etorx_1heor1es. 131-43. ---, ed. Ihe_New_Short_Storx_Iheor1es. Athens, OH: Chio UP, 1994. ---. “Reality in the Modern Short Story.” gtyie 27.3 (1993): 369-79. ---. The_Short_Storx1.Therfiealitx_of_Artifiee. New York: Twayne, 1995. ---, ed. Shert_§tery_1heeriee. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1976. McCaffery, Larry and Sinda Gregory. “An Interview with Raymond Carver.” Gentry and Stull 98-116. Menikoff, Barry. “The Problematics of Form: History and the Short Story.” Journal_of_the_Short_Stor¥_1n_Enslish 2 (1983): 129-46. Meyer, Adam. “Now You See Him, Now You Don’t, Now You Do Again: the Evolution of Raymond Carver’s Minimalism.” Critique 30.4 (1989): 239-51. Rpt. in Campbell, Raymend_§aryer. 143-58. ---. Raymend_garyer. Twayne’s United States Authors Ser. 633. New York: Twayne, 1995. Nesset. Kirk. Ihe_stor1es_of_Raxmond_Caryeri181Critical_$tnd¥. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1995. Gates' Joyce car01- “The Short Story ” Southern_Human1t1es_Reriew 5 (1971): 213-14. O'Connell, Nicholas. “Raymond Carver.” Gentry and Stull 133-50. O'Connor, Flannery. Myetery_and_Mannere. Eds. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, 1969. O’Connor, Frank. Ihe_Lenely_yeiee. 1963. New York: World Publishing. New York: Bantam, 1968. O'Faolain, Sean. Ihe_$hert_$tery. 1951. Old Greenwich, CT: Devin- Adaire, 1970. 205 Opdahl, Keith. “The Nine Lives of Literary Realism.” Centemperary Ameriean_Eietien. Eds. Malcolm Bradbury and Sigmund Ro. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies. 2nd series. London: Arnold, 1987. Pareyson, Luigi. Estet1ea;Ieor1a_della_Eermatiyita. 2nd ed. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1960. Pasco, Allan H. “On Defining Short Stories.” May, Ihe_NeW_$hert Sterz_Theer1es. 114-30. Perrine, Laurence. $tery_and_$trnetnre. 4th ed. New York: Harcourt, 1974. Pieters. Jfirgen. A_Shred_of_Rlat1num1_Ihe_Aestheties_ef_Ra¥mend garnerie Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? AND What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Studia Germanica Gandensia 31. Gent: Seminarie voor Duitse Taalkunde Blondijnberg, 1992. Poe, Edgar Allan. “Review of Twice-Told Tales.” Qraham;e_Magazine May 1842- Rpt. in May. Shert_Sterx_Iheeries. 45-51. Pope, Dan. “The Post-Minimalist American Short Stories, or What Comes After Carver?" Ihe_§ett¥ehnrg_fleyiew 1.2 (1988): 331-42. Prescott, Peter S. Neyer_in_nenht. New York: Arbor, 1986. Reid, Ian. Ihe_§hert_$tery. London: Methuen, 1977. Robinson, Marilynne. “Marriage and Other Astonishing Bonds.” New Xerk_11mes_eeok_8e11ew 15 May 1988: 1. 35. 40-41. Rohrberger, Mary. “Between Shadow and Act: Where Do We Go From Here?” Lohafer and Clarey 32-45. ---. Hawthorne_and_the_Medern_Short_Ster11_A_Stud¥_1n_eenre. The Studies in General and Comprehensive Literature, Vol. 2. The Hague: Mouton, 1966. ---. “The Short Story: A Proposed Definition.” May, ShQIL_SLQI¥ Theories. 80-82- Rohrberger, Mary and Dan E. Burns. “Short Fiction and the Numinous Realm: Another Attempt at Definition.” Medern E1et19n13tud1es 28.1 (1982): 5-12. 206 Ruthrof. Horst. Ihe_ReaderLs_Conetrnetien_of_Narratiye. London: Routledge, 1981. Saltzman. Arthur M. understand1n9_8a¥mond_earyer. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1988. Schumacher, Michael. “After the Fire, Into the Fire: An Interview with Raymond Carver.” Gentry and Stull 214-37. Shaw, Valerie. Ihe.$hort_etor¥11A_Cr1t1ea1_lntrednetion. London: Longman, 1983. Shechner, Mark. “American Realisms, American Realities.” Versluys 27-50. Shute, Kathleen Westfall. “Finding the Words: The Struggle for Salvation in the Fiction of Raymond Carver.” Hollins Critic 24.5 (1987) 1-9. Rpt. in Campbell, Raymend_§aryer. 119-30. Simpson, Mona and Lewis Buzbee. “Raymond Carver." Gentry and Stull 31-52. Skenazy, Paul. “Life in Limbo: Raymond Carver’s Fiction.” Enelitie 11.1 (1988): 77-83. Stevenson, Diane. “Minimalist Fiction and Critical Doctrine.” Mississinni_8e11ew 40/41 (1985): 83-89. Stone, Laurie. “Feeling No Pain.” yeiee_Literary_Snnnlement 20 (1983): 55. Stull, William L. “Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond Carver.” Bhilelegical_enarterl¥ 64.1 (1985): 1-15. ---. “Raymond Carver Remembered: Three Early Stories.” Studiee_in Shert_£ietien 25.4 (1988): 108-22. Stull, William L. and Maureen P. Carroll. Remembering_fiay. Santa Barbara: Capra P, 1993. Thurston, Jarvis. Introduction. Reading_Medern_$hert_§teriee. Ed. Jarvis Thurston. Chicago: Scott, 1955. 1-28. Towers, Robert. “Low-Rent Tragedies.” NeW_Xerk_Reyiew_et_Beeke 38.8 (1981): 37-40. 207 Trussler, Michael. “The Narrowed Voice: Minimalism and Raymond Carver." Stud1es_1n_ehort_fiietien 31 (1994): 23-37. Tylutki. George Edward. Short_Figt1en_as_eenre1_An_Analysie_ef $hert;§tery_1heery. Diss. State U of New York, Binghamton, 1984. Vander Weele, Michael. “Raymond Carver and the Language of Desire.” Denyer_Qnarterly 22.1 (1987): 108-22. Versluys, Kristiaan. Introduction. Versluys 7-12. Versluys, Kristiaan, ed. Neo;Bealiem_1n_Contemperarx_Amer1ean Eietien. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992. Wickenden, Dorothy. “Old Darkness, New Light.” WeW_Rennhiie 14 Nov. 1983: 38-39. Williams, Peter Andrew. A_Eew_flerds_About_L1terar¥_M1n1malism. Diss. U of Washington, 1994. Wood, Michael. “Stories Full of Edges and Silences.” NeW Kerk Timee_eeek_Rex1ew 26 April 1981: 1. 34. Wright, Austin M. “Recalcitrance in the Short Story.” Lohafer and Clarey 115-29. HICHIGQN STATE UNIV. LIBRARIES 1|((11111111((1111W”1111((1111111111111111111] 31293017120183