Carver
Carver
Carver
Table of Contents
I. Introduction 2
V. Conclusion 16
VI. Bibliography 19
A. Primary Sources 19
B. Secondary Sources 19
I. Introduction
In the seemingly simple low-rent tragedy "Collectors", "Carver’s most minimalistic [story],"5
a salesman for vacuum cleaners enters the house and life of the I-narrator. A multitude of
blanks and, moreover, unfamiliar events and actions contribute to a large extend to the
high potential of anxiety of the story. In the following, I will first reveal the most significant
blanks concerning the setting, the point of view and the two protagonists. By doing so, I will
also attempt to fill them. Secondly, I will analyze what is unfamiliar in the story and how
events and actions of the two characters amplify the, on the whole, uncanny situation.
Finally, I will sum up the main findings of my analysis and evaluate them.
In the beginning of the story, the unemployed I –narrator wastes his time by lying on the
sofa and waiting for the postman on a rainy day. However, not the anticipated postman with
a hopeful letter approaches, instead, it is the ominous vacuum cleaner salesman Aubrey Bell
who draws nearer. He is supposed to present some cleaning tools for Mrs. Slater, who is
said to be the wife of the I-narrator. As Aubrey Bell states it, her card was drawn in a
lottery and "[she] is a winner" (C 114). According to the I-narrator "Mrs. Slater doesn’t live
[there]" (Ibid.). Nevertheless, Aubrey Bell forces his way into the house and takes off his
hat, coat and galoshes.
[...]
1
Raymond Carver, "Collectors," Where I’m Calling From. New and Selected Stories (New
York: Vintage Books, 1989) 113-120. All page references within the text refer to this
edition. [Siglum C]
2
Uta Jäggle, Raymond Carvers Kurzprosa: Untersuchungen zu Formen narrativer Reduktion
(Aachen: Shaker, 1999) 17. Henceforth, all quotes from secondary sources in German are
translated into English.
3
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: 1964).
4
Wolfgang Iser, Die Appellstruktur der Texte: Unbestimmtheit als Wirkungsbedingung
literarischer Prosa (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1970). Also: Wolfgang Iser, Der Akt des
Lesens: Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung (München: Fink, 1976). Arthur F. Bethea calls them in
his book Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver (New York;
London: Routledge, 2002) on page 36 "indeterminate spots," which denote the same as
Iser’s "Leerstellen".
5
G. P. Lainsbury, The Carver Chronotope: Inside the Life-World of Raymond Carver’s Fiction
(New York: Routledge, 2004) 88.
Carver, Raymond. All of Us: The Collected Poems. ed. William L. Stull. News York: Vintage, 2000.
- - -. A New Path to the Waterfall. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1989.
- - -. At Night the Salmon Move. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1976.
- - -. Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Otheer Prose. Ed. William L. Stull. New York: Vintage, 2001.
- - -. Cathedral. New York: Knopf, 1983.
- - -. Elephant and Other Stories. London: Collins Harvill, 1988.
- - -. Fires. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1983; New York: Vintage, 1984; New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1989.
- - -. Furious Seasons and Other Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1977.
- - -. If It Please You. Northridge, CA: Lord John, 1984.
- - -. In a Marine Light: Selected Poems. London: Collins Harvill, 1987.
- - -. My Father's Life. Derry, NH: Babcock & Koontz, 1986.
- - -. Near Klamath. Sacramento: English Club of Sacramento State College, 1968.
- - -. No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings. London: Collins Harvill, 1991; New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1992.
- - -. Put Yourself in My Shoes. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1974.
- - -. The Pheasant. Worcester, MA: Metacom, 1982.
- - -. The Stories of Raymond Carver. London: Picador, 1985.
- - -. Those Days: Early Writings by Raymond CarverCarver. Elmwood, CT: Raven, 1987.
- - -. Two Poems. Salisbury, MD: Scarab, 1982.
- - -. Two Poems . Concord, NH: Ewert, 1986.
- - -. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Knopf, 1981.
- - -. Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1988; Franklin Center, PA: Franklin Library,
1988.
- - -. Where Water Comes Together with Other Water. New York: Random House, 1985.
- - -. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.
- - -. Winter Insomnia. Santa Cruz: Kayak, 1970.
- - -. Ultramarine. New York: Random House, 1986.
Carver, Raymond with Shannon Ravenel. (Eds.) The Best American Short Stories 1986. Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1986.
Carver, Raymond and Tess Gallagher. Dostoevsky: A Screenplay. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1985.
Carver, Raymond and Tom Jenks. (Eds.) American Short Story Masterpieces. New York: Delacorte, 1987.
Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) was an American short
story writer and poet. Carver is considered a major writer of the late 20th century and also
a major force in the revitalization of the short story in the 1980s.
Contents
[hide]
• 1 Life
• 2 Writing
• 3 Works
o 3.1 Fiction
3.1.1 Collections
3.1.2 Compilations
3.1.3 Some individual stories
o 3.2 Poetry
3.2.1 Collections
3.2.2 Compilations
o 3.3 Screenplays
o 3.4 Essays, Poems, Stories (Uncollected Works)
• 4 Films
• 5 Books about Carver
• 6 External links
[edit] Life
Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in
Yakima, Washington. His father, a sawmill worker, was an alcoholic. Carver's mother
worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. His one brother, James Franklin Carver,
was born in 1943.
Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. In his spare time he read
mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life and
hunted and fished with friends and family. After graduating from Davis High School in 1956,
Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. In June of 1957, aged 19, he
married 16-year-old Maryann Burk. She had just graduated from a private Episcopal school
for girls. His daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December of 1957. When their second
child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born the next year, Carver was 20. Carver
supported his family by working as a janitor, sawmill laborer, delivery man, and library
assistant. During their marriage, Maryann worked as a waitress, salesperson, administrative
assistant, and teacher.
Carver became interested in writing in California, where he had moved with his family
because his wife's mother had a home in Paradise. Carver attended a creative-writing
course, taught by the novelist John Gardner, who had a major influence on Carver's life and
career. Carver continued his studies first at Chico State University and then at Humboldt
State College in Arcata, California, where he was first published and studied with Richard
Cortez Day and received his B.A. in 1963. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the
University of Iowa, for one year. Maryann graduated from San Jose State College in 1970
and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977.
In the mid-60s Carver and his family lived in Sacramento, where he worked as a night
custodian at Mercy Hospital. He sat in on classes at what was then Sacramento State
College including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz. Carver's first book of poems, Near
Klamath, was published in 1968 by the English Club of Sacramento State College.
With his appearance in the respected "Foley collection," the impending publication of Near
Klamath, and the death of his father, 1967 was a landmark year. That was also the year
that he moved his family to Palo Alto, California, so that he could take a job as a textbook
editor for Science Research Associates. He worked there until he was fired in 1970 for his
inapproptiate writing style, too many active verbs. In the 1970s and 1980s as his writing
career began to take off, Carver taught for several years at universities throughout the
United States.
During the years of working in different jobs, rearing children, and trying to write, Carver
started to drink heavily and stated that alcohol became such a problem in his life that he
more or less gave up and took to full-time drinking. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver
was a teacher in the Iowa Writers' Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver stated that they
did less teaching than drinking and almost no writing. The next year, after leaving Iowa
City, Cheever went to a treatment center to attempt to overcome his alcoholism, but Carver
continued drinking for three years. After being hospitalized three times because of his
drinking (between June of 1976 and February or March of 1977), Carver began his 'second
life' and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous.
In 1982, Carver and first wife, Maryann, were divorced.[1] From 1979 Carver had lived with
the poet Tess Gallagher whom he had met at a writers' conference in El Paso, Texas in
1978. They married in 1988 in Reno, Nevada. Six weeks later, on August 2, 1988, Carver
died in Port Angeles, Washington, from lung cancer at the age of 50. In the same year, he
was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is buried at Ocean View
Cemetery in Port Angeles, Washington. As his will directed, Tess Gallagher assumed the
management of his literary estate.
In 2001 the novelist Chuck Kinder published Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale, a roman à
clef about his friendship with Carver in the 1970s. In 2006 Maryann Burk Carver wrote a
memoir of her years with Carver: What It Used To Be Like; A Portrait of My Marriage to
Raymond Carver.
[edit] Writing
Carver's career was dedicated to short stories and poetry. He described himself as "inclined
toward brevity and intensity" and "hooked on writing short stories" (in the foreword of
Where I'm Calling From, a collection published in 1988—and a recipient of an honorable
mention in the 2006 New York Times article citing the best works of fiction of the previous
25 years). Another stated reason for his brevity was "that the story [or poem] can be
written and read in one sitting." This was not simply a preference but, particularly at the
beginning of his career, a practical consideration as he juggled writing with work. His
subject matter was often focused on blue-collar experience, and are clearly reflective of his
own life. The same could probably be said of the recurring theme of alcoholism and
recovery.
Carver's writing style and themes are often identified with Ernest Hemingway, Anton
Chekhov, and Franz Kafka. Carver also referred to Isaac Babel, Frank O'Connor, and V. S.
Pritchett as influences. Chekhov, however, seems the greatest influence, motivating him to
write Errand, one of his final stories, about the Russian writer's final hours.
Minimalism is generally seen as one of the hallmarks of Carver's work. His editor at Esquire
magazine, Gordon Lish, was instrumental in shaping Carver's prose in this direction - where
his earlier tutor John Gardner had advised Carver to use fifteen words instead of twenty-
five, Gordon Lish instructed Carver to use five in place of fifteen. Objecting to the "surgical
amputation and transplantation" of Lish's editing, Carver's eventually broke with him.[1])
During this time, Carver also submitted poetry to James Dickey, then poetry editor of
Esquire. His style has also been described as Dirty realism, referring to a group of writers in
the 1970s and 1980s that included Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff - two writers Carver was
closely acquainted with - Ann Beattie, and Jayne Anne Phillips. These were writers who
focused on the sadnesses and losses of the everyday lives of ordinary people—often lower-
middle class or isolated and marginalized people who represent Henry David Thoreau's idea
of living lives of "quiet desperation."
His first published story appeared in 1960, titled "The Furious Seasons". More florid than
much of his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. "Furious
Seasons" was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and
can now be found in recent collections No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me.
His first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was first published in 1976; the title
story had appeared in the Best American Short Stories 1967 collection. The collection itself
was shortlisted for the National Book Award, though it sold fewer than 5,000 copies that
year. He was nominated again in 1984 for his third major-press collection Cathedral,
generally perceived as Carver's best. Also included in the collection are the award-winning
'A Small Good Thing', and 'Where I'm Calling From' - a story later selected by John Updike
as one of the Best American Short Stories of the Century. Carver said that he saw the
collection as a turning point in his career and a move towards a more mature, poetic and
optimistic style.
His final (incomplete) collection of seven stories, titled Elephant in Britain (included in
"Where I'm Calling From") was composed in the five years before his death. The nature of
these stories, especially Errand, have led to some speculation that Carver was preparing to
write a novel. Only one piece of this work has survived - an unpromising fragment "The
Augustine Notebooks", printed in "No Heroics, Please".
Tess Gallagher published five Carver stories posthumously in "Call If You Need Me"; one of
the stories ('Kindling') won an O. Henry Award in 1999. Prior to his death, Carver had won
six O. Henry Awards for the stories 'Are These Actual Miles' (originaly titled 'What is it?')
(1972), 'Put Yourself in My Shoes' (1974), 'Are You A Doctor?' (1975), 'A Small, Good Thing'
(1983), and 'Errand' (1988), respectively.
[edit] Works
[edit] Fiction
[edit] Collections
[edit] Compilations
• "Fat"
• "Nobody Said Anything"
• "The Student's Wife"
• "Neighbors"
• "Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarets"
• "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"
• "Distance"
• "Dummy" (revised title "The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off")
• "So Much Water So Close to Home"
From Cathedral
• "Vitamins"
• "Careful"
• "Where I'm Calling From"
• "Chef's House"
• "Fever"
• "Feathers"
• "Cathedral"
• "A Small, Good Thing"
From Elephant
• "Boxes"
• "Whoever Was Using This Bed"
• "Blackbird Pie"
• "Errand"
[edit] Poetry
[edit] Collections
[edit] Compilations
[edit] Screenplays
These books gather otherwise uncollected works. Fires covers Carver's career during the
period 1966–82. The latter volumes were published posthumously, and include early fiction,
essays, and reviews of other authors. Call if You Need Me was identical to No Heroics,
Please apart from the replacement of poetry in the latter with new stories, two found in
Carver's desk by his last partner, Tess Gallagher and three found in his archives by scholar
William Stull.
Раймонд Карвер (англ. Raymond Carver, 25 мая 1938, Клетскени, Орегон — 2 августа
1988, Порт Анжелес, Вашингтон) — американский поэт и новеллист, крупнейший
мастер англоязычной короткой прозы второй половины ХХ в.
Содержание
[убрать]
• 1 Биография
• 2 Творчество и признание
• 3 Стихи
• 4 Рассказы
• 5 Другие произведения
• 6 На русском языке
• 7 Библиография
• 8 Ссылки
[править] Биография
Отец — рабочий на лесопилке, алкоголик, мать — официантка. В 18 лет женился,
перепробовал много тяжелых профессий. В 1959 учился на курсах писательского
мастерства у Джона Гарднера, затем — в университете Гумбольдта в Калифорнии, в
университете Айовы. Дебютировал рассказом «Чудовищная погода» в 1961. После
первых публикаций стихов и прозы преподавал в 1970—1980-х гг. в различных
университетах Америки. Хватался за любую работу, чтобы содержать семью, стал много
пить, несколько раз лечился от алкоголизма. Бросил алкоголь в 1977 после тяжелой
мозговой комы. Вторично женился, много писал. Умер от рака легких.
[править] Стихи
[править] Рассказы
• Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?/ Вы не будете так добры помолчать? (1976,
Национальная книжная премия)
• Furious Seasons/ Чудовищная погода (1977)
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love/ Так о чем мы говорим, когда
говорим о любви (1981)
• Cathedral / Собор (1983, номинация на Пулитцеровскую премию)
• Elephant / Слон (1988)
[править] Библиография
Literary minimalism
Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface
description. Minimalist authors eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate
meaning. Readers are expected to take an active role in the creation of a story, to "choose
sides" based on oblique hints and innuendo, rather than reacting to directions from the
author. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional; they're
average people who sell pool supplies or coach second tier athletic teams, not famous
detectives or the fabulously wealthy. Generally, the short stories are "slice of life" stories.
Some 1940s-era crime fiction of writers such as James M. Cain and Jim Thompson adopted
a stripped-down, matter-of-fact prose style to considerable effect; some classifiy this prose
style as minimalism.
Another strand of literary minimalism arose in response to the meta-fiction trend of the
1960s and early 1970s (John Barth, Coover, and William H. Gass). These writers were also
spare with prose and kept a psychological distance from their subject matter.
Minimalist authors, or those who are identified with minimalism during certain periods of
their writing careers, include the following: Raymond Carver, Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton
Ellis, Ernest Hemingway, Amy Hempel, Eneas McNulty, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff,
Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Mary Robison, Frederick Barthelme, Richard Ford and Alicia
Erian.
American poets such as Robert Creeley, Robert Grenier, and Aram Saroyan are sometimes
identified with their minimalist style.
The Irish author Samuel Beckett is also known for his minimalist plays and prose.
Dirty realism is a North American literary movement born in the 1970s-80s in which the
narrative is stripped down to its fundamental features.
Dirty realism authors include the short story writers Raymond Carver (1938-1988), Tobias
Wolff (1945), Richard Ford (1944), and Pedro Juan Gutiérrez (1950).
Full Text:
Copyright Western Illinois University, Department of English
Spring 1994
I push the curtain away from the window. Outside, this old guy
in white coveralls is standing next to his ladder.
The sun is just starting to break over the mountains. The old
guy and I look each other over. It's the landlord, all
right--this old guy in coveralls. But his coveralls are too big
for him. He needs a shave, too. And he's wearing this
baseball cap to cover his bald head. Goddamn it, I think, if he
isn't a weird old fellow. And a wave of happiness
comes over me that I'm not him--that I'm me and that I'm inside
this bedroom with my wife. (145)
Seated on "the front steps" in the chill air beyond the porch,
the narrator warms himself with this memory of the
past-triggered, seemingly, by the kiss he gets from Roxy (before
she and J. P. "go in," leaving him outside alone).
He associates his "happiness" then, in his memory, with being
"inside" the bedroom with his wife, suggesting not
only how much women are integral to his well-being but also how
beneficial certain walls and enclosures have been
to him at times. "Outside," in the form of a strange, skinny old
man, are reminders of toil and old age, and, as
before, of what lies beyond that illness and decrepitude and
death; "inside," on the contrary, there is security and
leisure, embodied by a laughing wife and the enveloping comforts
of a warm bed, and by a recognition of his
circumstances as being as secure then as they were.
Thus the contact the narrator makes with an old man one morning
is recapitulated by his contact with a younger
man years later, though contact is closer now since both men are
"outside" and are working communally in their
efforts to find ways back in. Epitomized in the gesture of
Roxy's kiss, the intersection of their lives and stories has
initiated a recuperation that may get them, as J. P. says, "back
on the track." So crucial is this intersection,
ultimately, that it is manifested even on the level of the
story's structure, in the way the story unfolds. With its
disruptions in time and narrative continuity, the story mirrors
the psychic energies of the narrator, wavering from
man to man in its focus, intertwining the individual threads of
their stories and lives in a manner that makes them
come to seem oddly inseparable, fused in a brotherly textual
knit. Promoting such healthy complicity, "Where I'm
Calling From" embodies and dramatizes our collective tendencies
to discover ourselves in the stories of others, and
to complicate other lives with our own as we collaborate toward
understanding, toward liberation from the
confinements that kill.
"So far," the unnamed narrator says of Howard Weiss, "he had
kept away from any real harm, from those forces he
knew existed and that could cripple or bring down a man if the
luck went bad, if things suddenly turned" (62). As
for J. P.'s friend, "luck" is important to Howard; its
capriciousness, he knows, dictates somehow over the details of
his world--has in fact allowed "forces" to insinuate themselves
into the placid interior of his life, forces manifesting
themselves after the initial blow in the ominous calls of the
baker. His insular bubble of security now on the point
of bursting, Howard remains sealed in his "car for a minute" in
the driveway, his leg beginning to "tremble" as he
considers the gravity of his circumstances. Trying to "deal with
the present situation in a rational manner" (62), his
motor control is suddenly as erratic as that of Frank Martin's
clients. Similarly affected, Ann's teeth begin to
"chatter" as fear takes her over, and as she realizes that she
and her husband are "into something now, something
hard" (70). Both Howard and his wife--like recovering
alcoholics--are afflicted by the physical consequences of
their dealings with an irrational, overpowering problem, in the
face of which rationality is useless. Thanks to a bit
of bad luck, their secure and self-enclosed familial world is
turned inside out.
As Irving Howe notes, the stories of this volume "draw upon the
American voice of loneliness and stoicism, the
native soul locked in this continent's space" (42). While in
rare moments we find characters transcending the
fettered states of soul by means of smaller, personal
unfetterings of self, such moments do not deny the "locked"
status of the characters in general, or the darker implications
of Carver's vision overall. Still, Carver implies, it is
through our collaboration with others that we free ourselves
from the slavery of self-absorption. We see in these
stories that compassion, as well as stoicism, is a prerequisite
not just of happiness but of survival, and that while
confinement may be the precondition of many lives there is still
a good deal of freedom available within it--freedom
which becomes tangible only when it is recognized for what it
is. In this sense the stories of Cathedral are on a par
with those that Carver and Jenks praise as editors of American
Short Story Masterpieces, stories which have, as
they say, "the ambition of enlarging our view of ourselves and
the world" (xiii)--enlarging us as readers, that is, both
in the sense of expanding and setting us free.
NOTES
WORKS CITED
--. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Random
House, 1981.
--. Where I'm Calling From. 1st edition. Franklin Center, PA:
Franklin Library, 1988.
Тамара Боголепова
ТРИ ЖИЗНИ РАЙМОНДА КАРВЕРА
Реймонд Карвер[1]
От редакции
Реймонд Карвер (1938-1988) - американский поэт и новеллист, автор четырех сборников стихов и нескольких
сборников рассказов, его творчество отмечено на родине писателя многими литературными премиями.
Реймонд Карвер родился в штате Орегон, в семье лесоруба, он самостоятельно выбивался в люди, прошел
суровую жизненную школу - работал рассыльным, ночным сторожем, оператором на бензоколонке, санитаром
в больнице. Поступив в Калифорнийский университет, Карвер посещал и писательские курсы, которыми
руководил Джон Гарднер. Известный романист поддержал в самом начале пути талантливого дебютанта,
мечтавшего «создавать мир из слов».
Первый же сборник рассказов «Не будете ли вы так добры помолчать?» (1976) принес Карверу заслуженный
успех. Рецензенты отмечали скупость и точность языковых средств, тонкий психологизм молодого автора,
его умение задеть читателя за живое, «растревожить его». За первым сборником последовали другие.
Карверу ставили в заслугу возрождение интереса к короткому рассказу в англоязычной литературе, даже
называли самым значительным со времен Хемингуэя мастером этого жанра. Да и сам Карвер воспринимал
Хемингуэя как своего учителя. А еще он не раз говорил о своем внутреннем сродстве с Чеховым. С великим
русским классиком сравнивали Карвера и американские критики, считая, что того и другого писателя
роднит внимание к маленькому человеку, к драмам и «скучным историям» повседневной жизни, а также
«любовь к недоговоренности».
Стихи Карвер начал писать гораздо раньше, чем рассказы. Но первое его стихотворение увидело свет только
в 1984 году, а в 1985 году вышел первый сборник стихов - «Там, где вода встречается с водою», - сразу же
удостоенный премии журнала «Поэтри».
«Его стихи, - писал критик журнала «Нью-Йорк тайм», - это очищенные, отфильтрованные, более
концентрированные версии его рассказов, они позволяют нам, бросив всего лишь мимолетный взгляд, увидеть
точный срез обыденной жизни в ее критический, переломный момент».
«Читаешь стихи Карвера и понимаешь, что этот человек пережил больше, чем многие из нас» - таково
суждение обозревателя журнала «Поэтри».
Первое знакомство русского читателя с одним из самых тонких мастеров американской прозы состоялось в
1987 году, еще при жизни «американского Чехова», - в «Библиотеке журнала «Иностранная литература»
вышел сборник его рассказов «Собор». Составитель и автор предисловия - Алексей Зверев.
Моя ворона
Никому из поэтов.
To win?
To lose?
What for, if the world will forget us anyway.
The aim of this essay is to discuss and analyze some strategies used by the late American
writer Raymond Carver in his short story “A Small, Good Thing”, as an innovatory manner of
expanding the suspense of the story. What contributes to this achievement is the minimalist
structure of the narrative, the usage of several elements and images and also the unusual
focalization as a kind of aesthetic dialog with the cinematographic language.
I will begin by briefly examining some information about the author’s biography as well
as some aspects of his work and its aesthetic procedures:
Raymond Carver is acknowledged by the literary critics as one of the most inventive
postmodern writers. His writing is straightforward, stark and destitute of sentimentality.
Basically, he did not concede any space to language ornamentation or figures of speech. His
characters are antiheroic, emblematic and depressed people. They take part in quick and almost
abrupt stories, in which a little conflict is “fought” and, then, they unpredictably end, as in his
famous short stories “So Much Water So Close To Home”, “What We Talk About When We
1[1]
Ricardo Sobreira is a Brazilian student and an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher at CCAA – Centro
de Cultura Anglo-americana, one of the most important English schools in Brazil.
Talk About Love”, “Tell The Women We’re Going”, “Where I’m Calling From”, just to cite a
few.
In one of his most important short stories, “A Small, Good Thing”, Raymond Carver was
able to create psychologically rich characters in a very accurate way. This story deals with
subject matters intrinsically related to our human condition and our contingencies like, for
instance, the fear of the death, the sensation of powerlessness before the violence, the cruelty and
the incommunicability of the human being, as well as dwells on the importance and the meaning
of affection, of communion among the people in these chaotic days we have been living.
The version of the short story “A Small, Good Thing” encompassed in the collections
“Where I’m Calling From” and “Short Cuts” is a revision of two previous attempts. One of these
previous versions, “The Bath”, was awarded a few prizes, but in it, the author did not seem to
explore all the dramatic potentialities of the narrative. Therefore, “A Small Good Thing”
represents a phase of aesthetic maturity in the style of the writer. If in “The Bath”, Raymond
Carver creates characters and situations that are almost schematic, generating, thus, a lurid and
gloomy atmosphere, in “A Small Good Thing”, on the other hand, he intensifies his humanist
realism, producing a more complex portrayal of his characters. But before turning to a closer
examination of that, we must remember some of the facts and tensions present in the story:
Ann Weiss, a young and joyful mother, drives to a bakery and orders a cake. Then the
baker, a very impolite man, writes down her order and her phone number. But before the party
can be celebrated, Scotty, the birthday boy, is knocked down by a car. His parents, Ann and
Howard Weiss, go immediately to the hospital and powerlessly watch him die. Meanwhile, the
baker, as he is an evil entity, makes phone calls to the Weiss, reproaching them because they did
not pick the cake.
As the baker does not tell them who he really is, the parents get really scared and even
think that the man who keeps phoning them is the same “psychopath” who knocked over Scotty.
Only after Scotty’s death, Ann comes to know that the phone calls had being made by the rude
baker. So the angry and frightened parents stop by the bakery and tell the baker they could not
pick the cake because Scotty had died. Then they rebuke him so fiercely that he realizes how
cruel his acts were. He feels so sorry that he asks them to forgive him and says that he used to be
a different kind of human being years ago, but now he was just a baker. After that, he serves
them some of his delicious rolls, and says, “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this” (404).
It is interesting the fact that, according to what I have already pointed out, another version
of this story had been published in the book “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”
and it is entitled “The Bath”. Nevertheless, it focalizes more intensively the human brutality and
uncertainty. The characters of “The Bath” are unnamed. Except for the mother, Ann, the other
characters are just referred to as the boy, the father, the dog, etc. These characters seem to be
undefined, permanently locked in individual spheres, what turns the narrative into something
sketchy and impersonal. “The Bath” is shorter because, as it dwells on the anguished feelings, it
ends when Ann gets home for the first time after Scotty’s accident, the telephone is ringing and
when she answers it, she hears a voice say: “It’s ready”. Though the language used in “The
Bath” is more straightforward, even laconic and filled with symbolic images, “A Small, Good
Thing”, the expanded version, deals more deeply with the question of the human situation,
absolving the baker from his nonfigurative condition of “evil force” and transforming him into a
man devastated by his personal flop.
The characters of “A Small, Good Thing” represent the so-called North-American working
class. A good example of it being Ann Weiss, the housewife; her husband, Howard, the
businessman, and, above all, the baker, who at the ending of the story reveals all his bitterness
because of his frustration in a country like the United States, where the progress and the triumph
seem to be the only acceptable parameter. Although Carver was not an effusively politicized
writer, it is clear that this specific character, the baker, symbolizes in an almost Kafkaesque
manner, the submission of a man to the capitalist system, and depicts an almost palpable drama
played by the blue-collar class.
The predominant feeling among the characters of “A Small, Good Thing”, as well as
among the people of the real world nowadays, is a considerable incommunicability: In the
beginning of the story, the mother tries to be gentle to the baker, but she gives up soon in face of
his extreme rudeness. It can be exemplified by the following fragment, which also serves as a
concept to the minimalist aesthetic:
The baker was not jolly. There were no pleasantries between them,
just the minimum exchange of words, the necessary information.
(376)
After the moment when Scotty is run over, the despair of his parents increases because the
boy does not come to consciousness and the doctors and nurses seem to be incapable or
unwilling to talk to Ann and Howard about the real situation of the kid. In an institution that is
supposed to protect lives, what they find is the total disregard for human beings. Dr. Francis, for
example, in opposition to his patient, looks healthier and healthier every day, and he gives
laconic answers every time he is asked about the child’s condition:
Therefore, all the conflicts in “A Small, Good Thing” are a result of the extreme
incommunicability the characters experience. The fragmentation of the reality and, consequently,
the failures during the communication process are the main factors that trigger the hostility
depicted in the story: right after the moment Scotty is hit by a car, he stands up, feeling a little
dizzy, and hears his friend ask “what it felt like to be hit by a car” (378). Thus, the resentment
triggered by such unsociability is also implicit in the attitude of a nurse who enters Scotty’s room
and, without even saying a word to the parents, starts to draw off blood from the child’s arm.
When asked by the parents, the woman precariously explains:
The usage of the demonstrative pronoun “that” by the nurse in her statement promote the
disembodiment of the human being. “That” is a word that is syntactically used to refer to
something or someone that is away from the speaker. By doing so, she implies that Scotty is just
another patient, just another meaningless thing to the structure of the health system.
Ironically, the baker, though in an atrocious manner, is the only one who interrogates the
problem of Scotty’s existence because he sets off the process of reification of the characters and
their relationships. Metonymically through the birthday cake, he calls the other characters’ (and,
subsequently, the reader’s) attention to the subject of the personality of the boy. But while he
seems to be trying to humanize and “revitalize” Scotty, the life of the child is slowly fading
away. This hypothesis becomes evident in the following fragment of the narrative in which Ann
leaves the hospital and, feeling so guilty in an “obscure way” for what happened to her son, she
hears the phone ring and, when she answers it, the voice says:
“Scotty,” the man’s voice said. “It’s about Scotty, yes. It has to do
with Scotty, that problem. Have you forgotten about Scotty?” the
man said. Then he hung up. (392)
Given the happenings of the text and the tension experienced by the characters, the baker
acts like a destabilizing entity in the story. As Ann and Howard are too perturbed by their child’s
condition and the fact that they do not know who is making the phone calls contributes to a sort
of disembodiment of the mysterious man who keeps tormenting them on the other side of the
line. Therefore, the baker proceeds as an evil force, a wicked being that intrudes on the most
unexpected moments of the story to stir up their panic and, indirectly, make them blame
themselves for having neglected the boy.
Such moments of tenseness appear randomly in the text through the utilization of some
strategies to expand the suspense like, for instance, the insertion of narrative “ramifications”
parallel to the main plot. This narrative device is known as anticlimax because it delays the
ending of the central story. Thus, the narrator, in cuts that recall the cinematographic language,
dislocate the reader’s attention to additional narrative elements, postponing and causing a greater
expectation for the conclusion of the short story.
What contributes to the generation of the anticlimax in “A Small, Good Thing” is the
inclusion of the drama experienced by a Negro family that is waiting for their son who is in the
operation table. Ann realizes that those people were “in the same kind of waiting she was in” (391)
because Franklin, the black boy in the operation table, though innocent, was hurt by an external
agent, just like Scotty was; that is, their stories had gone through similar ruptures:
And besides this little parallel drama be rather analogous to the central story line, it is
interesting to mention the fact that Franklin does not survive the surgery and dies — what can be
interpreted as an anticipation of Scotty’s tragedy.
The narrator also uses another narrative procedure: the focalization of unusual elements
that are very useful in order to compose the scenes. His detailed descriptions of locations,
objects, characters, and, above all, their actions, help the reader to develop clearer notions of
temporality, spatiality, and to form a monstrous image of the baker:
He looked at them and rolled his tongue behind his teeth. (402)
Another expedient that contributes to the increasing sensation of anguish and uncertainty
in the text is related to the author’s capacity of condensing words, of precisely removing the
excessive elements of the dialogs so that what is left is just the minimum, just the essential
amount of information that is needed to the (in)comprehension of the message.
Whenever the doctor comes and examines the comatose boy, Ann tries really hard to get
answers from him, but the words he uses to explain Scotty’s condition are so limited that make
her feel even more frightened and confused. When asked about the boy’s recovery, the nurses
also provide minimal answers like “stable” or “his signs are good”, what really worries the
parents instead of comforting them.
The conciseness of Carver when dealing with words and sentiments detectable in “A
Small, Good Thing”, as well as in the whole minimalist artistic production, from the sober work
of Sol LeWitt to the succinct music of Suzanne Vega, requires that the reader/observer/listener of
this kind of art develop a high level of understanding and also a vast capacity of interaction and
reconfiguration of the symbolic and aesthetic elements provided by the artist along his or her
work. Although these artistic artifacts are conceptually simple, they have an enormous
perceptive density.
In “A Small, Good Thing” and in other stories written by Raymond Carver, the ordinary
themes of quotidian life are stylistically structured, and that is why they suggest much wider
human dimensions. Therefore, the simple act of answering the phone and not hearing a voice on
the other side of the line sounds like an overwhelming catastrophe. The violence is repressed in
the silence, the crisis and the fatal human collapse is implicit between the lines of the carefully
constructed discourse of the author. Michael Wood once wrote in “The New York Times” that
“in Mr. Carver's silences, a good deal of the unsayable gets said”.2[2]
Analyzing the characters is also something crucial in order to understand the text. Ann
Weiss, for example, symbolizes a stereotypical woman, a young mother whose actions are
somewhat automatic. She shows all her motherly sweetness, her uncertainty, her fear, but
nevertheless, she seems incapable of fighting against her own alienation. Only after her son’s
death, which represents the sacrifice, she starts to get rid of her behavioral automatism and then
she demonstrates her anger:
She clenched her fists. She stared at him fiercely. There was a deep
burning inside her, an anger that made her feel larger than herself,
larger than either of these men. (402)
The automatism of the social roles and the sensation of powerlessness of the character
reach such a dramatic level that Ann does not seem to be able to stand her current situation and
then she escapes totally from her reality, foreshadowing herself and Scotty running away to a
safer territory. Her incapacity of dealing with the situation is so palpable that she even mentally
advises a girl she met in the hospital not to have children in order to avoid such suffering:
“Don’t have children,” she told the girl’s image as she entered the
front door of the hospital. “For God’s sake, don’t.” (393-394)
The father also goes through similar alienation, but given the circumstances, Howard tries
an inverse kind of flight: by means of his flashbacks, he searches for some relief in the memories
of his serene and successful past. His life had been apparently full of satisfaction until the day
that brusque rupture happened and forced him to face a completely new reality:
Until now, his life had gone smoothly and to his satisfaction (...) He
was happy and, so far, lucky — he knew that (...) So far, he had
kept away from any real harm, from those forces he knew existed
and that could cripple or bring down a man if the luck went bad, if
things suddenly turned. (379)
However, what is surprising in “A Small, Good Thing”, if we compare it to “The Bath” are
the conversational rhythms of the baker. As he talks, he makes clear that he acted according to
his survival instinct, choosing the violence and the cruelty as a form of expression, as a way of
manifesting all his unhappiness:
“It cost me time and money to make that cake. If you want it, okay,
if you don’t, that’s okay, too. I have to get back to work.” He
looked at them and rolled his tongue behind his teeth (...) “Lady, I
work sixteen hours a day in this place to earn a living, (...) I work
night and day in here, trying to make ends meet” (402)
2[2]
WOOD, Michael. Stories Full Of Edges And Silences, The New York Times, Books, 26/04/1981.
<http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/01/21/specials/carver-wood.html>
“God alone knows how sorry [I am]. Listen to me. I’m just a baker.
I don’t claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I
was a different kind of human being (...) But I’m not any longer, if
I ever was (...) I’m not an evil man, I don’t think (...) You got to
understand what it comes down to is I don’t know how to act
anymore, it would seem”. (404)
When the baker becomes conscious of the perverse acts he practiced, he recovers the sense
of humanity he said he had lost a long time ago because of his overwhelming routine of work.
All his cruelty is due to his exaggerated materialism. We live in a material world where the
commercial relations are favored in detriment of feelings like fraternity, forgiveness, and love.
From this moment on, Carver’s prose, exactly because it suggests a critique of the social and
economical system, reminds the discourse of other great writers who preceded him and highly
influenced his work, like Czech author Franz Kafka and, above all, Russian writer Anton
Chekhov (whom Carver once confessed he was very fond of). The exhausting schedule of work
causes a person to become “robotized”. This winds up by leading them to isolation and making
them lose their affection. Other problem that contributes to the baker’s hostility seems to be his
childlessness:
Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the
baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of
loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come
to him in his middle years. He told them what it was like to be
childless all these years. To repeat the days with the ovens
endlessly full and endlessly empty. (405)
Carver also displayed his accuracy when he created an unexpected ending to his short
story: the sensations of incommunicability and reification are transformed into something
positive. The three characters (Ann, Howard and the baker), after pulling up a fierce argument,
start to articulate those feelings that were petrified until then. And finally, after Scotty’s sacrifice,
there is a brief communion among them, in which the food and the dawn of a new day reaches a
great symbolism, and, for a little while, we believe that communication and understanding are
the key to bind again those abysses that tear the people apart.
“A Small, Good Thing” by Raymond Carver follows the narrative structural scheme
below:
Initial Ending
Rupture Suspense
situation Sacrifice Association
A happy couple Scotty, the Scotty does not wake up; The parents are Scotty dies After the
(Howard and birthday boy, afflicted by the baker’s phone calls. too. argument, the
Ann) plans to is knocked parents forgive
celebrate their over. The Anticlimax Anticipation the baker. The
Ann meets an Afro-
American family
Franklin, the black
whose son was hurt in
eight-year-old birthday party boy, dies. three of them
a party and he is
child’s is canceled. sit around the
undergoing a surgery
birthday. table and eat.
INCOMMUNICABILITY >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>COMMUNION
Due to his development as a writer represented by his stories such as “A Small, Good
Thing” and “Cathedral”, Raymond Carver began to be compared since then to important writers
like Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemmingway. However, Mr. Carver and his work were
misinterpreted since the beginning. Some critics who classified his art as depressive and freezing
attacked him. Many people doubted the existence of Minimalism, even Carver himself, who
refused this label because he thought it was too simple to define his work.
But, whatever it is, every time we talk about Raymond Carver we talk about a tragic,
challenging, astoundingly beautiful mosaic — the life.
Bibliography:
CARVER, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Random House. New York, 1989.
CARVER, Raymond. Where I’m Calling From – New And Selected Stories. Random House. New York,
1989.
HASHIMOTO, Hiromi. Trying To Understand Carver’s Revisions. In: Tokai English Review, N.º 5,
Tokio, Japan, 1995, pp. 113-147.
Carver has been quoted as saying that his stories could happen anywhere. That is
pretty much true. Additionally, they are so contemporary that they require almost no
background material or preparation for reading and understanding by an American
audience. Even the issues of class (most of Carver's characters, if they have jobs,
are marginally employed), although they do exist in Carver stories, are not too
heavily at play in "A Small, Good Thing." However, this lack of location, class, and
even time can be used to start a classroom discussion. You might ask: Where is this
story set and in what year? How old are the characters? How does this affect your
reading of the story? Does this lack diminish the story? Would it have been a better
story if we knew it had been set in, say, Cleveland in May 1978? How would this
story be read by readers outside of Carver's culture? Would it be understood
differently in France or in Cameroon? The questions can draw the class toward a
discussion of style in literature and to one of the major issues for Carver: What
constitutes a good story?
To bring Carver himself into the classroom, I recommend the Larry McCaffery and
Sinda Gregory interview found in Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction or in
Alive and Writing: Interviews with American Authors of the 1980s as sources for rich
Carver quotes and his own insights into the stories and the writing process. For
example, Carver cites Isaac Babel's dictum, "No iron can pierce the heart with such
force as a period put in just the right place," as one of his own guiding principles.
You would definitely want to talk about "minimalism" in fiction. The style has become
so pervasive that students may just assume that this pared-down method of story-
telling is simply how one writes fiction. Frederick Barthelme writes that as a
minimalist "you're leaving room for the readers, at least for the ones who like to use
their imaginations." John Barth counters with this definition of a minimalist aesthetic:
"[its] cardinal principle is that artistic effect may be enhanced by a radical economy
of artistic means, even where such parsimony compromises other values:
completeness, for example, or richness or precision of statement." Carver was at
first the most influential practitioner of minimalism, and then, through the rewriting
of his earlier stories, a writer who repudiated the style.
Luckily, Carver's stories can be used to show both the power of the so-called
minimalist approach and its limits. Have the students first read the brief (ten-page)
story "The Bath," which was the earlier version of "A Small, Good Thing." "The Bath"
is an excellent example of what minimalism does well and can be more terrifying and
unsettling than anything by Stephen King. Contrasting and comparing "The Bath"
and "A Small, Good Thing" from Carver's later, more expansive period will allow the
students to participate in the intense debate about style. Carver preferred the
second version, but he didn't pass judgment on those who like "The Bath" best.
Another useful approach for showing the nuances of revision at work in Carver's
writing is to look at a few other versions of his stories. A particularly illustrative case
is a short-short-story of under five hundred words that has been known as "Mine"
(Furious Seasons), "Popular Mechanics" (What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love), and "Little Things" (Where I'm Calling From). The last two differ only in title,
but there are significant differences in "Mine." Students need not be textual critics to
talk about the choices that Carver has made in the various versions of his stories.
Original Audience
Carver's stories were published in most of the important slick magazines of the
seventies and eighties including Esquire and The New Yorker. All along the way his
work also appeared in small literary magazines. David Bellamy called Carver "the
most influential stylist since Donald Barthelme." He was writing for writers, for those
who appreciated experimental literature as well as for a general, though
sophisticated, reading audience.
Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, and Ernest Hemingway are the obvious influences on
Carver's work. The seemingly simple pared-down style of writing follows straight
through to Carver. You might consider teaching Carver and Hemingway and perhaps
Donald Barthelme together, then entering into a discussion of the bare bones style of
each.
Another way to consider Carver's style is to remember that he began writing poetry
before he tried fiction and continued writing and publishing poetry throughout his
career. He said (in a Paris Review interview with Mona Simpson), "In magazines, I
always turned to poems first before I read the stories. Finally, I had to make a
choice, and I came down on the side of fiction. It was the right choice for me."
Carver's poetry has been compared to that of William Carlos Williams, although I see
many obvious differences in their approach, sense of the line, and sense of narrative.
His poetry can also be compared to that of James Wright, particularly with respect to
the class of people from which the poems and stories are drawn.
Bibliography
"Mine." In Furious Seasons and Other Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1977.
"Little Things." In Where I'm Calling from: New and Selected Stories. New York:
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988.
"Popular Mechanics" and "The Bath." In What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.
Campbell, Ewing. Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne,
1992.
Carver talks about his writing and the writing of others in the following books:
Carver, Raymond. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1984.
Gentry, Marshall Bruce and William L. Stull. Conversations with Raymond Carver.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.
The following book of photographs helps show the locations for several of Carver's
stories:
I find it always helpful to hear the author read his stories, which is especially true in
the case of Carver, although only the following early tape is available:
Ray Carver Reads Three Short Stories. Columbia: American Audio Prose Library,
1983.
"A Small, Good Thing" can be found on tape (but not read by Carver) in the
following:
Where I'm Calling From. Read by Peter Riegert. New York: Random House Audio
Publishers, 1989.
Raymond Carver 1938-1989
Carver Interview
Carver Articles
"The Narrowed Voice: Minimalism and Raymond Carver"
"Carver's Vision" by Phillip Carson
"A Subtle Spectacle: Televisual Culture in the Short Stories of Raymond Carver"
"Cathedral" Articles
"Insularity and Self-Enlargement in Raymond Carver's 'Cathedral'"
Teaching "Cathedral"
Teaching Raymond Carver, from The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Contributing
Editor: Paul Jones
Pairing "Cathedral" with Tess Gallagher's "Rain Flooding Your Campfire"