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Chapter III

Minimalist Principles and Practices in Carver’s Short Fiction

Preamble

The chapter discusses Carver’s style of literary minimalism. It is more or less

an expansion of traits already found in the short story tradition. The chapter tries to

suggest how minimalism contributes something new and how it undermines or even

rejects some of those tenets which are the foundation of the modern short story.

Carver’s Niche

Criticism of Raymond Carver's short stories tends to take one of two tracks.

The first adopts a formalist-historical approach and assigns Carver to the "minimalist"

school of fiction that came of age in the United States in the 1970s. It stresses Carver's

affiliations with writers like Anne Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, and Mary Robison,

whose work is characterized by several commonly agreed upon characteristics: spare

prose, parataxis, and monotone; compression of detail and incident; a doggedly

present-tense sense of reality; "open" narratives that eschew the "beginning-middle-

end" convention for elision, ellipsis, and indeterminacy; and a fixation on consumer

habits and the surface details of consumer lifestyle (hence the pejorative "brand

name" or "freeze dried" label often applied to the minimalist style).

The second school emphasizes the social and economic milieu of Carver's

stories. These critics including Morris Dickstein, the novelist of working-class life,

Russell Banks, and Barbara Henning argue that the spare emotional and material

texture of Carver's stories (its formal minimalism as discussed by the formal school)

is a kind of objective correlative of the dreary working-class lives his characters lead.

They point out that most of Carver's characters are employed in either traditionally
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low-paying occupations like logging, mill, or factory work, or in neo-blue collar,

service-industry equivalents like mini-mart operator or apartment manager. The quiet

economic sufferings of Carver's socially immobile characters, rendered in skeletal,

affectless prose reminds those critics of Carver's own distinctly blue-collar roots in

the logging town of Yakima, Washington, and of his testimonials in interviews to the

working class as "my people.” Thus critics of this school echo the characterization of

Carver's stories as "low-rent tragedies," a phrase used by a character in Carver's

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” to describe her dull but poignant

domestic woe.

That the divergent evaluations of the two schools of critics of Carver rarely

intersect suggests a larger critical and political problem that this thesis will focus on.

The appreciation of "two Carvers," one prized primarily as a formal innovator, the

other as a social-realist, suggests a false but ongoing separation in criticism of form

and content. Narrowly fixated on minimalism's impressive innovations in style and

manner, many critics have tended either to divorce them from social influences or to

define the innovations as a flight from social engagement. In Carver criticism, for

example, the formalist critics tend to stress the monotone flatness of voice and the

Spartan style and substance of Carver's fiction as a narrowly formalist response to

both the "maximalist" excesses of high modernism (Joyce, Pound, Eliot) and the

"high" postmodern style of American writers such as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth,

and Robert Coover that are characterized by linguistic and conceptual excesses and

vast epistemological and narrative high jinks. Too often one result of that rigidly

formalist view has been the mistaking of minimalist style for absent content; lean,

formal innovation for social disengagement; textual scarcity for mindless pleasure.
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For James Atlas, Carver's characters have virtually no distinguishing

characteristics of temperament, personality, gender, race, or class but are mere "a

hedonic, cookie-cutter products of a clinical imagination, one is left with a hunger for

richness, texture, and excess." Atlas finds that Carver's stories, "just as the cubed glass

high-rises of Manhattan frustrate the eye's longing for nuance" (97). Although Atlas is

probably describing buildings that are in fact modernist, his suggestion of texts that

are "all surface," pure architectonics, recalls obliquely Fredric Jameson's now famous

appropriation of the mirroring squares of the Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles as a

quintessential example of postmodern art's refusal of traditional (i.e., modernist)

"depth." Atlas's formalist reading straitjackets Carver into a narrow but familiar

definition of a monolithic contemporary culture in which identity and ontology are

mere reflections or simulations of each other, and in which the artist is reductively

viewed as the detached, ironic chronicler of a banal nihilism in which content is

absent: nothing happens. Atlas thus makes no mention of the most obvious and

painful social fact of Carver's fiction, namely that the vast majority of his characters

are primarily economically burdened members of the lower-middle or working classes

whose dull lives have much to do with this fact.

By contrast, the social-realist critics downplay the impressive formal

innovation of Carver's work to recover a literary tradition that they sense is threatened

by the often myopic and apolitical nature of formalist criticism. Russell Banks notes

in passing the "post-modern loneliness and alienation" of Carver's characters but

reaches for another example with which to compare Carver, namely Stephen Crane.

The work of both writers, he argues, is powered by "a ferocious, inescapable

determinism that, when at last it overpowers their characters, approaches tragedy"

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(101). In a different manifestation of a similar critical problem, Morris Dickstein's

essay "The Pursuit for the Ordinary," observes that although Carver's fiction belongs

to "a definite region, a class, even a certain landscape," his minimalism is at bottom "a

post-Beckett realism that has been through the forge of modernist skepticism and

despair" (508). Yet Dickstein fails to acknowledge that Carver's characters are never

exposed to the extremities of circumstance or self-consciousness one identifies with

the modernist traditions he invokes. Indeed Carver's particular brand of "skepticism"

has more to do with a numb acculturation to commercial ennui, the postmodernist

skepticism of deadpan response to omnipresent quotidian details – fast food,

television, brand names – than with anything as high minded as Beckettian

existentialism or Craneian Social Darwinism. Put another way, what is finally

terrifying and moving about Carver's characters is not their consciousness of either

existential contingency or of social determinism, but the routinized impossibility of

their ever sensing or understanding what Carver called, describing his own characters,

the "lives they see breaking down" (Fires 201).

Television may be read as a polyvalent sign in Carver's fiction that is

important to the latter being readable as both formal minimalism and a variety of

social realism in the tradition of working-class or proletariat writing. One of the few

and better attempts to locate television's effect on Carver's writing and minimalism

generally is Philip E. Simmons's "Minimalism as 'Low' Postmodernism: Mass Culture

and the Search for History." Simmons argues that television's presence in Carver's

stories signals two things: a moral vacuity and historical superficiality in the lives of

characters attributable in part to television's evisceration of historical "depth" in their

lives, and a moral condemnation of television's formulaic lack of "honest engagement

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with the real" (52). That argument is in part a rare critical attempt to anchor Carver's

minimalism "in the world" by showing how it critiques television and consumer

culture. While making claims for minimalism as a form of "populist" or low

postmodernism, Simmons is vague about how television or mass media specifically

interact with the working-class status of most of Carver's characters.

In complement to Simmons's essay, the present thesis would contend that, as

in much postmodern fiction, television in Carver's work, stands as a general sign of

the superficial, homogeneous nature of consumer or "brand name" culture; yet it is

also a specific symbol of the constricted lives of the American working and lower-

middle classes. Often it signals both aspects simultaneously and jointly. It is at once a

marker of the random and arbitrary meanings of free-floating commercial signs in

consumer culture and an index of the material, spiritual, and intellectual limitations of

lower and working-class life within that larger culture. Those meanings converge in

the aimless indirection, the social and economic randomness of the lives of Carver's

working-class characters.

In Carver’s mature work, less is more: less psychology, less literary language,

less continuous narration, only spare disjunctive details which readers must assemble.

A Carver story is like a do-it-yourself kit. He avoided physical description, narrative

texture, atmospheric detail, and authorial commentary, and he even began to remove

them from stories he had already published. The stories themselves are not at all

confused; they have been carefully shaped, shorn of ornamentation and directed away

from anything that might mislead. They are brief stories but by no means stark: they

imply complexities of action and motive and they are especially artful in their

suggestion of repressed violence.

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A great many of Carver’s stories offer a view of life as experienced through an

alcohol-induced haze; he is, in fact, one of the finest chronicler of lives wrecked by

booze. There is sometimes a certain despairing humor in these portraits, but beneath

it always is the feeling that real ugliness can erupt suddenly, without provocation, as it

does in the following stories “Tell the Women We’re going,” “A Serious Talk,” “One

More Thing,” “The Bridle,” “Vitamins.” Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is

Carver’s most eclectic collection of fiction, the stories reflecting changes in style and

subject matter over decade. They are peopled with Carver’s trademark characters –

waitresses, a mailman, a vacuum-cleaner salesman, mill workers, a mechanic,

collectors of unemployment, folks Tess Gallagher described as “largely forgotten at

the heart of the country” (Adelman and Gallagher 16). It is worth noting, however,

that the population of Carver country includes professional people as well – Arnold

Breit in “Are You a Doctor?”; Myers, a writer in “Put Yourself in My Shoes”; the

student who reads Rilke to his attention-starved wife in “The Student’s Wife”; Harry

“How About This/”; and Marian and Ralph Wyman of the title story, teachers whose

relationship began in a Chaucer class. Most of the stories conclude with an

implication that things will be worse hereafter. Moments of heightened awareness

seem unlikely to lead to a deeper grasp of meaning in these depressive, elliptic

narratives, and thus Carver has come to be known as the writer of “low-rent

tragedies” (Dickstein 509).

Carver was like a pernicious alchemist. Take this setting for example; from

the beginning of the title story of the collection What We Talk About When We Talk

About Love: “The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin.

Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Mel and
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me and his second wife, Teresa –Terri, we called her – and my wife Laura. We lived

in Albuquerque then. But we were all from someplace else.” Nearly all of the

elements of a Carver story are here: people with the most ordinary of local habitations

and names, rootless with busted marriages behind them, who drink gin at kitchen

tables and for whom the outside world arrives over kitchen sinks. Not many writers

then had the gumption to attempt to dazzle, to move, with such clay. Yet Carver

succeeded in his venture of projecting his universe-in-a-grain of sand vision in his

primer-simple language with his terrible lucidity.

By the method of indirection he focuses on the mundane, the seemingly trivial,

but suggests the bigger issues. His style is almost completely unadorned by metaphor

or other figure of speech, and he does not use explicit or obtrusive symbolism.

Carver’s minimalist idiom may be compared to working-class speech characterized by

Claus Mueller as being marked by i) grammatical simplicity, ii) a uniform vocabulary,

iii) a scarcity of adjectives, adverbs, and symbolism, iv) repetitive use of

conjunctions, and v) short and recurrent sentence patterns.

Carver writes of the working class people, many of whom are hopeless and

desperate alcoholics. His characters are pressed for some resolution, some response

of their own by the story’s close. On many occasions they seem to be shrugging,

muddled and immobilized. These qualities have led many critics to designate the

Carver country as “Hopeless-ville.” For instance, Anatole Broyard has asserted that

“Carver’s stories are rather like the proletariat fiction of the 1930s although these are

proletariat of the psyche, not of economic forces.” Marc Chénetier elaborates a nature

metaphor to describe the dynamics of Carver’s stories thus:

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Carver’s stories follow the ripples made by a stone in a water. The

reader is too late to catch a glimpse of the stone before it sinks and

must be content with the detailed analysis of the ripples it has produced

on the surface of the pond. Nor is he ever allowed to witness the

agonizing break of the ripples against the shore. Carver’s stories, with

rare exceptions, are totally comprised in the surface covered and

organized by the rings, excluding both the original point of impact and

the final slushy smack against the bank. (167-168)

Carver’s settings are American towns, semi-industrial and often depressing. His

characters, plebeian loners struggling for speech, now and then find work as factory

hands, and waitresses. His actions revolve around the troubles of daily life and then,

through some sudden development or perhaps a darker cause, collapse into failed

marriages and broken lives. His stories leave a reader with tremors that resemble the

start of a breakdown.

There is a sort of “relief” in Carver’s minimalistic world: in drink, drugs, and

promiscuity. His protagonists could try running, firing up their rattle-trap cars to skip

town to some ‘better’ and thoroughly indefinable place. Owing to their being

emblematic perhaps of a greater despair – a cultural hopelessness – they are incapable

of even an attempt to save themselves. Madison Bell rightly observes on this plight

saying, “Carver’s characters resemble rats negotiating a maze that the reader can see

and they cannot.” Carver, in his finely wrought ‘minimalistic’ narratives, suggests

that only by confronting the results of their insular lives they could transcend their

fates.
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Carver’s Reaction to the ‘Minimalistic Tag’

Raymond Carver, “the father” of American minimalism, demurs when he is

classified as a minimalist writer. In an interview with Mona Simpson, Carver

remarks, “. . . somebody called me a ‘minimalist’ writer. But I didn’t like it. There’s

something about ‘minimalist’ that smacks of smallness of vision and execution that I

don’t like” (210). However, Carver speaks of his dissatisfaction about ‘minimalist’

tag in his essay "On Writing" thus:

"What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly the way the

concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the

story. But it's also the things that are left out, that are implied, the

landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled)

surface of things" (Carver, Fires 17).

This 'leaving out' and 'landscape under the surface' speaks directly to Ernest

Hemingway's likening of the story to an iceberg:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he

may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing

truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though

the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is

due to only one-eighth of it being above water. (Hemingway 192)

This "iceberg" model has minimalist implications and can be used to show that the

psychological action which underlies or overlays the physical action in his stories

occurs beneath the surface of Carver's fiction. In one of his interviews Carver admits

that he has been influenced by Hemingway. Hemingway’s short fiction marks the

beginning of the minimalist short story in America.

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It is Hallett's contention that in minimalist fiction, Carver's especially, what is

excluded becomes as important as or more so than what is included (50). We may

now delve deeper into Carver's fiction looking for the omitted, the "iceberg" below

the surface of the narrative.

"Why Don't You Dance," the first story in What We Talk About When We Talk

About Love, gives us a quintessential example of the unsaid in Carver's fiction, the

"iceberg" which lurks below the surface of the story. As Arthur Bethea states, this

story "contains a series of small omissions yet is not nearly as indeterminate as it

might initially appear" (105). "Why Don't You Dance," begins with a man as he

"poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard" (Carver,

Love 3). We are told, "That morning he had cleared out the closets, and except for the

three cartons in the living room, all the stuff was out of the house" (4). While this man

is away at the store, a young couple come along and assume the man's things on the

front lawn to be a yard sale. We are told that this young couple are furnishing a new

apartment. The man returns with a sack-full of beer and whiskey, offers them a drink,

and they proceed to bargain over prices of the items in the lawn. The three continue to

bargain and as they become intoxicated, the man invites the young couple to dance.

The story concludes with the young girl recounting the story to a friend: "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" (9). The last line of the

story tells us: "She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was

trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying" (10). There is most certainly

"more to it", and the young girl's quote nearly mirrors Hallett's statement that "the

[minimalist] method of presentation suggests that there is more to the story than the
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mere external narrated details" (7). When the story is examined closely, with an eye

for the sub-textual details, we understand that there is more to the story than simply

one man's bizarre yard sale.

A 'submerged' aspect that is immediately pertinent to the story is the domestic

and emotional state of the man. We are immediately aware that something is certainly

awry, that there is some sort of unspoken tension here, since moving one's furnishings

out onto the front lawn certainly indicates a questionable mental state. We are

"hooked by this bizarre situation, [and] we want to know what caused the man to put

all his furnishings outside" (Bethea 105). However, we can only assume what has

motivated the man to do such a thing, as we are not directly given this information in

the story's narration.

We can assume that the man has recently broken up with his wife or partner.

In the first paragraph of the story, the man looks out the window at all of his

furnishings and notes everything inside the house is the same as it was: "nightstand

and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side. His

side, her side" (Carver, Love 3). While each side is represented in the furniture, only

his side is represented in the story. “Her side” of the story we are never told, and

while "the entire allusion to her, vague and disconnected, is buried in the husband's

observation" (Hallett 51), her presence permeates the story and is suggested through

the behaviour of the man.

With two words "her side" we are given that there was a woman involved in

this story, and these two words are but the tip of the iceberg. We can assume that she

is no longer around as the man's behaviour is not the typical behaviour exhibited by

one who is in a relationship. What these two words show us, as well, is that there was
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a rift in their relationship, that there were "His side, her side," that were not crossed,

thus leading to a separation of sorts. The description refers to the sides of the bed but

suggests physical and mental incompatibilities and is poignant as a display of the

couple's possible lacking romantic relationship, that each maintained their own side in

the bed and that this lack of romance may have been a factor in their eventual breakup

(Bethea 106).

With this reading, we see the man's redecoration of his yard as an "inversion

of his home [which] imitates the reversal of his fortunes... the self is going-out-of-

business sale, a systematic exteriorization of old wounds" (Saltzman 101). Also, the

bizarre re-decoration, as Nessett observes, is a "kind of lurid public display . . . a

flaunting of intimacy long dead and gone" (37). While we are told the man "Had run

an extension cord on out there . . . . Things worked no different from how it was

inside" (Carver, Love 4), things are most assuredly working different from how they

were inside; or perhaps they are not, and that is why the woman has left. Bethea

questions, "So there was a breakup, yet this answer begets another question, namely,

what caused the breakup?" and Bethea continues, "Furthermore, the opening line links

drinking and setting up the bedroom suite. If the relationship was destroyed by

alcoholism, what caused the alcoholism?" (106). Thus, the iceberg grows..

With these inferences, we see that the man is in a peculiar state; the excessive

drinking and bizarre redecoration underline this. However, there is more to this man's

state than a mere post-breakup, alcoholic, redecoration and we see this clearly with

one simple line of narration. The man is observing his front lawn and we see from his

perspective: "Now and then a car slowed and people stared. But no one stopped. It

occurred to him that he wouldn't either" (Carver, Love 4). This one line, "It occurred
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to him that he wouldn't either" is quite disturbing in its implications and we

immediately discern that there is something more happening here, more at stake than

the surface of the story would have us believe. The implications of this quote are a

stunning example of the "Underground streams of unease [which] steal just beneath

the narrative" (Saltzman 13). Stop what? We can only guess, as the narration gives us

no hard facts, but merely allusions. Nessett theorizes that the man "won't stop" in that

"he will survive in his own, however peculiar, way" (36), but the implications of this

man's continuance are more violent, more menacing than a mere 'peculiar survival'.

There is a threat of something here, and it is menacing, but we can only suspect, and

this suspicion lends itself to the tension below the story's surface.

Such portrayal of characters in the midst of their unravelling is a common

template in Carver's stories. Let into a present situation, we are given little, if any, of

the past and future of the characters whose lives we are witnessing; but by the

demeanour and action of the story's characters we sense time periods invading the

story, and, in fact, haunting it. "Why Don't You Dance" is a perfect example of this

technique. While Ewing Campbell, in “Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short

Fiction,” asserts, and correctly so, that "Why Don't You Dance," "takes place after the

storm," and "is one example of fiction initiated in the aftermath of such a tempest"

(43); we are still given virtually no information on the events leading up to the point

where we enter the story. We can discern the past (the man has recently separated

from his partner) through certain aspects or allusions found in the story, but we have

no clear understanding, only inferences. The future, too, is present in the man's claim

"that he wouldn't [stop] either" (156), which implies actions in the future. As readers
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we feel discomfited by these time periods, as they do not exist in the actual narration

but create a tension below the story's surface.

The same 'haunting' is true for the young couple. At first glance they seem a

typical young and happy couple. But when each of their actions and interactions in

the story is observed more closely, we see that there is a hint of tension in their

relationship as well. We can begin to see the couple at some sort of odds.

The young girl proves more of a maverick than the young boy, and as they

begin to inspect the man's belongings "in a rehearsal of postures and affectations they

hope to suit to these items" (Saltzman 102), we see this in the young boy's obvious

trepidation in honouring the young girl's request to join her on the bed. "I feel funny,"

he says (Carver, Love 5). We see that there is certainly something "funny" going on

here and the young couple intimates this by the way they interact. The boy does join

her on the bed, and when he does, the girl becomes immediately sexual in her

advances. She asks him to kiss her, but he responds, "let's get up" (5). The boy does

not get up; instead "he just sat up and stayed where he was, making believe he was

watching the television" (5). The boy's refusal to kiss the girl can be seen as a

reflection of their own bedside manner and infers a tension lurking below the surface

of the couple's conversation, as Nessett states: "The tensions here, filling the

interstices of a conversation they conduct lying down, of all places, on a bed, are

grounded in sexual politics" (38).

The girl then makes the comment, "Wouldn't it be funny if," and she doesn't

finish her statement, as she does not need to. The boy's response to this is to laugh,

"but for no good reason" (5). This "no good reason" is poignant and is repeated in his

action in response to her question, "for no good reason he switched the reading lamp
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on" (5). This simple phrase "for no good reason" alludes to a definite tension in the

couple's relationship, as Bethea remarks, "If he laughs at the half-stated suggestion to

have sex and is wrong to do so, a lack of passion is implied" (107).

With this hint of tension in the young couple's relationship, a reflection of the

man's failed relationship begins to emerge. This reflection is a haunting undercurrent

of the story and grows completely out of the unsaid, residing below the surface of the

actual narration. While we are never directly given the facts on the state or the nature

of the young couple's relationship, we gain from subtle hints that there is a tension

present. With this tension in the young couple's relationship, it is impossible not to

parallel it with the man's failed relationship.

Thus we are presented with a timeline of human relationships of sorts: in the

young couple's relationship we see the man's past relationship and perhaps the course

of events which led to its eventual demise. In "Why Don't You Dance," Carver uses

"the barest events to communicate what no amount of exposition can" (Hallett 52).

With the last line of the story: "There was more to it, and she was trying to get it

talked out. After a time she quit trying" (Carver, Love 10), we find the young girl

"knowing that something has gone drastically wrong, but without realizing precisely

what it is" (Campbell 45). While the young girl "failed to discover the implications of

what she has encountered" (44), we fare better, and through examination of the

iceberg we do see that, "By juxtaposing one couple's beginning and the aftermath of a

dissolution, Carver creates a tension that is immediately felt in the reading" (44-45).

Often times this is the case in Carver's fiction. The characters are vaguely

aware of the fact that there is something more at stake than merely a bizarre yard sale,

a divorce, an infidelity or a bankruptcy. It’s a meagre life his characters live without
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religion, politics or culture, without the shelter of class or ethnicity, without the

support of strong folkways or conscious rebellion. It’s the life of people who cluster

in the folds of the society. They are not bad or stupid; they merely lack the capacity

to understand the nature of their deprivation – the one thing, as it happens, that might

ease or redeem it. When they get the breaks, they can manage; but once there’s a sign

of trouble, they turn out to be terribly brittle. Lacking an imagination for strangeness,

they succumb to the strangeness of their trouble. Carver’s art is an art of exclusion –

many of life’s shadings and surprises, pleasures and possibilities are cut away by the

stringency of his form. As readers, we are afforded the opportunity to go back

through the story and gain a more concrete understanding of what is below the surface

of the narration from various allusions or hints from dialogue. As readers, we become

aware of what Saltzman calls "extratextual reality", and can identify the tension that

the characters are only dimly aware of (Powell 647).

The first story in Carver's collection What We Talk About When We Talk

About Love presents us with such a character, vaguely aware of the 'iceberg'. "Fat"

begins with the narrator telling us "I am sitting over coffee and cigarettes at my friend

Rita's and I am telling her about it" (Carver, Quiet 1). The narrator, who is a waitress,

then recalls to her friend how she had served "the fattest person I have ever seen" (1).

She describes her interactions with this fat man as she brings him his meal: several

baskets of bread, Caesar salad, bowl of soup, baked potato, pork chops, and two

deserts. The narrator is in some way greatly affected by this large customer, so much

so that when her boyfriend Rudy, who is a cook at the restaurant, makes sexual

advances at her that night she recollects: "When he gets on me, I suddenly feel I am
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fat. I feel I am terrifically fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all"

(6).

While she is greatly affected by the fat man, she, like the young girl in "Why

Don't You Dance," and many other Carver characters, has "failed to discover the

implications of what she has encountered" (Campbell 44). She realizes that she has

been affected, as she says to Rita, "I know now I was after something" (Carver, Quiet

4), but she cannot fully understand the implications, "But I don't know what" (4)

(Nesset 14). When her boyfriend calls the man fat, the narrator responds, "but that is

not the whole story" (Carver, Quiet 5).

Again, we are after the "whole story", and like the young girl in "Dance," the

narrator in “Fat” too, reflects our own role as readers. While the narrator might fail to

completely understand her experience, we know by now where we must look in order

to retrieve the "whole story." When the narrator describes the fat man to her friend,

she says, "it is the fingers I remember best" (1), and she goes on to describe them

"long, thick, creamy fingers ... three times the size of a normal person's fingers" (1).

There is obvious phallic imagery here, and we can begin to see that the narrator is in

some way aroused by the fat man's potency (Runyun 12). The narrator is so affected,

in fact, she knocks over the man's glass of water (Bethea 11), "I am so keyed up or

something, I knock over his glass of water" (Carver, Quiet 2). In fact, as Randolph

Runyun states in “Reading Raymond Carver,” the narrator believes "To be fat, then, is

to be sexually powerful, even virile" (12). Later that evening, this fascination, this

arousal from her experience with the fat man is also seen when the narrator tells us

that she "put my hand on my middle and wonder what would happen if I had children

and one of them turned out to look like that, so fat" (Carver, Quiet 6). The fat man is
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tied into her sexual fantasies here, and as well as when the narrator is in the midst of

intercourse with her boyfriend and imagines herself "terrifically fat" (6).

While the fat man represents virility and power to the narrator, she tells the fat

man "Me, I eat and eat and I can't gain, I say. I'd like to gain."(5) As fatness

represents power to the narrator, and she cannot gain weight, we see that she feels

powerless in her own life. The feeling of powerlessness in the narrator is not stated

outright, but is implied and creates tension under the surface of the story, and can be

seen in her sexual encounter with Rudy: "Rudy begins. I turn on my back and relax

some, though it is against my will. But here is the thing. When he gets on me, I

suddenly feel I am terrifically fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at

all" (6). Thus, in her powerlessness, in this case sexual, she imagines that she is fat

and therefore renders Rudy "inconsequential" (Hallett 54). In this light, we see the

narrator's fascination with the fat man as a fascination with the power she imagines is

tied to largeness. Runyun states, "She wants to become the fat man" (Runyun 12), and

while this is true, the narrator really wants the power she associates with the fat man.

The beginning and the ending of the story present us with the tip of an

'iceberg' in the form of one word: "it" (Hallett). The first line of the story states: "I am

sitting over coffee and cigarettes at my friend Rita's house and I am telling her about

it" (Carver, Quiet 1), and in the last lines of the story, which describe Rita's reaction to

the story the narrator has just told:

That's a funny story, Rita says, but I can see

she doesn't know what to make of it.

I feel depressed. But I won't go into it with her.. .My

life is going to change. I feel it. (Carver, Quiet 6)

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This usage of the word is vague in its application, but enormous in its implication, and

is an example of how, in two letters, Carver creates tension underneath the story's

surface. Hallett describes its usage in terms of Hemingway:

Here the reference to 'it' is reminiscent of the use of 'it' in Hemingway's

"Hills Like White Elephants", for in both stories 'it' refers to individual

aspects of 'it,' as well as to an all-inclusive 'it': in 'Hills,' 'it' refers to an

abortion, a baby, the choice, and the whole situation; in "Fat," 'it' is the

encounter with an obese customer, separate visions/versions of fat,

being becoming fat. Compulsion versus choice, and an over-all implied

principle of difference. (53)

With this connotation of "if, we see the narrator referring to the iceberg throughout

the story. As she is giving details of the story to Rita, she says "Now that's part of it. I

think that's really part of if" (Carver, Quiet 2). Arthur Bethea refers to this pronoun as

well, conjecturing that in the narrator's last lines of the story, "The “it” that the

narrator 'won't go into' might refer to an affair between the cook and Margo, the 'one

who chases Rudy,' or to a pregnancy" (13). While it is possible that Rudy and Margo

are having an affair, we are able to find actual implication of the narrator's pregnancy

in the narrative. We need only recall when the narrator "put my hand on my middle

and wonder what would happen if I had children," and to link this with the last line of

the story, "My life is going to change. I feel it" (Carver, Quiet 5-6). If this is true, and

we can only infer that it is, then the narrator's life will certainly change, and the “it”

she feels is the child inside her womb.

With this implication then, the narrator's fascination with the fat man takes on

quite another aspect, and one, as well, that is similar to the timeline juxtaposition seen
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in "Why Don't You Dance": the woman sees in the fat man a reflection of her

pregnant, larger self in the future. Carver has achieved all of these implications,

literally set up a series of tensions underneath the surface of the narration, by way of

the simple pronoun "it". We see this same tension lurking under the surface of the

narration in "Neighbors" too. The story revolves around a couple, Bill and Arlene

Miller, who are taking care of their neighbours’ apartment while they are away on

vacation. Instead of feeding the cat and watering the plants, what transpires is an

unusual, voyeuristic exhibition as Bill Miller becomes obsessed with entering the

Stones' apartment and living vicariously through their personal possessions. With

each trip to the Stones' apartment, Bill's behaviour intensifies and the story culminates

in a description of Bill and Arlene's desperation at having locked themselves out of

their neighbours’ apartment. While the surface details of the story show us a house-

sitter's strange visits, the implications of Bill's behaviour create a tension that drives

the story, a tension that lies beneath the surface of the narrative.

We are not distinctly told what would impels/compels the Millers to engage in

such behaviour, and this behaviour at once goes far beyond the bounds of normal

curiosity. While we are never directly given information which would explain such

bizarre behaviour, we are given subtle hints that could explain their motivation as well

as why their desperate reaction when they lock themselves out of the Stones'

apartment.

As Bill and Arlene Miller watch the Stones drive away, Arlene says, "God

knows, we could use a vacation" (Carver, Quiet 8). This quote introduces us to a

sense of jealousy as a motive in the explanation of Millers' behaviour in the Stones'

apartment. We are told in the beginning of the story that Bill and Arlene Miller are "a
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happy couple. But now and then they felt that they alone had been passed by

somehow" (7). It makes us wonder, passed by how? We understand more fully the

nature of their sense of deficiency when we are given, "They talked about it

sometimes, mostly in comparison with the lives of their neighbours, Harriet and Jim

Stone" (7). We begin to see that the Stones represent what the Millers feel they are

not, that in comparison, the Stones feel that they come up short. We are told that Jim

and Harriet are able to take many vacations, Jim combining business and pleasure

trips. Meanwhile, Bill and Arlene feel stuck with their bookkeeping and secretarial

chores. With this sense of envy exposed, we can begin to understand the motivations

of the Millers.

Bill is the first to enter the Stones' apartment, and while it is only "across the

hall" we see that to Bill it could be some sort of "paradise" (Nesset 13): "Bill took a

deep breath as he entered the Stones' apartment. The air was already heavy and

vaguely sweet" (Carver, Quiet 8) and later, "Inside it seemed cooler than his

apartment, and darker too" (11). We get a sense from these lines that Bill, himself, as

Saltzman points out, is taking "a vacation from himself” (Saltzman 25). We watch as

Bill steals a bottle of Harriet Stones' medication, finds their Chivas Regal and takes

two drinks from the bottle (Carver, Quiet 8). Bill is quite literally 'making himself at

home' in the Stones' apartment (Carver 8). When Bill returns from across the hall, the

consequences of his visit are immediately apparent: Bill has become sexually aroused

by his foray across the hall (Hallett 55). When Arlene asks him why he was so long,

Bill responds "Playing with Kitty," and then "went over and touched her breasts 'Lets

go to bed honey'" (Carver 9).

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Bill is quite sexually aroused, in fact, as he comes home from work early the

next day and surprises Arlene: "Let's go to bed," he said. "Now?" She Laughed.

"What's gotten into you?" "Nothing. Take your dress off." He grabbed for her

awkwardly, and she said, "Good, God Bill." (qtd. Bethea 69) This passage is quite

telling. We can tell from Arlene's response, "'Now?' She laughed" (Carver, Quiet 9),

that an afternoon occasion such as this is not the norm for the Millers, and we can

infer that Bill's behaviour is a consequence of his behaviour in his neighbours’

apartment, which William Stull calls "a psychosexual rumpus room" (qtd. Nesset 12).

While Nessett argues that the influence of this "rumpus" room "is not altogether bad"

(Nesset 12), Arthur Bethea suggests that there is "something unhealthy to this sexual

encounter" (Bethea 69). Bethea states that (in the above quoted encounter), "the

negative connotations of nothing and awkward infer this unhealthiness” (69). Bethea

goes further by looking at the lack of intimacy that follows this encounter "Later

they...ate hungrily, without speaking" (qtd. 69). We begin to see Bill's sexual arousal

as compulsive here, and perhaps but a symptom of something deeper happening in

Bill.

While Arlene's question at once seems innocent enough "What's gotten into

you?" (Carver 9), the implications are weighty. Quite literally, in fact, the Stones'

have gotten into Bill, as Campbell states that "Bill Miller's behaviour consists of two

kinds of endeavours: pointedly taking in substances that belong to the Stones and

inserting himself into their spaces and belongings" (Campbell 15). We see this 'taking

in' of the Stones' possessions in his taking of Harriet's pills, the "deep breath" he took

upon entering the Stones' apartment, and the whiskey he drank (15). While Campbell
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asserts that these actions "result in increased sexual activity at home", we see that

these actions indicate something more (15).

While we have seen Bill "taking in" the Stones' possessions, it is when Bill

calls in sick from work in order to spend more time in the Stones' apartment that we

understand there is more going on here, more at stake than merely gaining sexual

gratification or arousal through the invasion of another's personal belongings. It is

then that we see Bill "inserting himself into their spaces and belongings" (15). During

this trip into the Stones' apartment Bill continues "taking in" the stones' possessions:

"he moved slowly through each room considering everything that fell under his gaze,

carefully, one object at a time. He saw ashtrays, items of furniture, kitchen utensils,

the clock. He saw everything." (Carver, Quiet 11). It is after 'taking it all in' that Bill

Miller begins to 'insert himself into the Stones' possessions, and it is in this action

that, as Hallett recognizes, "his movements become bizarre" (Hallett 55). Bill enters

the Stones' bedroom and lay down on the Stones' bed, inserting himself into the most

intimate of their spaces, and "then he moved his hand under his belt" (Carver, Quiet

11), an action which, Campbell insists, implies masturbation (Campbell 16).

Bill then begins to look through the Stones' closet, "He put on a blue shirt, a

dark suit, a blue and white tie, black wing tip shoes" (Carver, Quiet 11). While we

find Bill’s trying on Jim Stones' clothing certainly bizarre, we are simply shocked to

find that Bill "stepped into the panties and fastened the brassiere" and are immediately

jolted into a realization of the virulence of the tension inherent below the

narration(12).

The implications of Bill's behaviour are all below the surface of the story,

alluded to only by his actions, and it is from these implications that we understand
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that there is something more to the story than a bizarre cross-dressing fiasco. We have

ascertained through their comments at the beginning of the story that Bill and Arlene

feel unable to have the life that the Stones live, and they feel inadequate because of it.

Bill finds so much pleasure in his forays across the hall and keeps returning, each time

increasing the level of intrusion, not merely because of the obvious consequence of

sexual arousal which the story shows us in so many ways, but because in doing so Bill

is able to live vicariously through the Stones' possessions. To go even further, for the

brief time Bill spends inside the Stones' apartment, he becomes the Stones. In

assuming, vicariously, the roles and items of the Stones' life, Bill becomes, briefly,

everything he is not. Bill commits what Saltzman calls a "symbolic coup" (25). In a

sense, he is taking the vacation that Arlene desiderates "God knows" they need: a

vacation from the reality of his own life and into the Stones' (25).

The mirrors in the Stones' apartment show us how strong Bill's desire is to

assume the role of the Stones', as well as the distance from reality his forays have

taken him. The mirrors appear enough times so that we realize they are an image

which must signify something greater. In his first encounter "He looked at himself in

the mirror and then closed his eyes and looked again" (Carver, Quiet 8). In the light of

Bill's actions in the story and their implications, we understand just who Bill wanted

to see after he opened his eyes. As Bill no doubt regrettably found himself there, he

begins to take more drastic measures in assuming the Stones' identity. The next time

he looks in the mirror is after he had "moved his hand under his belt" (11) in the

Stones' bed. It is immediately after this action that we are told Bill tried to remember

when the Stones were due back, and then he wondered if they would ever return. He

could not remember their faces or the way they talked and dressed. He sighed and
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with effort rolled off the bed to lean over the dresser and look at himself in the mirror.

(11)

We can see just how far from reality Bill is when he begins to fantasize that

the Stones will not return (Campbell 16). Also, Bill has effectively erased the Stones

from his memory, and tries to replace their vision in the mirror with his. However, he

is still unsatisfied. The next time Bill looks in the mirror, he is wearing Jim Stones'

clothing and when he looks in the mirror he "crossed his legs, and smiled, observing

himself in the mirror" (Carver, Quiet 11). Bill is no doubt pleased with the image that

he sees for he has effectively, in his own mind, and quite literally, filled the Stones'

shoes: in this case Jim's "black wing tips" (11).

It is after Arlene's first trip into the Stones' apartment that the door to the story

is effectively closed. While we do not follow her actions in the apartment as we do

Bill's, we do understand they are identical when Bill meets her in hallway coming out

of the Stones': "He noticed white lint clinging to the back of her sweater and the

colour was high in her cheeks" (13). Arlene tells Bill that she "found some pictures"

(13), and while the pictures are never described, we understand the nature of them

from the Millers' exchange: "What kind of pictures?" Bill asks, and Arlene replies,

"You can see for yourself (13). Bill and Arlene decide to go into the Stones' together,

bonded as they have become in their similar experiences, and it is then that Arlene

realizes "My God . . . I left the key inside' (14). The Millers' reaction to becoming

locked out betrays the nature of their situation, and thus, the implications of their

actions:

Her lips were parted, and her breathing was expectant. He opened his

arms and she moved into them.

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"Don't worry," he said into her ear. "for God's sake, don't worry."

They stayed there. They held each other. They leaned into the door as

if against a wind, and braced themselves. (14)

We certainly agree with Hallett's description of the Millers' reaction to this event as

"peculiarly desperate" (55), but their reaction implies more than desperation and is

closer to "devastated," as Bethea suggests (71). In this final scene, the devastation at

being locked out of their newfound happiness, shows just how much "they feel they

have been passed by" (Carver, Quiet 7). In the hallway between their apartment and

the Stones', a place Nesset describes as "limbo" (14), both the 'brighter life" of the

Stones and their own feeling of being "passed by" become painfully clear, as "they

glimpse the terrifying banality of their lives and have no key to open the door to a

better future" (Bethea 71). In this sense, "the locked door represents the story's

essential emotion of perceived deprivation" (Campbell 17).

While Carver tells us that he is not a minimalist, we see his incorporation of

the 'iceberg' model into his short stories as a minimalist technique. With a knowledge

of literary minimalism, Carver's statements, "Its true that I try to eliminate every

unnecessary detail in my story" (Gentry, Stull 44), and "What creates tension in a

piece of fiction... [is] also the things that are left out, that are implied" (Carver 17),

can be viewed as a testimony of his own minimalist practices. For Boxer and Philips

“passivity is the strength of this language: little seems to be said, yet much is

conveyed.”(81) and they compare the simplicity of Carver’s dialogue to Pinter’s and

write of “emotional violence lurking beneath the neutral surfaces. One could go

further and assert that in his early stories Carver’s obsessive subject is the failure of

human dialogue, for talking fails in all but the title story of Will You Please Be Quiet,
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Please? and that story’s message is that sometimes the best thing we can say is

nothing.

Minimalism might well be a "pejorative" term, critically speaking, but

Raymond Carver's application of it is astounding; we capsize when we collide with

the tension below the surface of his fiction. With a term that he declared, "smacks of

smallness of vision" (Gentry, Stull 44), Carver has shown us, in fact, a much larger

vision: a vision of the human condition. While he has not told us much, Raymond

Carver has indeed shown us a great deal.

A few qualities of minimalist fiction are worth restating: short words, short

sentences, short paragraphs, little figurative language, minimal description of

characters and setting, minimal background information, nihilistic tone leading to a

very short story: For instance, in one of Carver’s stories titled “Cathedral”, the

following passages, mentioned one by one, display most of the qualities mentioned

above:

This blind man, an old friend of my wife’s, he was on his way to spend

the night. His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife’s

relatives in Connecticut. He called my wife from his in-laws’.

Arrangements were made. He would come by train, a five-hour trip,

and my wife would meet him at the station. […] (Cathedral)

The story has simple sentence structure throughout the story: “[…] She made

the first contact after a year or so. She called him up one night from an Air Force in

Alabama. She wanted to talk. They talked. He asked her to send him a tape and tell

him about her life. She did this. She sent the tape. […]” There is no resolution (open

endings): “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel
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like I was inside anything. ‘It’s really something’, I said.” Moreover the sentences

are detached from one another, for example: “The blind man had another taste of his

drink. He lifted his beard, sniffed it, and let it fall. He leaned forward on the sofa. He

positioned his ashtray on the coffee table, they put the lighter to his cigarette. He

leaned on the sofa and crossed his legs at the ankles.”

Great works of literature generally demand a certain level of participation

from readers. This is especially true of “minimalist” literature, as minimalist writers

consciously omit or withhold information, inviting readers to draw on their own past

experiences and knowledge to find meaning in the text. According to Hempel:

There’s a way in which a writer does not have to spell things out, and

the reader will get it. There’s a way in which the mind works to impose

meaning and order automatically on seemingly random bits of

information, so you can almost offer these bits up without knowing

yourself how they fit together – suspecting that they do – and trust the

reader to make some sense out of it. (Sapp 88)

The act of reading a minimalist story can be compared to the process one must

undergo to solve a difficult mathematical equation. As Hempel notes, readers of

minimalist fiction are presented with “seemingly random bits of information,” then

asked to fit the pieces together and “make some sense out of it.” Unlike mathematical

equations, however, which generally allow for just a single correct answer, the style

of writing theorized by Hempel invites and trusts readers to “impose meaning” on the

story and ultimately “get it [the story]” in whichever way/s makes sense to the

individual reader.
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What is astonishingly unique about Carver’s stories is that they are depictions

of our worst dreams about the reality of our neighbor’s existences, and the spiritual

barrenness at the heart of American life of the majority of Americans. Carver has the

courage to face up to this barrenness and the genius to make it come alive. If Post-

modern fiction promotes a collaborative version of meaning that is elusive and

negotiable, Carver’s fiction is similarly collaborative in that the readers are challenged

to complete for themselves the fragments that have been entrusted to them.

The editorial knife of Gordon Lish Carver’s sometime editor played a crucial

role in Carver’s writing career at least in the beginning. Beginners, Carver’s

posthumous collection of the unedited stories that were first published as What We

Talk About When We Talk About Love in a heavily edited form in 1981, goes some

way to renegotiating the minimalist label. Because Carver didn’t like the term, it

doesn’t mean the stories are any better now that Beginners restores them to their

original, less-minimalist state. As you might expect, comparing the new volume with

the old we find that some stories are better, some remain largely the same, but some

are worse without the would-be villainous hand of Lish.

It cannot be ruled out that Carver didn’t produce his own best work all by

himslef. This goes against many of those conventions we hold dear about genius,

creativity and authorship in general and about what we believe and trust in particular.

A claim about Lish’s maieutic role is best demonstrated through an example: In

What We Talk About… (WWTA) a story is entitled ‘I Could See the Smallest Things’;

in Beginners (B) it is called ‘Want to See Something?’

Here’s the opening from WWTA:

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I was in bed when I heard the gate. I listened carefully. I didn’t hear anything

else. But I heard that. I tried to wake Cliff. He was passed out. So I got up and went to

the window. A big moon was laid over the mountains that went around the city. It was

a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.

And here’s the opening from B:

I was in bed when I heard the gate unlatch. I listened carefully. I didn’t hear

anything else. But I had heard that. I tried to wake cliff, but he was passed out. So I

got up and went to the window. A big moon hung over the mountains that surrounded

the city. It was a white moon and covered with scars, easy enough to imagine a face

there – eye sockets, nose, even the lips.

The most significant changes are listed below:

I was in bed when I heard the gate. (WWTA)

I was in bed when I heard the gate unlatch. (B)

The minimalist enterprise was concerned with paring down sentences by

removing words, phrases and so on. This is a good example of that in action. In the

minimalist version, the word ‘unlatch’ is removed. The effect is to remove certainty

and introduce ambiguity: we know the gate has made a sound but we don’t know

why. In some cases, this is preferable and you might argue that knowing the gate had

become unlatched is more sinister and troubling than simply hearing the gate.

Typically, though, minimalist writers won’t tell you want to think and you can see

that even a single word can reveal a specific and clear meaning. This example shows

how the minimalist aesthetic invites the reader to participate in the interpretation of

the story because there is an intended paucity of detail: something is ensured to be

missing, so the reader must provide it.

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Moving on. Here’s the next significant difference between the texts:

I tried to wake Cliff. He was passed out. (WWTA)

I tried to wake Cliff, but he was passed out. (B)

This example illustrates how small changes in the text affect the ways in

which the rhythm of reading works. In the minimalist example from WWTA, the

disjunctive ‘but’ is removed and the sentence is divided. It creates a stopping effect,

slows the reading down, and in the context of this passage (and story) underscores the

feeling of sudden wakefulness or nervous attention. There’s no smooth transition to

support from her partner; Cliff (his name itself suggestive of large immovability)

remains defiantly unaware of her ordeal. How the story is read depends on the

construal of the pace and flow of the text: Here’s the next line:

A big moon was laid over the mountains that went around the city (WWTA)

A big moon hung over the mountains that surrounded the city (B)

The minimalist technique depended upon, elision and ambiguity, and

inferences so as to give the reader too clear a didactic nod to this approach. Typically

you find this working in the absence of any kind of interior monologue or access to

feelings in many minimalist stories. Here the effect is the same but more subtle.

Minimalists often describe scenes with the kind of objectivity we find in a

photograph. In the example above, the moon was ‘big’ and was ‘laid’ over the

mountains that ‘went around’ the city. All of this is detached observation without

much of a hint at evaluation.

Carver's Minimalist Masterpiece

Compare this with the same ‘big’ moon that ‘hung’ over mountains that

‘surrounded’ the city. Both the terms ‘hung’ and ‘surrounded’ are evaluative and
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don’t sit with their feet inside the hard-minimalist camp. For example, the word

‘surrounded’ suggests a kind of siege, which is analogous to how she feels being

trapped in her room. The same single word, even though it’s not hard-minimalism,

works well to be evocative without overdoing it. Similarly, the omission of detail in

the moon’s face in the first example is typical of the way that minimalists pared back

the detail of their writing to hint at more than what they told the reader outright.

Now, we know that nothing – including a photograph – is purely innocent, so

we might like to say these stories/passages in the stories aspire to this detached,

objective condition at such times. But the effect, paradoxically, is very far from

detachment. This is the case because often it’s the accumulation of small details

working together that creates the minimalist approach and its effect. And the

ambiguity of being non-specific about which way the gate is opening, the staccato

reading of longer sentences divided into smaller, single-clause barbs, and the taming

of evaluative adjectives such as ‘hung’ and ‘surrounded’ all work together to pare

back the interpretative clues readers have at their disposal, and which invite the reader

to find much more in the story than the words printed on the page.

When thinking about the inevitable question about which story (and approach)

was better, it depends on how one likes one’s literature. In a crude metaphor, if one is

the kind of person who likes loose ends at the end of the film, who doesn’t enjoy

being spoon-fed or manipulated into a precise way of reading a film, if one likes the

film to make one think a bit, then one might like and appreciate the kind of minimalist

writing that made – and sustains – Carver’s acclaim, in What We Talk About When We

Talk About Love.

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In one of his stories titled “Popular Mechanics” the element of irresolubility is

quite evident. The plot of the story goes like this: It is probably spring season because

the snow is melting and the weather a little warmer. Nevertheless, it is darker on the

inside of a house. A husband and a wife are in the midst of an argument while the

husband is packing to leave her behind. Meanwhile, the husband remembers their

baby who was being held by the mother. The husband wants to take the baby and the

wife wants to keep it. Each one of them firmly takes hold of an arm of the baby and

pulls hard. That is how – the issue was decided (69).

The first description, the setting, is of the weather, the surroundings of the

house where the whole story takes place, and finally the internal atmosphere of the

building; which was as dark as the outside weather. Then, two characters are

introduced. The author does not provide background information for the characters at

any point in the story. Even their names are not provided, but right away we learn that

a serious marital quarrel is underway, which is the sole action of the story. The reader

is already made aware of the conflict in the second paragraph, when the husband is

introduced packing his suitcase in the bedroom to leave home. The wife comes to the

door and the quarrel takes over the scene. The setting is exploited wisely and

enhances the mood of the short-short. When the marital argument moves from the

bedroom to the kitchen with a third character in the scene, the baby, the wife stands

behind the stove and the husband leans over to grab the baby and knocks down a

flowerpot, a sense of tightness and compression is felt. The kitchen window gave no

light, adds the narrator.

The story‘s atmosphere gets darker and tenser. There is no way out of the

strife. It is near the end of the story and there is no resolution. When the reader
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approaches the end of the short-short, a working out of the plot is expected, but it

depends on the action of the pre-existing conflict, which does not seem to have an

end. The story is seen as a picture of a moment, an impression of the narrator, and is

subordinated to the two main active characters and their relation to each other; and a

third, passive character, the baby, who seems more like a prop. The story is very

brief, 498 words, less than two pages. Ninety percent of the short-short is composed

of dialogue. The closure would obviously be so interesting if a solution to the

argument had been found. The end is left to the imagination of the reader. The two

active characters resemble types; they stand in for a familiar domestic scene, a

husband-wife argument and a threat to leave home. If the story were to be summed up

in the form of a maxim, it might be: ―After marriage, husband and wife become two

sides of a coin; they just can‘t face each other. And no one wants to interfere in their

quarrel – even the narrator of the story. The title is not only ironic but darkly comic.

The resolution also suggests the Biblical story of Solomon the judge and the two

women arguing over who is the real mother of the baby, with the prospect of the baby

being literally divided in half here becoming horribly real. In this connection,

William Stull has observed that Carver’s short stories often conclude with

“implosions,” moments where “ . . . Carver shows that we can mean what we say, but

we can never say what we mean” (241). The term implosion suggests the sense of an

accumulating tension breaking inward at the end, leaving no fragment, no shard.

Charles E. May suggests that perhaps Carver is the closest contemporary short story

writer to Chekhov, as both of them created “an illusion of inner reality by focusing on

external details only… [They found] an event that . . . expressed properly . . . by the .
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. . [wise] choice of relevant details . . . [would] embody the complexity of the inner

state” (May, Chekhov 202).

Expression and communication are also central “obsessions” in Carver’s

writings; his own characters are constantly confronted with difficulties in expressing

themselves, in communicating with each other. Carver’s unconditional judgment on

the intentions of authors can be put in perspective thanks to Carver’s own stories. The

correction he adds in his last sentence (“[ . . . ] and that not very well”) may go

unnoticed, but it can also be seen as a reference to “Fat.” This story can indeed be

read as an opinion on the relation between author and reader, an investigation in the

ins and outs of communication which ends up reflecting on writer and reader. Carver

mixes different levels of storytelling, each part of the narrative taking several

meanings on the different levels. For example, when the waitress interrupts her own

narrative to address her friend Rita, it is both a realistic action, in its similarity to oral

storytelling, and an imitation of the incursions of an omniscient narrator in written

fiction.

For indeed the waitress’s addresses reflect the author’s addresses to the reader,

however hidden they might be. “Fat” stages the difficulties in saying what one means,

and how almost insurmountable a task it is to make self-expression and

communication merge. In “Fat,” nevertheless, a failure in communication proves a

failure in expression; when the waitress “see[s] that [Rita] doesn’t know what to make

of [her story]”(WYP, 8), it is also the author’s voice that we hear, noticing that all the

readers may not understand the point of his stories, this very point being made

obscure by the way it is expressed. The parallel reaches puzzling heights when the

waitress says: “I’ve already told too much.” It is not too far-fetched to see in this
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statement a tongue-in-cheek reference to Carver’s so-called minimalism, an effort in

paring storytelling down “to the marrow.” The waitress’s storytelling style is hardly

minimalist, indeed, as she lists in excruciating detail such seemingly irrelevant

information as what she served, how she moved, etc. the waitress’s quest for a way to

express herself correctly can be seen as Carver’s own; she has a desire to

communicate with her friend which is only broken by her incapacity to find the right

way to talk to Rita, the narrative tricks that would get her point across. She thinks she

has already said too much, but her friend Rita obviously needs more. What words,

what style could convey the point of this story to Rita? The waitress told her story,

taking care not to forget a single detail, for she could not herself make clear where in

this story, in what detail lay the gist of her experience. At the end of the story, the

waitress has grasped that what is important cannot be worded, but only implied, while

hoping that the addressee can make it out on his own. The story demonstrates the

power of Carver’s “pared-down prose,” not as compared to other types of prose, but

as it is the most adequate way to express Carver’s voice. The waitress could not

betray herself in trying to tell her story in a way that would better suit Rita; similarly,

it is not the author’s job to adapt to his readers’ needs and desires. Yet it seems clear

that the waitress herself is not pleased in the way she told her story. The short story

raises the dilemma of the writer, between self-expression and communication, the one

implying the other while still being independent from it. From this level of

interpretation, we can reach Carver’s personal concern in writing. This dilemma is

present throughout Carver’s writings.

Raymond Carver’s second major collection of stories pushes his minimalism

to the threshold – without every crossing it – where economical realism might

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disintegrate into fragmented, experimental play. The guiding (de)compositional

principle here – largely attributable to Gordon Lish’s editorial hand - is to cut as much

and as early as possible without undermining the coherence of the fundamental scene.

This reductive aesthetic produces an exceptionally bleak tone for Carver, as his

characters – sometimes described as simply “the man” or “the girl” – are often frozen

at the story’s end in a pose of emotional tension or despair. The decision to abruptly,

even prematurely, end each story formally redoubles the inability of Carver’s

characters to weave the events of their lives into some kind of overarching narrative.

In fact, many of his characters are self-conscious about their lack of “plans”; dealing

with alcoholism, crumbling marriages, and/or bouts of unemployment, they are all too

aware that their lives lack any form of long-term consistency. For example, in

“Gazebo,” one character nostalgically notes, “Everything was fine for the first year. I

was holding down another job nights, and we were getting ahead. We had plans. Then

one morning, I don’t know.” As Mark McGurl has recently argued in The Program

Era, Carver’s stories aestheticize lower-middle class suffering, “beautifying shame”

without explaining it. This exposure of private shame to the public’s eyes is

thematized many of the stories. For example, in “Why Don’t You Dance?” a man

separated from his wife places all of his household furniture out on his front lawn,

exposing his domestic problems to strangers passing by. In “Viewfinder,” the narrator

is fascinated by the idea of having a photographer take photos of him inside and on

top of his house.

Communicational dysfunction is an omnipresent problem for the stories’

couples and friends, who are cognizant of their inability to express themselves. In

“Gazebo,” one character admits, “I don’t have anything to say. I feel all out of words
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inside.” But moments of non-verbal communion provide much needed relief. In “The

Bath,” a husband tries to comfort his wife after their child is injured in a hit-and-run:

“The husband sat in the chair beside her. He wanted to say something else. But there

was no saying what it should be. He took her hand and put it in his lap. This made

him feel better. It made him feel he was saying something.” More mystically, the

titular conversation of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” ends in a

powerful moment of silence. “I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s

heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not

even when the room went dark.” Yet Carver’s stories just as often stage scenes of

storytelling, confessing to the problematic pleasures of narrative making that his

minimalism would seem to repress. So whereas in “The Third Thing That Killed My

Father Off” a son is subjected to his father’s account of cheating on his mother, in

“The Calm” the narrator overhears a hunting story while sitting in a barbershop.

As McGurl notes, Carver’s characters appear apolitical (when not explicitly

conservative) and cut off from any involvement in the currents of History. Outside of

household appliances and color televisions, his characters even seem left behind by

the latest wave of modernization. No doubt the long downturn of the U.S. economy

since the beginning of the 1970s played a constitutive role in the stories’ sense of

economic (and therefore individual) stagnation. Carver’s association with the house

style of creative writing programs might lead some readers to be suspicious of the

level of calculated craft involved in these stories, but, at times, Carver’s infamously

simple syntax achieves a singularly powerful affective impact. His short stories, near-

classics by now, mark pockets of blight. It is American blight. Most of the pain in

these mostly painful stories is that of deterioration. Marriages, feelings, endeavours

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run down, partly from selfishness or lack of vision but mainly because there is no

society to sustain them.

Carver himself realised an expansion in his later works. In an interview with

Kasia Boddy, Carver answers to the question about his dislike for the term ‘theme’

thus:

... I think theme or the meaning of a story declares itself in the work

itself, and that it’s finally impossible to separate the meaning of the

story from the content and the way things are worked out. For better

or worse, I am an instinctual writer rather than a writer working out a

programme or finding stories to fit particular themes. There are certain

obsessions that I have and try to give voice to: the relationships

between men and women, why we oftentimes lose the things we put

the most value on, the mismanagement of of our own inner resources.

I’m also interested in survival, what people can do to raise themselves

up when they’ve been laid low. I wish you could see stories are

different in a lot of ways – in ways I can’t really articulate – from the

stories that have come before. I think all the stories in each of my

books seem to be somewhat different from the other, earlier stories.

The stories in Cathedral, for instance – most of them, at any rate – are

vastly different from the stories in the first book. They’re fuller, more

generous, somehow. There’s a new story about Chekhov and his last

days: I never would have written anything like that, I couldn’t have,

five years ago.(London Review of Books, 1983).

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Carver’s sign of success is manifold: prestigious and ample grants, publication in the

best literary quarterlies and national magazines, and, from all appearances, an

unperturbed ability to write the kind of stories he wishes to write. In order to throw

light on the distinctive descriptive wizardry of Carver, the next chapter focuses on the

rhetorical devices employed in his fiction.

Literature Review

Minimalist literature depends upon omission, absence and suggestion to fulfil

its aesthetic promise: to reduce, to pare down, and to condense. While Russell Banks’

essay "Raymond Carver: Our Stephen Crane” describes the inescapable determinism

in both the writers, Morris Dickstein’s essay “The Pursuit of the Ordinary” describes

Caver’s minimalism as post-Beckett realism. Philip E. Simmons argues that

television's presence is prevalent in Carver's stories. People in his stories watch

television because they have nothing more productive to do, lack the intelligence or

motivation to do otherwise, or wish to repress or deflect the ennui and alienation of

their class-bound lives. Marc Chénetier elaborates a nature metaphor to describe the

dynamics of Carver’s stories thus: Carver’s stories follow the ripples made by a stone

in a water. Madison Bell rightly observes on this plight saying, “Carver’s characters

resemble rats negotiating a maze that the reader can see and they cannot.” In his

essay “On Writing” Carver writes about his dissatisfaction towards the term

‘minimalism’. Kirk Nesset’s The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical study and,

Arthur Saltzman’s Understanding Raymond Carver, Jo. Sapp’s “Interview with Amy

Hempel”, John Powell’s essay "The Stories of Raymond Carver: The Menace of

Perpetual Uncertainty" and Cynthia Whitney Hallett’s Minimalism and the Short Story:

Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel and Mary Robison, Ewing Campbell’s Raymond
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Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction and Mark McGurl’s The Program Era have been

referred to in this chapter for analyzing the stories of Carver.

Methodology

This chapter adopts philosophic semantics and formalist stylistics as its

methodology for analyzing Carver’s brand of literary minimalism.

Conclusion

a) Elements of Original Contribution: Critics of Carver’s stories tend to travel

along the two tracks: formalist track or the socio-and-economic milieu. Carver

knows his readers’ passions and perversions well. In story after story, in language

that babbles from wise lunatics, Carver’s penetration of characters is honest and

artistic. The chapter establishes the dualism of Carver’s critics along either track and

Carver’s own reconciliation of form and content as co-ordinates.

b) Impact: The appreciation of "two Carvers," one prized primarily as a formal

innovator, the other as a social-realist, suggests a false but ongoing separation in

criticism of form and content. In several key stories since 1980, he has revealed to

readers and critics alike that though they have long suffered the conviction that life is

irredeemably trivial, in truth it is as profound as their wounds, and their substance is

as large as the losses they suffer.

c) Recapitulation: Prior to attempting a close scrutiny of Carver’s fiction, let us

have a recapitulation of the present chapter. We have dealt with Carver’s minimalist

principles namely “exclusion or leaving-out,” half-said,” “unsaid,” “expression and

communication,” “implicature or suggestion,” “presupposition,” and “indirection.”

Some of the select stories of Carver have been taken for analysis in order to illustrate

his minimalist practice. The Literature Review included here comprises the books
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and articles of several American critics of both the above-mentioned mutually

exclusive approaches. And the Methodology deployed here draws upon both

meaning/content theories(semantics) and form-theories(formalism and systematics).