Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena Institute for English/American Studies

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

"Minimalism" in Raymond Carver’s "Collectors"

Name: Mathias Keller

Table of Contents

I. Introduction 2

II. Setting and Point of View 3

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

IV. Unfamiliar Actions and Events 13

V. Conclusion 16

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

I. Introduction

Raymond Carver’s "Collectors"1 is part of the often underrated trend2 in contemporary American short fiction which is called "Minimalism" or "New Realism". Its most significant characteristic, in contrast to "Postmodernism", is that it returns to the realistic depiction of everyday life (mimesis) in the American society. Raymond Carver can be labelled as one dominant representative of this movement and he writes in most cases about the trivialities of everyday life. Very frequently he constructs stories with a depressive and hopeless mood due to the failure of personal relationships between the protagonists. Then, alcoholism is their last refuge. Furthermore, Carver admired Hemingway and adopted some very interesting techniques from his literary idol. Indeed, the most prevailing one was Carver’s imitation of the "Iceberg-Theory"3 in his stories. Hemingway states that in a story only about 1/8, like the top of an iceberg, should be told and 7/8, the part underneath the water, should be discovered by the reader. The latter represents for Hemingway as well as for Carver the most important part of a short story. Wolfgang Iser wrote in his books on the aesthetics of reception about the analogous technique of blanks/omission.4 He states, that the main issues lie underneath the plain and fragmentary surface of narration. Accordingly, the story depends on speculations by the reader, which are intended by the author, and often a high level of previous knowledge is required to understand all circumstances and motivations of the characters. Due to the variety of speculations it can be doubted that a coherent interpretation of a text with a lot of blanks is possible. However, they certainly do create an enormous effect.

In the seemingly simple low-rent tragedy "Collectors", "Carver’s most minimalistic [story],"5

a salesman for vacuum cleaners enters the house and life of the I-narrator. A multitude of

blanks and, moreover, unfamiliar events and actions contribute to a large extend to the high potential of anxiety of the story. In the following, I will first reveal the most significant blanks concerning the setting, the point of view and the two protagonists. By doing so, I will also attempt to fill them. Secondly, I will analyze what is unfamiliar in the story and how events and actions of the two characters amplify the, on the whole, uncanny situation. Finally, I will sum up the main findings of my analysis and evaluate them.

II. Setting and Point of View

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

[...]

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

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

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

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

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

Works by Raymond Carver

Carver, Raymond. All of Us: The Collected Poems. ed. William L. Stull. News York: Vintage, 2000.

- - -. A New Path to the Waterfall. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1989.

- - -. At Night the Salmon Move. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1976.

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

- - -. Cathedral. New York: Knopf, 1983.

- - -. Elephant and Other Stories. London: Collins Harvill, 1988.

- - -. Fires. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1983; New York: Vintage, 1984; New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1989.

- - -. Furious Seasons and Other Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1977.

- - -. If It Please You. Northridge, CA: Lord John, 1984.

- - -. In a Marine Light: Selected Poems. London: Collins Harvill, 1987.

- - -. My Father's Life. Derry, NH: Babcock & Koontz, 1986.

- - -. Near Klamath. Sacramento: English Club of Sacramento State College, 1968.

- - -. No Heroics, Please: Uncollected Writings. London: Collins Harvill, 1991; New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1992.

- - -. Put Yourself in My Shoes. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1974.

- - -. The Pheasant. Worcester, MA: Metacom, 1982.

- - -. The Stories of Raymond Carver. London: Picador, 1985.

- - -. Those Days: Early Writings by Raymond CarverCarver. Elmwood, CT: Raven, 1987.

- - -. Two Poems. Salisbury, MD: Scarab, 1982.

- - -. Two Poems . Concord, NH: Ewert, 1986.

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

- - -. Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories. New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1988; Franklin Center, PA: Franklin Library,

1988.

- - -. Where Water Comes Together with Other Water. New York: Random House, 1985.

- - -. Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

- - -. Winter Insomnia. Santa Cruz: Kayak, 1970.

- - -. Ultramarine. New York: Random House, 1986.

Carver, Raymond with Shannon Ravenel. (Eds.) The Best American Short Stories 1986. Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1986.

Carver, Raymond and Tess Gallagher. Dostoevsky: A Screenplay. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1985.

Carver, Raymond and Tom Jenks. (Eds.) American Short Story Masterpieces. New York: Delacorte, 1987.

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

Contents[hide]

• 1 Life • 2 Writing • 3 Works

o 3.1 Fiction 3.1.1 Collections 3.1.2 Compilations 3.1.3 Some individual stories

o 3.2 Poetry 3.2.1 Collections 3.2.2 Compilations

o 3.3 Screenplays o 3.4 Essays, Poems, Stories (Uncollected Works)

• 4 Films • 5 Books about Carver

• 6 External links

[edit] Life

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

Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. In his spare time he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[edit] Writing

Carver's career was dedicated to short stories and poetry. He described himself as "inclined toward brevity and intensity" and "hooked on writing short stories" (in the foreword of

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[edit] Works

[edit] Fiction

[edit] Collections

• Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (first published 1976) • Furious Seasons (1977) • What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) • Cathedral (1983) • Elephant (1988)

[edit] Compilations

• Where I'm Calling From (1988) • Short Cuts : Selected Stories (1993) - (film tie-in)

[edit] Some individual storiesFrom Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

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

From Furious Seasons

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

From What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

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

From Cathedral

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

From Elephant

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

[edit] Poetry

[edit] Collections

• Near Klamath (1968) • Winter Insomnia (1970) • At Night The Salmon Move (1976) • Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985) • Ultramarine (1986) • A New Path To The Waterfall (1989)

[edit] Compilations

• In a Marine Light: Selected Poems (1988) • All of Us: The Collected Poems (1996)

[edit] Screenplays

• Dostoevsky (1985, with Tess Gallagher)

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

• Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (1983) • No Heroics, Please (1999) • Call if You Need Me (2000)

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

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

Содержание[убрать]

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

• 8 Ссылки

[править] Биография

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

[править] Творчество и признание

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

[править] Стихи

• Winter Insomnia / Зимняя бессонница (1970) • At Night The Salmon Move/ Лосось выплывает ночью (1976) • Where Water Comes Together with Other Water/ Там, где вода встречается с водой

(1985) • Ultramarin/ Ультрамарин (1986) • A New Path to the Waterfalls/ Новая тропа к водопаду (1989)

[править] Рассказы

• Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?/ Вы не будете так добры помолчать? (1976, Национальная книжная премия)

• Furious Seasons/ Чудовищная погода (1977) • What We Talk About When We Talk About Love/ Так о чем мы говорим, когда

говорим о любви (1981) • Cathedral / Собор (1983, номинация на Пулитцеровскую премию)

• Elephant / Слон (1988)

[править] Другие произведения

• Dostoevsky /Достоевский(1985, киносценарий)

[править] На русском языке

• Собор. М.: Известия, 1987 (Библиотека журнала «Иностранная литература»). • Стихи [из разных книг] // Иностранная литература, 2005, № 7. • Поезд • Вы — доктор? • Рассказы • Рассказы

[править] Библиография

• Saltzman A.M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

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

• Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver. New York: Scribner’s, 1990. • …when we talk about Raymond Carver/ Ed. by Sam Halpert. Layton: Gibbs Smith, 1991. • Campbell E. Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. • Remembering Ray: A composite biography of Raymond Carver/ Ed. by William L. Stull

and Maureen P. Carroll. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1993. • Runyon R.P.Reading Raymond Carver. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1994. • Nesset K. The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Survey. Athens: Ohio UP, 1995. • Halpert S. Carver: An oral biography. Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1995. • Hallett C.W. Minimalism & the Short Story: Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, and Mary

Robison. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999. • Bloom H. Raymond Carver: comprehensive research and study guide. Broomall: Chelsea

House, 2002 • Zhou J. Raymond Carver's short fiction in the history of black humor. New York:

P.Lang, 2006. • Carver M. What it used to be like: a portrait of my marriage to Raymond Carver. New

York: St. Martin's Press, 2006

Literary minimalism

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

Some 1940s-era crime fiction of writers such as James M. Cain and Jim Thompson adopted a stripped-down, matter-of-fact prose style to considerable effect; some classifiy this prose style as minimalism.

Another strand of literary minimalism arose in response to the meta-fiction trend of the 1960s and early 1970s (John Barth, Coover, and William H. Gass). These writers were also spare with prose and kept a psychological distance from their subject matter.

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

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

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

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

This movement is a derivation from minimalism. As minimalism, dirty realism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Authors working within the genre tend to eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. The characters in minimalist stories and novels tend to be unexceptional.

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

Insularity and self-enlargement in Raymond Carver's Cathedral Essays in Literature; Macomb; Spring 1994; Nesset, Kirk Full Text:Copyright Western Illinois University, Department of English Spring 1994 In "The Compartment," one of Raymond Carver's bleakest stories, a man passes through the French countryside in a train, en route to a rendevous with a son he has not seen for many years. "Now and then," the narrator says of the man, "Meyers saw a farmhouse and its outbuildings, everything surrounded by a wall. He thought this might be a good way to live-in an old house surrounded by a wall" (Cathedral 48). Due to a last minute change of heart, however, Meyers chooses to stay insulated in his "compartment" and, remaining on the train, reneges on his promise to the boy, walling out everything external to his selfish world, paternal obligation included. Meyers's tendency toward insularity is not, of course, unique among the characters in Cathedral or among thecharacters of earlier volumes. In Will You Be Quiet, Please? there is the paranoid self-cloistering of Slater andArnold Breit, and in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love we read of James Packer's cantankerous,self-absorbed disgruntlement about life's injustices. In Cathedral appear

other, more extreme versions of insularity,from a husband's self-imposed confinement to a living room in "Preservation" to another's pathetic reluctance to leave an attic garret in "Careful." More strikingly in Cathedral than before, Carver's figures seal themselves off from their worlds, walling out the threatening forces in their lives even as they wall themselves in, retreating destructively into the claustrophobic inner enclosures of self. But corresponding to this new extreme of insularity, there are in several stories equally striking instances where--pushing insularity the other way--characters attempt to throw off their entrapping nets and, in a few instances, appear to succeed. In Cathedral, and in Cathedral only, we witness the rare moments of their comings out, a process of opening up in closed-down lives that comes acrossin both the subjects and events of the stories and in the process of their telling, where self-disenfranchisement isreflected even on the level of discourse, rhetorically or structurally, or both. As one might expect, "de-insulation" of this kind necessarily involves the intervention of others: the coming out ofa self-enclosed figure depends upon the influence of another being--a baker or a babysitter or blind man, or even afellow drunk on the road to recovery, who, entering unexpectedly into a character's life, affords new perspective orawareness and guides him along, if not toward insight then at least away from the destructively confining stricturesof self. As one might expect further, such interventions and influences are mobilized in the stories through thecommunal gestures of language--through the exchanging of tales and through communicative transactions, particularly, where separate identities blend and collaborate rather than collide. Thus even as "Carver's task," as Paul Skenazy writes, is to depict the "tiny, damning confinements of the spirit," in Cathedral it is also to go beyond depicting the suffocations and wilted spirits of characters in chains (78). Engaging in what he calls a kind of writerly "opening up" of his own, Carver draws out in various uplifting moments the momentary gratifications and near-joys characters experience when, however temporarily, the enclosing walls come down--when their self-preoccupations lift and they sense new freedom, a freedom they may or may not ever truly participate in at all(Interview 21). But since outright freedom is for many of Carver's lot as terrifying as total lack of mobility (think of Arnold Breitin "Are You a Doctor?" or Lloyd in "Careful"), the freedoms Carver's newly-liberated characters experience manifest themselves ironically as forms of enclosure, ample and humane as those enclosures may be. Be they a comforting memory of one's old bedroom, or the warm, fragrant reality of a bakery, or a vision of the awesome interior of a cathedral, they are enclosures nevertheless. Trying to free themselves of the fetters of insecurity and addiction, Carver's characters expand both inwardly and outwardly and, thanks to the beneficial

incursion of other lives and other stories, imagine larger, more spacious enclosures--places big enough and light enough to allow the spirit room to breathe. In Cathedral, by and large, characters are more insulated than ever, cut off from their worlds and from themselves; but a few of them, like J. P. in "Where I'm Calling From," trying patiently and steadfastly "tofigure out how to get his life back on the track" (135), demonstrate through shared stories and through overturestoward human connection new and unprecedented awareness. It is an awareness of collective confinement, a sensethat we can and often do help each other set aright our derailed lives, that by opening up to others and to ourselves,we do indeed occasionally get those lives back on track. "Where I'm Calling From" is the story of a man coming to grips with addiction within the security of an alcoholtreatment home. Contrary to the situations of "The Compartment," "Preservation," and "Careful"--situations inwhich men blockade themselves in ways as offensive to others as they are self-destructive--this narrator'sconfinement is both positive and necessary. Locking himself up voluntarily in "Frank Martin's drying out facility"(127), he is a stronger version of Wes in "Chef's House," a wavering recoveree who lapses back into alcoholismwhen his summer retreat--the sanctuary of his fragile recovery--falls out from under him. Up until now, thisnarrator (like many of Carver's narrators, he goes unnamed) has insulated himself with drink, with the bufferingtorpor alcohol can provide, his addiction being both a reaction to and the cause of his failing marriage. Arriving atFrank Martin's dead drunk, exchanging one extreme state of insularity for another, he takes refuge from a priorrefuge--one that was killing him. Sitting on the porch with another recovering drunk, J. P., he takes further refuge inthe story his new friend has to tell.(1) It is significant that throughout most of the story Carver leaves his characters sitting where they are. Protected yetstill exposed to the chill of the outer world, the porch is that liminal space existing between the internal security ofa cure-in-progress and the lure, if not the danger, of the outer world. On the porch, the narrator and J. P. are at oncesheltered and vulnerable, their physical surroundings an objective correlative to the transitional state of their mindsand wills. Beyond the "green hill" they see from the porch, as Frank Martin tells them, is Jack London's house--theplace where the famous author lived until "alcohol killed him" (137). Beyond that--much farther north--is the"Yukon," the fictive topos of London's "To Build a Fire," a place where, as the narrator recalls later, a man will"actually...freeze to death if he can't get a fire going" (146). With his wet clothes, tragically enough, London's figureis hardly insulated from the chill, even though, ironically, he's bundled up in the manner of the two strongest figures

in Carver's story: J. P.'s wife, Roxy, whose "big knuckles" have broken her husband's nose, wears both a "coat" and"a heavy sweater" (142); Frank Martin, hard-edged and tough and looking like a "prizefighter," keeps his "sweaterbuttoned all the way up" (137). By the end of the story, sitting alone and enjoying the transitional comforts of the porch, Carver's narrator fails torecall, or subconsciously omits, the tale's sad conclusion--the fact that, at the mercy of the elements, London's maneventually freezes to death, his life extinguished along with his fire. Still upset perhaps about Tiny's "seizure," thenarrator chooses not to think of the extreme consequences of ill-prepared exposure to the outer world. Nor does heremind himself that death entered the heart of the sanctuary only days before, this time without claiming its prize.Subject also to bodily complaints, J. P. suffers from the "shakes" and the narrator from--an occasional "jerk in [his]shoulder"; like Tiny, the fat electrician from Santa Rosa, J. P. and his friend are each in their own way overpoweredby biology, by nature. Their bodies--like their minds--are adjusting and compensating in the process of recovery.Just as love was once upon a time "something that was out of [J. P.'s] hands"--something that set his "legsatremble" and filled him "with sensations that were carrying him every which way" (132)--the aftermath ofdrinking is for both men superseded in intensity only by death, the ultimate spasm, which proceeds from bothwithin and without, insulate themselves however they may. Before "going inside," Frank Martin suggests a bit of recommended reading, namely The Call of the Wild. "We haveit inside if you want to read something," he says. "It's about this animal that's half dog and half wolf" (137). LikeLondon's "animal," we learn, the narrator is similarly divided, torn by inner impulses. At the outset of his firstvisit, Frank Martin had taken the narrator aside, saying, "We can help you. If you want help and want to listen towhat we say" (138). Thinking now in retrospect, the narrator says, "I didn't know if they could help me or not.Part of me wanted help. But there was another part" (138). Partly civilized, partly wild, the narrator is in one senseinterested in protecting himself from himself, his retreat at Frank Martin's a gesture of attemptedself-domestication that, considering present circumstances, unfortunately did not come off the first time. "We'renot out of the woods yet," he says, describing the second aftermath of addiction, the physical extremity of whichleaves him and his friend trembling in their chairs, still caught up in the war of selves. "In-between women,"Skenazy writes of this story, "in-between homes, in-between drinks, the narrator locates himself in hisdisintegration" (83). And yet it is between selves, we should hasten to add, where he begins to come to terms with

disintegration, and begins imagining ways to reintegrate, rebuild. Above all he wants "to listen," as Frank Martin says, though it is not Frank he listens to chiefly but to J. P. "Keeptalking, J. P.," he says early on (130), interjecting this and like phrases throughout the story in the manner of arefrain: "You better keep talking," he says (136). The coming out of hardened insularity involves intensive listening,as necessary for him as telling is for J. P., and for Carlyle in "Fever," who comes out of a psychological andphysical ordeal by spilling his pent-up turmoils to a babysitter. For this narrator, significantly, the process ofcoming out involves going into the narrative of another, involves entering imaginatively into a discourse which,arising of the communal act of storytelling, is at once familiar and unfamiliar. Since "commiseration instigatesrecuperation," as Arthur Saltzman observes of this story, J. P.'s story initiates through both comradery anddisplacement the continuation of the narrator's own story--and, if all goes well, the reassembly of the fragments ofhis life (147). Which is not to say, of course, that there are not perils as well as benefits in transactions ofdiscourse, the sharing of stories. In "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please," a secure, seemingly happy man comesunglued at hearing the tale of his wife's infidelity, a story she tells him herself; in "Sacks," a son enclosed by hisown world and concerns meets his father briefly in an airport, and upon hearing the story of his father's adultery(and his parents' ruined marriage), he seals himself off completely from his father, more alienated and embitteredthan ever by the old man's confession. Before Cathedral, generally, narrative transactions--if transaction has takenplace at all--constitute perilous intercourse indeed. But in "Where I'm Calling From," as in other stories in Cathedral, Carver would have us believe otherwise. "I'mlistening," the narrator says, waiting for J. P. to go on with his tale. "It's helping me to relax, for one thing. It'staking me away from my own situation" (134). Still, J. P.'s story helps him do more than merely "relax." Listening,and the imagination required of close listening, takes him away from his "own situation" even as it brings him closerto the heart of his problems. His inner crisis is externalized in J. P.'s story, both in the pairing of their presentcircumstances and in the details of his friend's narration--in such odd details, in fact, as the "well" J. P. fell into as aboy. Like the chimneys from which J. P. ends up making his livelihood later in life--narrow, tubular enclosuresassociated with the family to whom he becomes attached (they run the chimney-sweeping business)--the well is atrap, a darkly insulating prison; it represents the extent to which J. P. senses, enclosed until very recently in abottle, he has hit "the bottom" in the present trajectory of his life.(2) For both the narrator and J. P., the well

represents literally the pitfalls of experience, the dark refuges in which they find themselves (voluntarily orinvoluntarily) existing, places they are extricated from ultimately only through the intervening efforts of others.Like J. P. "hollering" at the bottom of the well, the narrator is waiting for a drop-line of his own, his "line out"being (along with his willingness to reform) the telephone. By the end of the story he has tried calling his wifetwice, and is about to call his "girlfriend," hoping to make contact with the women in his life. Not by any meansout of the woods yet, though, he is still wavering in his resolve. In one of the story's last lines, he says, thinking ofhis girlfriend, "Maybe I'll call her first"--suggesting, given what we know about her drinking habits, that that lineout may send him tumbling back into the hole. Torn between the warmth of stability and the chill of the outerworld, between civilization and wilderness, he is, we assume, still at war with himself. With two layers of female protection, in a sense, buffering him from the world, he is mildly obsessed with thewomen in his life, so it is not surprising that his life and J. P.'s story intersect finally in a woman's kiss. Far morehopeful than the peacock in "Feathers"--one man's token of a kind of radiant bliss he'll never know--Roxy's kiss isfor the narrator a token of "luck," emphasizing more than his need for help from without, a rope down the well ofhis life. As a gesture, Roxy's kiss underscores the degree to which women provide security in his life; he hasdepended on them, certainly, as much as he has in the past on drink, or as he has recently on the captivating flowof J. P.'s narrative. Our sense of his greatest personal security comes with his description of the time his landlord,coming around one morning to paint the house, awakened him and his wife in their bedroom: I push the curtain away from the window. Outside, this old guy in white coveralls is standing next to his ladder.The sun is just starting to break over the mountains. The old guy and I look each other over. It's the landlord, allright--this old guy in coveralls. But his coveralls are too big for him. He needs a shave, too. And he's wearing thisbaseball cap to cover his bald head. Goddamn it, I think, if he isn't a weird old fellow. And a wave of happinesscomes 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 thepast-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 notonly 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, asbefore, of what lies beyond that illness and decrepitude and death; "inside," on the contrary, there is security andleisure, embodied by a laughing wife and the enveloping comforts of a warm bed, and by a recognition of hiscircumstances 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 youngerman years later, though contact is closer now since both men are "outside" and are working communally in theirefforts to find ways back in. Epitomized in the gesture of Roxy's kiss, the intersection of their lives and stories hasinitiated 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 itsdisruptions in time and narrative continuity, the story mirrors the psychic energies of the narrator, wavering fromman to man in its focus, intertwining the individual threads of their stories and lives in a manner that makes themcome to seem oddly inseparable, fused in a brotherly textual knit. Promoting such healthy complicity, "Where I'mCalling From" embodies and dramatizes our collective tendencies to discover ourselves in the stories of others, andto complicate other lives with our own as we collaborate toward understanding, toward liberation from theconfinements that kill. In "A Small, Good Thing" we find a similar coming together of lives--rather more disparate lives, but with problemsno less serious. It is the story of a couple dealing with the loss of a child, and of the consolation they findeventually, haphazardly, in the company of a baker; it is a story about the way fear and worry and grief can causepeople to break out of the habitual, insulating, self-preoccupations of their lives, and about how the narratives ofothers can cushion the violent unsettling such break-outs bring on. As in "Where I'm Calling From," recoveryentails "listening," as characters enter briefly into the lives of others through channels of verbal interaction. In thisstory, however--perhaps because Ann and Howard Weiss, its central figures, are simultaneously more stable andmore emotionally vulnerable than J. P. and his friend, and because the story evokes a greater sense of affirmationoverall, despite its subject--the liberating aspects of attentive listening are rather more noticeable. With a fullnessand optimism unequalled in any other story, Carver dramatizes here what William Stull calls "talk that works" (11).Carver provides here in essence an answer to the failures his characters have been subject to all along, failures ofcharacters who, in stories in all of his books, talk and listen with characteristically poor results. Corresponding to

this new fullness of possibility, the shape of the story itself swells out to new proportions (revised from itsoriginal form as "The Bath"), reflecting on the level of narrative the kind of psychological and spiritual expansiontaking place within. "So far," the unnamed narrator says of Howard Weiss, "he had kept away from any real harm, from those forces heknew existed and that could cripple or bring down a man if the luck went bad, if things suddenly turned" (62). Asfor J. P.'s friend, "luck" is important to Howard; its capriciousness, he knows, dictates somehow over the details ofhis world--has in fact allowed "forces" to insinuate themselves into the placid interior of his life, forces manifestingthemselves after the initial blow in the ominous calls of the baker. His insular bubble of security now on the pointof bursting, Howard remains sealed in his "car for a minute" in the driveway, his leg beginning to "tremble" as heconsiders the gravity of his circumstances. Trying to "deal with the present situation in a rational manner" (62), hismotor 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, somethinghard" (70). Both Howard and his wife--like recovering alcoholics--are afflicted by the physical consequences oftheir dealings with an irrational, overpowering problem, in the face of which rationality is useless. Thanks to a bitof bad luck, their secure and self-enclosed familial world is turned inside out. As the focal figure of the story, Ann seems both more preoccupied and more sensitive than her husband, notnecessarily because her parental (maternal) attachment to the boy is greater than Howard's, but because she isafforded more interior space in the story throughout. Thus, despite the intensity of her preoccupation in theirdays-long vigil, she momentarily glimpses the walls around her, walls erected in the tide of catastrophe. "For thefirst time," the narrator says, describing Ann's realization after many hours in the hospital, "she felt they weretogether in it, this trouble" (68). Realizing she has shut herself off to everything but her son and his condition, sheacknowledges that she "hadn't let Howard into it, though he was there and needed all along. She felt glad to be hiswife." If in a sense the disruptive force of calamity clarifies, it also causes both Ann and her husband, hemmed innow by fear and dread, to project outward as they seek respite from confinement. Worry insulating them assecurity had before, they stand staring "out at the parking lot." They don't "say anything. But they seem...to feeleach other's insides now, as though the worry had made them transparent in a perfectly natural way" (71). Theirinterior state of affairs is "natural," of course, because it is nature--and their powerlessness in the face of it--that

makes them transparent, that prompts them, fire-distilled now by mutual concern, to gaze out the window the wayJ. P. and his friend stare from the porch. After Scotty's death, however, they will have to "get used to...being alone"(82); soon they will have to readjust tensions in the marital bond that have been for years filtered by their son'spresence. What was once a common refuge is suddenly no longer available to them. As in "Where I'm Calling From," the act of exchanging stories is also a kind of refuge, though here it becomes aneven more compensatory one. Ann and Howard end up in a bakery, giving up the oppressive environment of thehospital--and a house full of painful momentoes--for a warmer, more spacious setting. The narrative transactionoccurring in the bakery is for husband and wife the "restorative measure" the doctor mistakenly diagnoses indiscussing Scotty's "very deep sleep"; at the hands of the baker the Weisses are doctored as their son could not be.Contrary to the situation of J. P. and his friend, recovery is administered to them by a speaker who cannotempathize with his listeners, a man as ironically unlike them as anybody could be. "I don't have any childrenmyself," the baker tells Ann and Howard, "so I can only imagine what you must be feeling" (87). Still, sparked byhis power to "imagine" their grief, he begins his tale of "loneliness, and of...what it was like to be childless all theseyears," offering them if nothing else at least the consolation of knowing that they know what they are going tomiss. Thus husband and wife listen, and listening, enter the baker's world--his story--to temporarily escape theirown. "They listened carefully," the narrator says, drawing through repetition special attention to the act, "theylistened to what the baker had to say" (88). Elsewhere in Cathedral, remarkably, hearing and listening are treated in less optimistic terms: in "Careful," a man'smetaphorical deafness to the world is figured in the literal blockage of his ear with wax; in "Vitamins," a similar ifmore general kind of deafness finds its emblem in a dismembered, dried-out human ear. But in other stories--in"Fever" and "Where I'm Calling From," for instance--characters indeed turn their ears to others, and come awaybetter for it. "I got ears," the blind man says in "Cathedral," affirming, in spite of his handicap, that "Learning neverends" (222). In "Intimacy," one of Carver's last stories, a fiction-writing narrator calls himself "all ears," exploringboth the idea of the writer as plunderer of experience (as earlier, in "Put Yourself in My Shoes") and of the writeras listener, as someone who, by listening carefully, reconstructs memory and experience in order to reorder thedisorder of his past. In "A Small, Good Thing," more strikingly than ever, telling and listening are beneficial,recuperative activities. And yet what is crucial is not so much the substance of the stories as it is the process of the

telling. "I was interested," J. P.'s friend says of J. P.'s tale. "But I would have listened if he'd been going on abouthow one day he'd decided to start pitching horseshoes" (132). Enveloped similarly in the baker's tale, Ann andHoward listen, escaping the still unthinkable reality of their present circumstances by entering the far more stifling,insulated life of their host, and thus they begin a slow journey out of the darkness of grief. Though it is still darkoutside, it is "like daylight" inside the bakery; warmed by the light and the ovens and the sweet rolls they eat, andrevived by shared compassion, Ann and Howard do "not think of leaving." The welcome light of possibility, finally, along with hopes if not promises of self-regeneration, is reflected in theshape of the story overall, which we have here in its revised form; "A Small, Good Thing" is two-thirds again aslong as the original published version, "The Bath," and is the longest story Carver ever collected. Like many storiesin Cathedral, which Carver describes as "fuller and more interesting somehow" as well as "more generous," therevised version of this story reflects part of an "opening up in this book" which, as Carver says, is absent in "anyother of the books" (Interview 22). From the shadowy, overdetermined world of "The Bath," where the tinyenclosure of a bathtub provides a sole comfort for characters ("Fear made him want to take a bath," the originalnarrator says of Howard), we traverse to the indoor daylight of the bakery, where food and talk and commiserationactually do make a difference, if not redeeming characters of their miseries then consoling them at least, allowingthem to understand that loneliness and hardship and death are part of the natural order of things, and that as peoplethey are not in it alone. Embodied in this "fuller" version of the story, Carver's "opening up" suggests further thevery real extent to which style can wall an artist in--suggests how as an artist Carver, like a few of his morefortunate characters, is capable of breaking free of enclosing environments, exchanging them not only for greatercapaciousness but, we must assume, for a new understanding of himself and his craft as well. In the title story, "Cathedral," the coming out of a self-insulated figure is more dramatic than ever before, notsimply because he is more fully shut off than some but because, like Meyers riding away from his son on a train tonowhere, he is ignorant of the serious nature of his insularity. Walled in by his own insecurities and prejudices, thisnarrator is sadly out of touch with his world and with himself, buffered by drink and pot and by the sad reality, ashis wife puts it, that he has no "friends." As are the figures in "A Small, Good Thing" and "Where I'm CallingFrom," however, he too is given an opportunity to emerge from the strictures of self-enclosure, though here it is

not a story that opens him up but a more subtle nonverbal transaction--an odd, unspoken communication betweenhim and his blind guest, Robert. And as is often the case in the conversations of Carver's characters, talk fails him,and yet his failure is more than made up for by the connection he finally succeeds in making, by the self-liberatingresults of his attempt. Not surprisingly, this narrator lives in a narrow, sheltered world. Like Howard and Ann, he is threatened abruptlyfrom without; the appearance of his wife's friend constitutes--at the outset, at least--an invasion of his enclosedexistence. "h blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to," he admits (209), and later adds, "Nowthis same blind man was coming to sleep in my house" (212). His territorial impulses, spurred on certainly byinsecurity, make for what Skenazy calls an "evening of polite antagonism between the two men" (82). Thenarrator's buried hostility, we suppose, is rooted in the blind man's association with aspects of his wife's past andof her independent nature in general--aspects that are intimidating to him, not the least of which is her formermarriage, a subject with which he is obsessed. Simultaneously fascinated by and reluctant to hear the blind man'sstory ("my wife filled me in with more details than I cared to know," he says; "I made a drink and sat at the kitchentable to listen" [213]) he searches for himself indirectly in his wife's relationship with Robert. Like J. P.'s friend,this man's sense of a secure identity depends upon his bond with a female, a bond he seems to need to seeperpetually reinforced--though, perturbed by his insensitivity, his wife isn't about to give him the reinforcement hecraves. Referring to his wife's conversation with Robert in the living room, he says, "I waited in vain to hear myname on my wife's sweet lips" (218). His muddled search for self, we guess, involves a continual gauging andprotecting of the autocratic status of his name. A year earlier, listening to Robert's half of a taped conversation, he'dbeen startled to hear his "own name in the mouth of [a] stranger, this blind man" he did not know (212). Insistentupon asserting his identity over his wife, therefore, he blankets her past the way he has lately blanketed hispresent--with insulating self-absorbency. Summing up her prior life, he refers to his wife's ex-husband only as her"officer," adding, Why should he have a name?" (211). He is no ideal listener, having predicated the names andstories of others under the subject of his own tyrannical yet precarious identity: he listens for purposes ofself-validation, relegating the rest of experience--like Robert's marriage--to a place "beyond [his] understanding"(213). It is fitting that Robert, the invader in the house, is insulated only physically, left in the dark only by his handicap.

Extremely outgoing--not to mention friendly--he has done "a little of everything," from running a salesdistributorship to traveling in Mexico to broadcasting "ham radio." His activities, unlike those of his host, bring himout into the world, his booming voice having extended as far as Alaska and Tahiti before making its way into thenarrator's home. Unlike the baker and J. P.--relatively restrained men--Robert is characterized by the strength of hispersonality, and he serves accordingly as the extra-durable guide needed to pull his host out of his shell (though likethe Weisses, Robert, too, is dealing with grief, having just lost his wife; "I know about skeletons," he says [223],responding to the narrator's query regarding the TV). As the narrator fails to describe the image he sees ontelevision, Robert listens, and having "listened" to failure, takes charge of the situation. "Hey, listen to me," hesays, activated suddenly by his host's admission of verbal impotence. "Will you do me a favor? I got an idea. Whydon't you find us some heavy paper. And a pen. We'll do something. We'll draw one together. Get us a pen andsome heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff" (226). Robert's initiative in the matter of the narrator's failings, not tomention the remedy he employs in general, suggests that verbal handicaps--and the larger problems they aresymptoms of--are debilitating as blindness (stemming as they do from the willed blindness of ignorance, oversight).Robert's handling of the situation, finally, suggests that handicaps are first and foremost challenges to overcome. "[M]ost of the communication in this story," writes Michael Vander Weel, in reference to the joint project of thedrawing, "comes through shared non-verbal work, as expression that stops short of the effort and commonality ofspeech" (120). Indeed, as Irving Howe observes, the drawing of the cathedral is a "gesture of fraternity" that, likethe meal preceding it, establishes solid contact between the men and in turn nudges the narrator temporarily out ofhis self-contained world (43). The subject of their mutual efforts--the cathedral--as a symbol represents a kind ofcommon humanity and benevolence, and of human patience and fortitude, in the process of "a-spiring."(3)Curiously enough, it is within the walls of the cathedral that the narrator ultimately ends up. "I was in my house,"he says at the end of the story, his eyes still tightly closed--bringing to mind the "box" he drew when he and Robertbegan, something that "could have been the house [he] lived in" (227). What begins as an enclosing spatialconfiguration of his home--and present level of awareness, we assume--gradually swells in proportion to becomesomething far more spacious than what he started with, something with interior depths as enlightening to him asbakeries and bedrooms are comforting to others. "I didn't feel like I was inside anything," he says (228), unwilling still to open his eyes. While Meyers "close[s] his

eyes," alternately, to whatever encroaches on his personal life--his voluntary blindness as bad as Lloyd's deafnessin its turn--the narrator of "Cathedral" finds not escape but sanctuary within self-confinement, his sanctuaryexisting, by virtue of hip, closed eyes, within that inner vestibule of self, where selfishness gives way at last toself-awareness. A man obsessed with the faculty of vision ("Imagine," he says earlier of Robert's wife, "a womanwho could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one" [213]), he clings to a miraculous glimpseof a world beyond the borders of his insular life, blinding himself voluntarily to the distracting reality of his formerworld. The profundity of his new awareness staggers him; "It was like nothing else in my life up to now," he says,and adds, in the story's final sentence, "It's really something." The indefiniteness of his language--he is usually alittle more glib than he is here--expresses the sheer incomprehensibility of his revelation, and the fact that heregisters it as such. He experiences "depths of feeling," as Saltzman calls them, that only a few enlightenedcharacters in Cathedral experience, feelings that he "need not name to justify" (154). The changes working in himare not unlike those "impossible changes" Ralph Wyman undergoes in "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?," whereeven more pronounced tensions of jealousy, possessiveness, and self-preoccupation are vented finally in humancontact. Just as Ann Weiss wants "her words to be her own" after the death of her child, seeking out a personalvocabulary of grief, this narrator reaches for words weighty enough to fit his experience, and, failing gloriously inthat, settles for indefinites. Impossibly changed, reduced to semi-inarticulateness, he keeps his eyes fastened shut,wavering between self-awareness and habitual existence in a new and newly-spacious enclosure; he is "no longerinside himself," as Skenazy writes, "if not quite outside, no longer alone, if not quite intimate" (83). Naturally, this coming out is mirrored by rhetoric of the story. Early on in the story, the narrator feels momentarily"sorry for the blind man," his insulated hardness beginning to soften. As the walls of his resentment noticeablycrack, he watches with "admiration" as Robert eats, recognizing Robert's handicap to be no impairment to hisperformance at the dinner table. The tonal shift in the final sequence of the story--marked by a kind of mildethereality flooding the last lines--illustrates on the rhetorical level the opening up the narrator has undergone, and,certainly, is yet to undergo. Like Robert, who is on a journey by train, dropping in on friends and relatives, tryingto get over the loss of his wife, the narrator is also on a journey, one signalled by signposts in his language andplayed out by the events of the story he tells. His destination--as are the destinations for all of Carver's travellers,

whether they leave home or not--is necessarily a confining one. But it is also a destination where one's sense ofshared confinement makes for heretofore-unknown freedoms. "What's a cathedral without people?" Robert asks,bidding his host to add a touch of humanity to the drawing, to "put some people in there" (227). Approaching hisdestination, the narrator begins to realize just how exhilarating confinement can be, once one sees beyond thenarrow enclosure of self that larger, more expansive enclosure of society. He begins to sense, as did perhaps thebuilders who toiled for years to raise the cathedrals they would never see--people who were, as Robert says, "nodifferent than the rest of us" (224)--he begins to sense, the warmth of the blind man's touch still vibrating in hishand, that we are all in this together, and that that really is something. Carver wrote "Cathedral" on a train, writing in his cabin during a transcontinental journey from Seattle to NewYork.(4) Enclosed in tight quarters, rubbing shoulders with all kinds of people, heading somewhere in a hurry: thewriting environment seems an appropriate one, considering the story--and the volume of stories-which was tocome of that ride. "It was a different kind of story for me, no question," he explains in his preface to Where I'mCalling From. "Somehow I had found another direction I wanted to move toward. And I moved. And quickly" (i).Reflecting the process of his "opening up," Carver is in this collection definitely going somewhere in a hurry; inCathedral, as in no other volume of his stories, characters connect with one another, however briefly, and as a resultof their connections come away changed. Such momentary connections, of course, do not reflect the tone of thebook as a whole. Most of the stories--"The Compartment" or "The Train," say, ironically stories about people ontrains--are slightly fuller explorations, or re-explorations, of Carver's old familiar territory, reimmersions intotableaux where human proximity not only provides no real connection but also alienates, with disconnectednessand alienation coming hand-in-hand as end-products of insularity, terminal self-enclosure. In these stories, as wellas in the lighter ones, Carver suggests that life hemmed in rigidly by walls is a hard life indeed--suggests, contraryto Meyers's observation, that this is perhaps not "a good way to live," this having a ticket to ride and no ideawhere one is going, no connection with one's fellow travellers. As Irving Howe notes, the stories of this volume "draw upon the American voice of loneliness and stoicism, thenative soul locked in this continent's space" (42). While in rare moments we find characters transcending thefettered 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 thesestories that compassion, as well as stoicism, is a prerequisite not just of happiness but of survival, and that whileconfinement may be the precondition of many lives there is still a good deal of freedom available within it--freedomwhich becomes tangible only when it is recognized for what it is. In this sense the stories of Cathedral are on a parwith those that Carver and Jenks praise as editors of American Short Story Masterpieces, stories which have, asthey say, "the ambition of enlarging our view of ourselves and the world" (xiii)--enlarging us as readers, that is, bothin the sense of expanding and setting us free. NOTES 1 For a brilliant narratological and stylistic analysis of this story see Verley. 2 See also Carver's later story "Elephant" (Where I'm Calling From), in which a reformed alcoholic refers to hisdrinking days, and his vision of an alcoholic relapse, as "rock bottom." 3 For this coinage I am indebted to Lonnquist. 4 This bit of information I gleaned in a conversation with Tess Gallagher, who refutes Carver's assertion in hispreface to Where I'm Calling From that "[a]fter a good night's sleep, [he] went to [his] desk and wrote the story'Cathedral.'" WORKS CITED Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. New York: Random House, 1984. --. Interview. Saturday Review. Sep-Oct 1983: 21-22. -- and Tom Jenks. Introduction. American Short Story Masterpieces. New York: Delacorte, 1987. --. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Random House, 1981. --. Where I'm Calling From. 1st edition. Franklin Center, PA: Franklin Library, 1988. --. Will You Be Quiet. Please? New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977. Howe, Irving. "Stories of Our Loneliness." New York Times Book Review. 11 Sep 1983: 42-43. Lonnquist, Barbara C. "Narrative Displacement and Literary Faith: Raymond Carver's Inheritance from Flannery

O'Connor." Since Flannery O'Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story. Ed. Loren Logsdon andCharles W. Mayer. Macomb, IL: Western Illinois University, 1987. 142-50. Saltzman, Arthur. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1988. Skenazy, Paul. "Life in Limbo: Raymond Carver's Fiction." Enclitic 11(0000): 00-00. Stull, William. "Beyond Hopelessville: Another Side of Raymond Carver." Philological Quarterly 64 (1985): 1-15. Verley, Claudine. "Narration and Interiority in Raymond Carver's 'Where I'm Calling From.'" Journal of the ShortStory in English 13 (1989): 91-102. Weele, Michael Vander. "Raymond Carver and the Language of Desire." Denver Quarterly 22 (1987): 00-000. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

Тамара БоголеповаТРИ ЖИЗНИ РАЙМОНДА КАРВЕРА

Раймонд Карвер, один из самых читаемых в последние десятилетия американских писателей, незадолго до конца своей короткой жизни любил говорить: "Я счастливый человек. Мне удалось прожить две жизни." Карвер приводил при этом точную дату завершения своей "первой" жизни и начала "второй": 2 июня 1977 года. День этот для Карвера был одновременно страшным и знаменательным. 2 июня 1977 года Раймонд Карвер, уже сравнительно известный поэт и писатель, после очередного запоя впал в состояние мозговой комы: "Я словно очутился на дне очень глубокого колодца," - вспоминал он позднее. Врачам удалось вернуть Карвера к жизни, а он с того дня ни разу не выпил ни капли спиртного. "Вторая" жизнь Карвера длилась недолго, всего 11 лет. 2 августа 1988 годв он умер от рака легкого. Но даже зная свой страшный диагноз (в США врачи всегда ставят пациентов в известность о характере заболевания), зная, что времени остается совсем мало, он не уставал повторять своим друзьям и близким: "Каждый день я чувствую на себе благословение божие. Каждый день я не устаю благодарить судьбу. Каждый день я чувствую радостное изумление от того, как у меня все теперь устроилось." Действительно, во "второй" своей жизни Карвер обрел много больше, чем в "первой": к нему пришла и заслуженная слава, и настоящая любовь, и материальное благополучие. И, самое главное, - его творческий потенциал не только не иссяк, но, напротив, блестяще реализовался в нескольких книгах

рассказов: "Так о чем мы говорим, когда говорим о любви" (1981), "Собор" (1983), "Откуда я взываю" (1988), в поэтических сборниках "Где вода сливается с другой водою" (1985), "Ультрамарин" (1988), "Новая тропинка к водопаду", в сценарии к фильму "Достоевский". Но, говоря о полноте счастья, испытанной им в конце жизненного пути, Карвер никогда не зачеркивал своей "первой" жизни - ведь этот этап его писательской судьбы был для него тяжелой. но очень большой школой, в которой ему пришлось учиться с самого рождения. Раймонд Карвер родился 25 мая 1938 года в небольшом городке Клэтскени (штат Орегон) на Северо-Западе США. Детство его прошло в Якиме (штат Вашингтон), где, как и во многих других городах американского Северо-Запада, сосредоточена лесная и деревообрабатывающая промышленность. В Якиме отцу Карвера удалось найти место заточника пил. Доходы семьи были невелики, поэтому Раймонду после окончания средней школы в 1956 году не удалось продолжить образования. Подобно многим американским писателям-классикам, он оказался перед необходимостью зарабатывать себе на хлеб тяжелым трудом. К концу 50-х годов Карвер все острее осознает в себе тягу к литературному творчеству и в 1961 году приезжает в Калифорнию. Только через десять лет ему удается издать первые сборники стихов: "Зимняя бессонница" (1970), "Лосось выплывает ночью" (1976) и опубликовать рассказы ("Поставь себя на мое место", 1974). Калифорния с ее свободой нравов, терпимостью к любому проявлению эксцентричности и увлечением художественными экспериментами в годы подъема молодежного движения становится западной "Меккой" американских нонконформистов (восточной был Нью-Йорк). "Улицы кишмя кишели головными повязками, широкополыми шляпами, амулетами, мокасинами, римскими сандалиями и кожаной бахромой, свисающей с каждого жилета или куртки," - вспоминает о Сан-Франциско тех лет, этой штаб-квартире контркультуры, литератор Джим Хьюстон, знавший Карвера в калифорнийский период его жизни. Карвер с его суровой северо-западной закваской, похожий на "застенчивого медведя", даже внешне не очень-то вписывался в калифорнийский стиль жизни - даже внешне. Тот же Хьюстон отмечает, что Карвер одевался совсем не так, как многие представители богемы Сан-Франциско: "На нем были черные брюки и белая рубашка, он выглядел бы совсем консервативно, если бы и то и другое не было сильно измято". И все же Калифорния, этот живописный, шумный и пестрый "сумасшедший дом" Америки (вспомните известную песню "Отель Калифорния") увлекает Карвера в водоворот и хаос своей жизни. Он поселяется неподалеку от Сан-Франциско сначала в городке Арката, затем - в Купертино вместе с женой Мэриан и двумя детьми. Но отношения в семье становились все более напряженными: возможно, оттого что они поженились совсем рано, после окончания школы, где были одноклассниками, возможно, из-за несходства характеров, а скорее всего - от трудных материальных условий, не дававших Карверу сосредоточиться на творчестве, развивали раздражительность и стремление отвлечься от повседневных забот с помощью крепких напитков. Не отставала от него в этом и Мэриан. Но, несмотря на все неблагополучные обстоятельства калифорнийского периода, Карвер продолжал писать и делал все, чтобы усовершенствовать свое мастерство. Он много и жадно читал, с увлечением учился на писательских курсах. Очень большую роль в его биографии сыграла встреча с выдающимся американским романистом 60-70-х годов Джоном Гарднером (1933-1982), который руководил работой писательской студии в колледже ґико в начале 60-х годов.

Именно Гарднер познакомил начинающего новеллиста Карвера с именами и произведениями многих великих мастеров этого жанра: "На занятиях он всегда упоминал о писателях, чьи имена были мне незнакомы: о Конраде, Портер, Бабеле, ґехове," - вспоминал Раймонд Карвер. Гарднер внимательно относился ко всему написанному слушателями студии, но особенно заметный интерес вызывало у него то, что делал Карвер. Гарднер не патронировал начинающего автора, но сумел дать ему необходимые советы и внушить веру в его писательское призвание. "Хороший литературный учитель," - любил повторять Карвер, - "как твоя литературная совесть," - и прибавлял, что Гарднер и был для него как раз таким учителем. Поэтому известие о трагической гибели Джона Гарднера в 1982 году для Карвера, как и для многих других писателей его поколения, стало тяжелым ударом: "Я тоскую о нем больше, чем могу выразить словами," - говорил он, вернувшись с похорон Гарднера. Во многом благодаря Гарднеру к Карверу пришла любовь к русской литературе - к творчеству Тургенева, Толстого-новеллиста, и особенно к ґехову. Рассказы Карвера, где даны краткие, немногословные зарисовки обыденной жизни, критики почти всегда сравнивают с рассказами ґехова, а самого Карвера нередко называют "американским ґеховым". Сам Карвер не раз говорил о своем восхищении мастерством ґехова, о чувстве внутреннего родства, которое он испытывает, читая ґехова или о нем. Последний рассказ "Поручение", написанный Карвером для своего, последнего же, сборника, - это рассказ о смерти ґехова. Вероятно, это еще одно свидетельство того огромного значения, которое принадлежало ґехову в творческой жизни американского писателя. Проза Карвера с первой же фразы поражает простотой и отсутствием какой бы то ни было замысловатости. Краткие реплики, которыми обмениваются его персонажи, состоят из самых ходовых слов и выражений в речи современных американцев. Рассказы Карвера в оригинале - превосходный источник американской разговорной лексики для тех, кто хотел бы научиться беседовать, а не "изъясняться с представителями основной массы населения этой страны". Сюжеты карверовских рассказов, повествующих о самых заурядных житейских делах: семейных радостях или, напротив, ссорах между супругами, потере работы, переезде из одного города в другой, дорожных происшествиях или распродаже ставшего ненужным домашнего скарба, - тоже не отличаются особой занимательностью или оригинальностью. Потому так часто рецензенты и литературные обозреватели в США и других странах определяли творчество Карвера термином "минимализм", имея в виду его сходство с художественным течением, развившимся в музыке, живописи и литературе с конца 70-х годов. Минималисты тяготели к ясности смысла, лаконизму и даже скупости выразительных средств, к отказу от всякого рода декоративности, предпочитая нечто подобное знаменитому "телеграфному стилю" Хемингуэя - кстати, одного из любимых писателей Карвера. Действительно, предельная сдержанность художественной палитры Карвера, сосредоточенность на житейской прозе делают его творчество близким манере "минималистов", впрочем, как и произведениям "неореализма" (просьба не путать с итальянским неореализмом 1950-х годов) или же "грязного реализма" - еще одного течения 70-80-х годов, к которому относили Карвера другие критики. Но, как это всегда бывает с большими художниками, масштаб и суть их творчества трудно измерить с помощью тех или иных терминов. "Как бы ни пытались это делать, сама тайна произведений Карвера остается нетронутой," - справедливо замечает талантливая американская поэтесса Тэсс Галлахер, литературный соратник и вдова Раймонда Карвера.

В самом деле, простые, будничные истории и отношения, о которых повествует Карвер, завораживают своей глубиной, недосказанностью и загадочностью не меньше, чем самый закрученный детектив. О чем хотел поведать нам Карвер в новелле "Ванна", одной из четырех, которые читатель сможет прочесть на страницах этого альманаха? О хрупкости человеческой, особенно детской, жизни, которая оказывается под угрозой даже от сравнительно "легкого" столкновения с движущимся автотранспортом? О силе инерции повседневного существования, которая даже при таком потрясении, как тяжелая мозговая травма сынишки, все равно влияет на поведение любящих его родителей, заставляя их вновь и вновь мечтать о горячей ванне для себя как о главном жизненном удовольствии (что и вправду весьма типично для американцев)? Или речь идет о том, что никакая катастрофа не может остановить течения жизни? Этот рассказ о несчастном случае, который произошел с мальчиком по дороге в школу в день его рождения, и о том, как переживали это несчастье его родители, рождает много вопросов. Отвечать на них каждый читатель будет по-своему, потому что у каждого из нас - свой опыт и своя реакция на происходящее в жизни, но и потому еще, что подтекст прозы Карвера, как и у ґехова, и у Хемингуэя, неисчерпаем, и более всего - потому, что Карвер, подобно своим предшественникам, не торопится подсказать нам один единственный верный ответ и вряд ли сам уверен, что знает его. Вглядываясь в обычную жизнь людей с более чем скромным достатком, так хорошо знакому ему самому, Карвер вовсе не бесстрастен, хотя и пристрастным его тоже не назовешь. Он умеет передать озабоченность теми симптомами духовного неблагополучия, которые он называл "эрозией" человеческих отношений: распад семейных связей, усиливающееся отчуждение и одиночество, формальность контактов даже между самыми близкими людьми (как в рассказах, публикующихся в настоящем издании: "Кое-что напоследок", "ґто не танцуете?" и в некоторых других из того же сборника "Так о чем мы говорим, когда говорим о любви"), атрофия чувств и вялость эмоциональных реакций, открывающая дорогу цинизму и насилию (рассказы "О чем мы говорим. когда говорим о любви?", "Как же много воды вокруг", "Скажи женщинам - мы идем" из того же сборника и новеллы, вошедшие в другие книги, изданные в разные годы). Вновь и вновь фиксируя эти опасные проявления рутинного существования, Раймонд Карвер, умеющий подметить и страшное, и смешное, вовсе не стремится "обличить", "разоблачить" или сразить своих персонажей убийственной иронией, столь хароактерной для литературы постмодернизма - особенно для тех, кого называют "черными юмористами". Позиция Карвера-повествователя - меньше всего позиция судьи или "ликующего нигилиста", по выражению Гарднера; Скорее он ощущает себя одним из тех, о ком рассказывает, потому за внешней невозмутимостью и видимой сдержанностью интонации угадывается тревога, горечь или сочувствие. Франсуа Лакэн, один из переводчиков прозы Карвера на французский язык, признавался, что когда он увидел фотографию писателя с характерным для него серьезным, внимательным и добрым выражением лица, он понял, что совершил непростительную ошибку: "Я перевел его книгу в ироническом тоне, а человек на фотографии никогда бы не поставил себя выше своих персонажей." И Лакэн перевел книгу заново. Рассказы Карвера зовут людей к размышлению об общих бедах и неурядицах, к поискам пути выхода из духовного кризиса и депрессии. Этот путь вовсе не представляется писателю ясным и очевидным. Во всяком случае, он явно не склонен искать выход в сфере социальных потрясений, хотя о необходимости решения социальных проблем на основе более радикальных и продуманных

программ оздоровления экономических и общественных отношений, чем в годы пребывания у власти республиканцев во главе с Рейганом, он охотно говорил и писал в конце жизни. В рассказах Карвера, созданных в это время, намечается кроме того и еще одно средство лечения эрозии человеческих отношений, которое вновит в его творчество "особенно яркие проблески надежды." Это заметно в рассказах "Видоискатель", "О чем мы говорим, когда говорим о любви", "К нему все пристало" (сборник "О чем мы говорим, когда говорим о любви"), "Лихорадка" и особенно - "Собор" из одноименного сборника, где из шелухи повседневности, отупляющей стереотипности бытовых условий, беспросветной разобщенности, словно величественный храм, где люди, собравшись вместе, могут устремляться душой к самым высоким идеалам, вырастает убежденность в нетленности таких ценностей, как любовь, взаимопонимание, помощь в беде и радость сопричастности самому чуду бытия, каким бы сложным и грустным оно порой ни было. "Писать и оставаться добрым" назывался документальный телефильм режиссера Джин Уокиншо о Карвере, впервые показанный по седьмому каналу телевидения США осенью 1993 года. Название этого фильма как нельзя более точно определяет суть творческого кредо Раймонда Карвера, чья смерть хоть и была безвременной, не смогла прервать его писательской биографии. Потому, что настоящий писатель, как и всякий большой художник, живет в созданных им творениях. "Третья жизнь" замечательного американского писателя ХХ века Раймонда Карвера у него на родине полнокровна и разнообразна. После того августовского дня в 1988 году, когда он был похоронен на тихом кладбище маленького городка Порт-Анжелес в штате Вашингтон, куда вместе со своей второй женой Тэсс Гэллахер он вернулся в начале 80-х годов и где был так счастлив среди зеленых полей, густых лесов и чистых горных рек Северо-Запада, только в одном издательстве "Вантэдж"вышли десять книг его рассказов и стихов, которые быстро разошлись тиражом в полмиллиона экземпляров - цифра для "не самой читающей страны" огромная. Особенно популярны были сборники "О чем мы говорим, когда говорим о любви" и "Откуда я взываю"; последний авторы литературных обзоров окрестили "величайшим хитом Карвера". Творчество Карвера изучается на уроках литературы в школах, составляет непременную часть университетских курсов, посвященных современной американской словесности. Герои прозы Карвера впервые появились и на киноэкранах: в 1993 году вышел большой трехчасовой фильм известного режиссера Роберта Олтмана "Срезая Углы" (Short Cuts), в том же году завоевавший приз "За лучший фильм" на кинофестивале в Венеции. Одна за другой появились книги отзывов и воспоминаний о Карвере: "Когда мы говорим о Карвере" под редакцией Сэма Халперта (1991) и "Вспоминая Рэя: коллективная биография" (редакторы Уильям Стэл и Морин Кэррол, 1993) - среди них. В создании последней, как прежде - в подготовке к печати поздних произведений Карвера, принимала большое участие Тэсс Гэллахер, "добрый гений" его "второй жизни". Слава Карвера растет и за пределами Соединенных Штатов. Его произведения переведены более чем на двадцать языков, в том числе - и на русский. Первое знакомство отечественного читателя с карверовской прозой состоялось за год до его смерти, в 1987 году, когда в серии "Библиотека "Иностранной литературы"" вышел сборник рассказов "Собор" под редакцией А.М.Зверева. Нынешняя публикация четырех рассказов Раймонда Карвера в переводе Ивана Ющенко, первая на Дальнем Востоке - продолжение этого приятного знакомства, которое, будем надеяться, на этом не завершится.

Опубликовано в журнале:

«Иностранная литература» 2005, №7

Реймонд Карвер[1]

От редакции

(1938-1988) - , Реймонд Карвер 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

« ?» (1976) Первый же сборник рассказов Не будете ли вы так добры помолчать 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 1984 , 1985 - « , », - в году а в году вышел первый сборник стихов Там где вода встречается с водою сразу же

« ».удостоенный премии журнала Поэтри

« , - « - », - , , Его стихи писал критик журнала Нью Йорк тайм это очищенные отфильтрованные более , , , концентрированные версии его рассказов они позволяют нам бросив всего лишь мимолетный взгляд увидеть

, ».точный срез обыденной жизни в ее критический переломный момент

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

.Произведения Карвера переведены на двадцать языков

Первое знакомство русского читателя с одним из самых тонких мастеров американской прозы состоялось в 1987 , « », - « « »году еще при жизни американского Чехова в Библиотеке журнала Иностранная литература

« ». - .вышел сборник его рассказов Собор Составитель и автор предисловия Алексей Зверев

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

Моя ворона

.На дерево под моим окном села ворона

? , ,Чья она Теда Хьюза Галвея

, , ?Фроста Пастернака Лорки

?Одна из Гомеровых птиц плотоядных

. - ,Нет Просто ворона

Которая так и не пригодилась

.Никому из поэтов

.Она посидела пару минут

Поточила о ветку клюв и

.Улетела из моей жизни

( . )Далее см бумажную версию

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

TALKING ABOUT THE PROCEDURES OF RAYMOND CARVER

Ricardo Sobreira1[1]

To win? To lose?

What for, if the world will forget us anyway.

Raymond Carver [1938 – 1988]

The aim of this essay is to discuss and analyze some strategies used by the late American

writer Raymond Carver in his short story “A Small, Good Thing”, as an innovatory manner of expanding the suspense of the story. What contributes to this achievement is the minimalist structure of the narrative, the usage of several elements and images and also the unusual focalization as a kind of aesthetic dialog with the cinematographic language.

I will begin by briefly examining some information about the author’s biography as well as some aspects of his work and its aesthetic procedures:

Raymond Carver is acknowledged by the literary critics as one of the most inventive

postmodern writers. His writing is straightforward, stark and destitute of sentimentality. Basically, he did not concede any space to language ornamentation or figures of speech. His characters are antiheroic, emblematic and depressed people. They take part in quick and almost abrupt stories, in which a little conflict is “fought” and, then, they unpredictably end, as in his famous short stories “So Much Water So Close To Home”, “What We Talk About When We

1[1] Ricardo Sobreira is a Brazilian student and an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher at CCAA – Centro de Cultura Anglo-americana, one of the most important English schools in Brazil.

Talk About Love”, “Tell The Women We’re Going”, “Where I’m Calling From”, just to cite a few.

Talking about A Small, Good Thing

In one of his most important short stories, “A Small, Good Thing”, Raymond Carver was

able to create psychologically rich characters in a very accurate way. This story deals with subject matters intrinsically related to our human condition and our contingencies like, for instance, the fear of the death, the sensation of powerlessness before the violence, the cruelty and the incommunicability of the human being, as well as dwells on the importance and the meaning of affection, of communion among the people in these chaotic days we have been living.

The version of the short story “A Small, Good Thing” encompassed in the collections “Where I’m Calling From” and “Short Cuts” is a revision of two previous attempts. One of these previous versions, “The Bath”, was awarded a few prizes, but in it, the author did not seem to explore all the dramatic potentialities of the narrative. Therefore, “A Small Good Thing” represents a phase of aesthetic maturity in the style of the writer. If in “The Bath”, Raymond Carver creates characters and situations that are almost schematic, generating, thus, a lurid and gloomy atmosphere, in “A Small Good Thing”, on the other hand, he intensifies his humanist realism, producing a more complex portrayal of his characters. But before turning to a closer examination of that, we must remember some of the facts and tensions present in the story:

Ann Weiss, a young and joyful mother, drives to a bakery and orders a cake. Then the

baker, a very impolite man, writes down her order and her phone number. But before the party can be celebrated, Scotty, the birthday boy, is knocked down by a car. His parents, Ann and Howard Weiss, go immediately to the hospital and powerlessly watch him die. Meanwhile, the baker, as he is an evil entity, makes phone calls to the Weiss, reproaching them because they did not pick the cake.

As the baker does not tell them who he really is, the parents get really scared and even think that the man who keeps phoning them is the same “psychopath” who knocked over Scotty. Only after Scotty’s death, Ann comes to know that the phone calls had being made by the rude baker. So the angry and frightened parents stop by the bakery and tell the baker they could not pick the cake because Scotty had died. Then they rebuke him so fiercely that he realizes how cruel his acts were. He feels so sorry that he asks them to forgive him and says that he used to be a different kind of human being years ago, but now he was just a baker. After that, he serves them some of his delicious rolls, and says, “Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this” (404).

It is interesting the fact that, according to what I have already pointed out, another version

of this story had been published in the book “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” and it is entitled “The Bath”. Nevertheless, it focalizes more intensively the human brutality and uncertainty. The characters of “The Bath” are unnamed. Except for the mother, Ann, the other characters are just referred to as the boy, the father, the dog, etc. These characters seem to be undefined, permanently locked in individual spheres, what turns the narrative into something sketchy and impersonal. “The Bath” is shorter because, as it dwells on the anguished feelings, it ends when Ann gets home for the first time after Scotty’s accident, the telephone is ringing and when she answers it, she hears a voice say: “It’s ready”. Though the language used in “The Bath” is more straightforward, even laconic and filled with symbolic images, “A Small, Good Thing”, the expanded version, deals more deeply with the question of the human situation, absolving the baker from his nonfigurative condition of “evil force” and transforming him into a man devastated by his personal flop.

The characters of “A Small, Good Thing” represent the so-called North-American working class. A good example of it being Ann Weiss, the housewife; her husband, Howard, the businessman, and, above all, the baker, who at the ending of the story reveals all his bitterness

because of his frustration in a country like the United States, where the progress and the triumph seem to be the only acceptable parameter. Although Carver was not an effusively politicized writer, it is clear that this specific character, the baker, symbolizes in an almost Kafkaesque manner, the submission of a man to the capitalist system, and depicts an almost palpable drama played by the blue-collar class.

The predominant feeling among the characters of “A Small, Good Thing”, as well as among the people of the real world nowadays, is a considerable incommunicability: In the beginning of the story, the mother tries to be gentle to the baker, but she gives up soon in face of his extreme rudeness. It can be exemplified by the following fragment, which also serves as a concept to the minimalist aesthetic:

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

After the moment when Scotty is run over, the despair of his parents increases because the

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

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

Therefore, all the conflicts in “A Small, Good Thing” are a result of the extreme

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

“Doctor’s orders,” the young woman said. “I do what I’m told. They say draw that one, I draw” (386)

The usage of the demonstrative pronoun “that” by the nurse in her statement promote the

disembodiment of the human being. “That” is a word that is syntactically used to refer to something or someone that is away from the speaker. By doing so, she implies that Scotty is just another patient, just another meaningless thing to the structure of the health system.

Ironically, the baker, though in an atrocious manner, is the only one who interrogates the problem of Scotty’s existence because he sets off the process of reification of the characters and their relationships. Metonymically through the birthday cake, he calls the other characters’ (and, subsequently, the reader’s) attention to the subject of the personality of the boy. But while he seems to be trying to humanize and “revitalize” Scotty, the life of the child is slowly fading away. This hypothesis becomes evident in the following fragment of the narrative in which Ann leaves the hospital and, feeling so guilty in an “obscure way” for what happened to her son, she hears the phone ring and, when she answers it, the voice says:

“Scotty,” the man’s voice said. “It’s about Scotty, yes. It has to do with Scotty, that problem. Have you forgotten about Scotty?” the man said. Then he hung up. (392)

Given the happenings of the text and the tension experienced by the characters, the baker

acts like a destabilizing entity in the story. As Ann and Howard are too perturbed by their child’s condition and the fact that they do not know who is making the phone calls contributes to a sort of disembodiment of the mysterious man who keeps tormenting them on the other side of the line. Therefore, the baker proceeds as an evil force, a wicked being that intrudes on the most unexpected moments of the story to stir up their panic and, indirectly, make them blame themselves for having neglected the boy.

Such moments of tenseness appear randomly in the text through the utilization of some strategies to expand the suspense like, for instance, the insertion of narrative “ramifications” parallel to the main plot. This narrative device is known as anticlimax because it delays the ending of the central story. Thus, the narrator, in cuts that recall the cinematographic language, dislocate the reader’s attention to additional narrative elements, postponing and causing a greater expectation for the conclusion of the short story.

What contributes to the generation of the anticlimax in “A Small, Good Thing” is the inclusion of the drama experienced by a Negro family that is waiting for their son who is in the operation table. Ann realizes that those people were “in the same kind of waiting she was in” (391)

because Franklin, the black boy in the operation table, though innocent, was hurt by an external agent, just like Scotty was; that is, their stories had gone through similar ruptures:

He said, “Our Franklin, he’s on the operation table. Somebody cut him. Tried to kill him. There was a fight where he was at. At this party. They say he was just standing and watching. Not bothering nobody. But that don’t mean nothing these days”. (390-391)

And besides this little parallel drama be rather analogous to the central story line, it is

interesting to mention the fact that Franklin does not survive the surgery and dies — what can be interpreted as an anticipation of Scotty’s tragedy.

The narrator also uses another narrative procedure: the focalization of unusual elements that are very useful in order to compose the scenes. His detailed descriptions of locations, objects, characters, and, above all, their actions, help the reader to develop clearer notions of temporality, spatiality, and to form a monstrous image of the baker:

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

Another expedient that contributes to the increasing sensation of anguish and uncertainty

in the text is related to the author’s capacity of condensing words, of precisely removing the excessive elements of the dialogs so that what is left is just the minimum, just the essential amount of information that is needed to the (in)comprehension of the message.

Whenever the doctor comes and examines the comatose boy, Ann tries really hard to get answers from him, but the words he uses to explain Scotty’s condition are so limited that make her feel even more frightened and confused. When asked about the boy’s recovery, the nurses also provide minimal answers like “stable” or “his signs are good”, what really worries the parents instead of comforting them.

The conciseness of Carver when dealing with words and sentiments detectable in “A Small, Good Thing”, as well as in the whole minimalist artistic production, from the sober work of Sol LeWitt to the succinct music of Suzanne Vega, requires that the reader/observer/listener of this kind of art develop a high level of understanding and also a vast capacity of interaction and reconfiguration of the symbolic and aesthetic elements provided by the artist along his or her

work. Although these artistic artifacts are conceptually simple, they have an enormous perceptive density.

In “A Small, Good Thing” and in other stories written by Raymond Carver, the ordinary themes of quotidian life are stylistically structured, and that is why they suggest much wider human dimensions. Therefore, the simple act of answering the phone and not hearing a voice on the other side of the line sounds like an overwhelming catastrophe. The violence is repressed in the silence, the crisis and the fatal human collapse is implicit between the lines of the carefully constructed discourse of the author. Michael Wood once wrote in “The New York Times” that “in Mr. Carver's silences, a good deal of the unsayable gets said”.2[2]

Analyzing the characters is also something crucial in order to understand the text. Ann Weiss, for example, symbolizes a stereotypical woman, a young mother whose actions are somewhat automatic. She shows all her motherly sweetness, her uncertainty, her fear, but nevertheless, she seems incapable of fighting against her own alienation. Only after her son’s death, which represents the sacrifice, she starts to get rid of her behavioral automatism and then she demonstrates her anger:

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

The automatism of the social roles and the sensation of powerlessness of the character

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

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

The father also goes through similar alienation, but given the circumstances, Howard tries

an inverse kind of flight: by means of his flashbacks, he searches for some relief in the memories of his serene and successful past. His life had been apparently full of satisfaction until the day that brusque rupture happened and forced him to face a completely new reality:

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

However, what is surprising in “A Small, Good Thing”, if we compare it to “The Bath” are

the conversational rhythms of the baker. As he talks, he makes clear that he acted according to his survival instinct, choosing the violence and the cruelty as a form of expression, as a way of manifesting all his unhappiness:

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

2[2] WOOD, Michael. Stories Full Of Edges And Silences, The New York Times, Books, 26/04/1981. <http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/01/21/specials/carver-wood.html>

“God alone knows how sorry [I am]. Listen to me. I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human being (...) But I’m not any longer, if I ever was (...) I’m not an evil man, I don’t think (...) You got to understand what it comes down to is I don’t know how to act anymore, it would seem”. (404)

When the baker becomes conscious of the perverse acts he practiced, he recovers the sense

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

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

Carver also displayed his accuracy when he created an unexpected ending to his short

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

“You probably need to eat something,” the baker said. “I hope you’ll eat some of my hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this.” (404)

[Howard and Ann] listened to him. They ate what they could (...) They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving. (405)

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

below:

Initial situation

Rupture SuspenseEnding

Sacrifice Association

A happy couple (Howard and Ann) plans to celebrate their

Scotty, the birthday boy,

is knocked over. The

Scotty does not wake up; The parents are afflicted by the baker’s phone calls.

Scotty dies too.

After the argument, the

parents forgive the baker. The Anticlimax Anticipation

eight-year-old child’s

birthday.

birthday party is canceled.

three of them sit around the table and eat.

Ann meets an Afro-American family

whose son was hurt in a party and he is

undergoing a surgery

Franklin, the black boy, dies.

INCOMMUNICABILITY >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>COMMUNION Due to his development as a writer represented by his stories such as “A Small, Good

Thing” and “Cathedral”, Raymond Carver began to be compared since then to important writers like Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemmingway. However, Mr. Carver and his work were misinterpreted since the beginning. Some critics who classified his art as depressive and freezing attacked him. Many people doubted the existence of Minimalism, even Carver himself, who refused this label because he thought it was too simple to define his work.

But, whatever it is, every time we talk about Raymond Carver we talk about a tragic, challenging, astoundingly beautiful mosaic — the life.

Bibliography: CARVER, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Random House. New York, 1989. CARVER, Raymond. Where I’m Calling From – New And Selected Stories. Random House. New York,

1989. HASHIMOTO, Hiromi. Trying To Understand Carver’s Revisions. In: Tokai English Review, N.º 5,

Tokio, Japan, 1995, pp. 113-147. CRIADO, Francisco J. Rodriguez. El realismo pesimista de Raymond Carver.

<http://maruska.soria.org/carver.htm> 09/09/2002. SOBREIRA, Ricardo. Sobre o que falamos quando falamos de Raymond Carver.

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

© 1989 by the estate of Raymond Carver

© . , 2005Максим Калинин Перевод

Raymond Carver (1938-1988)

Contributing Editor: Paul Jones

Classroom Issues and Strategies

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

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

Major Themes, Historical Perspectives, and Personal Issues

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

Significant Form, Style, or Artistic Conventions

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

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

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

Original Audience

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

Comparisons, Contrasts, Connections

Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, and Ernest Hemingway are the obvious influences on Carver's work. The seemingly simple pared-down style of writing follows straight through to Carver. You might consider teaching Carver and Hemingway and perhaps Donald Barthelme together, then entering into a discussion of the bare bones style of each.

Another way to consider Carver's style is to remember that he began writing poetry before he tried fiction and continued writing and publishing poetry throughout his career. He said (in a Paris Review interview with Mona Simpson), "In magazines, I always turned to poems first before I read the stories. Finally, I had to make a choice, and I came down on the side of fiction. It was the right choice for me." Carver's poetry has been compared to that of William Carlos Williams, although I see many obvious differences in their approach, sense of the line, and sense of narrative. His poetry can also be compared to that of James Wright, particularly with respect to the class of people from which the poems and stories are drawn.

Bibliography

The following collections by Carver include stories mentioned above:

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

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

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

Critical books on Carver are as follows:

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

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

Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

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

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

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

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

Adelman, Bob. Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver. "Introduction" by Tess Gallagher. New York: Scribner, 1990.

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

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

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

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

Raymond Carver 1938-1989Carver Interview

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

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

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

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