'Do You See What I'm Saying?

': The Inadequacy of Explanation and the Uses of Story in the Short Fiction of Raymond Carver Author(s): Charles E. May Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 31, North American Short Stories and Short Fictions (2001), pp. 39-49 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3509372 . Accessed: 25/11/2013 11:32
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'Do You See What I'm Saying?':The Inadequacyof Explanationand the Uses of Story in the Short Fiction of Raymond Carver
CHARLES E. MAY
StateUniversity, Beach California Long

The most significant index of Raymond Carver's mastery of the short story genre is his suspicion of exposition and his respect for the mysterious nature of story. Driven by an obsession to tell tales of irrational behaviour populated by characters who reject explanation by insisting, 'Will You Please Be Quiet, Please', or by discovering that only story will suffice for 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love', Carver situated himself firmly within a tradition of short fiction that originated in the oral tradition and was modernized by Poe's aesthetic patterning in the mid-nineteenth century. His distrust of exposition and veneration of story lies at the heart of the most common criticism of his work - that his characters are inarticulate and insufficiently realized because they seem unable to explain why they do what they do. It also underlies the frequent critical debate about the difference between the so-called 'minimalist' stories in his first two collections and the 'more generous' stories that began with 'Cathedral'.' In what follows, I will try to justify and explain Carver's distrust of explanation, as well as illustrate his uses of story in several of his short fictions, in order to provide some context for the critical reservations about the psychological and linguistic poverty of his first two collections and the supposed superiority of the stories in his last two. Although I run the risk of being labelled a retrograde formalist, I hope to perform this modest critical task by appealing to the formal historical and generic tradition of the short story. In spite of the still current clamour to reduce literature to cultural, social, and political abstractions, I align myself with the 'old-fashioned' view of William H. Gass - that the writer's fundamental loyalty is to form: 'Every other diddly desire can find expression; every crackpot idea or local
I do not wish to spend time on Gordon Lish's revelations about how much the stories in Carver's first two collections were a result of his influence and editing. Nor am I concerned with a distinction between 'early minimal' stories and 'late generous' stories, since Carver revised his stories often either by deleting or adding material. I simply accept that for whatever reasons, Carver's published story style changed somewhat with the publication of 'Cathedral'. He was proud of this shift and mentioned it to interviewers many times. For a discussion of the Lish debate, see D. T. Max, 'The Carver Chronicles', online at http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/o8io98carver-mag.html; for Carver's remarks on with Raymond ed. by Marshall Bruce Gentry his style change with 'Cathedral', see Conversations Carver, and William L. Stull (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, I990).

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'Do YouSee WhatI'm Saying?'

obsession, every bias and graciousness and mark of malice, may have an hour; but it must never be allowed to carry the day.'2 The short story is, as Boris Ejxenbaum once reminded us, a 'fundamental, elementary' form that originated in folklore, anecdote, and the oral tale and is thus 'inherently at odds' with the novel.3 In fact, as Walter Benjamin has noted in his essay on the storyteller, the rise of the novel is one of the primary symptoms of the decline of storytelling, for the novel neither comes from the oral tradition, nor goes into it. Moreover, Benjamin says that another form of communication - 'information' - has come to predominate in the modern world that threatens storytelling even more seriously than the novel.4 Whereas the 'truth' of information derives from an abstracting effort to arrive at a distilled discursive meaning, the truth of story is communicated by a patterned recounting of a concrete experience in such a way that the truth is embodied rather than explained. The story has a compactness that defies psychological analysis, argues Benjamin. In fact, the less psychological shading the story has the more the listener will remember it and tell it to someone else later on. One of the most familiar images of Raymond Carver recalled by his friends and acquaintances is his participation in storytelling exchanges and his wonder at the mystery of story. Describing Carver's love of telling and listening to stories, Stephen Dobyns says Carver would scratch his head and lean forward with his elbows on his knees and say, 'You know, I remember a funny thing'. And when someone else told a story, says Dobyns, Carver would 'burst forth with oddly archaic interjections such as "you don't say" and "think of that". Then he would shake his head and look around in amazement'.5 Tobias Wolff describes Carver's almost 'predatory' curiosity when a story was being told, his vibrancy and breathlessness, 'as if everything depended on what you might say next. He let his surprise show, and his enthusiasm, and his shock. "No!" he'd cry, "No!" and "Jesus!" and "You don't say!" '.6 Story stays in the memory and compels the listener to tell it to someone, says Benjamin. In fact it might be said that storytelling is the art of repeating stories, for when the rhythm of the story seizes the reader, he listens in such a way that the ability to retell it comes by itself. According to Benjamin, whereas realistic narrative forms such as the novel focus on the relatively limited areas of human experience that indeed can be encompassed by information, characters in story encounter those most basic mysteries of human experience that cannot be explained by rational means. Stories do
a Form (New York:Knopf, 1996), p. 35. Finding 0. Henryand the Theoryof the ShortStory,trans. by I. R. Titunik (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, I968), p. 4. 4 trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Cape, I970), pp. 83-I I0. Illuminations, 5 ed. by William L. of Raymond Carver, 'Laughter's Creature', in Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography Stuff and Maureen P. Carroll (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press, 1993), pp. I08-13 (p. I 10). 6 'Appetite',in Remembering Ray, pp. 24 I -50 (p. 244).
3 2

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not demand plausibility or conformity to the laws of external reality, argues Benjamin. What story does is to show us how to deal with all that which we cannot understand; it is half the art of storytelling to be free from information. Because the reader of story is permitted to interpret things, story has an amplitude lacking in information. Carver recognizes this basic difference between the information-based novel and the mystery of the short story in his own experience. In his essay on influences Carver says that when he was learning his craft, he realized that in order to write a novel a writer 'should be living in a world that makes sense, a world that the writer can believe in, draw a bead on, and then write about accurately. A world that will, for a time anyway, stay fixed in one place'.7 The modern literary short story's adherence to this ancient primal tradition can be seen in Edgar Allan Poe's perverse rejection of explanation in his stories and his self-conscious efforts to transform mysterious events into aesthetic patterns. Time and again Poe's characters confront inexplicable mysteries that exceed the mind's ability to explain them; over and over in his reviews Poe insists that by 'plot' he does not mean temporal sequence but rather a spatial, pictorial pattern that communicates an essential mystery. This is not the place to survey the fascination of storytellers with the mysterious, their impatience with explanation, and their frustration with listeners who cannot 'see' the story they are trying to tell. Since I have written about these matters in other places,8 I trust a few examples will be suggestive: Poe's narrator cannot seem to grasp the mystery of Roderick Usher; Melville's lawyer struggles to account for the enigma of Bartleby; Sherwood Anderson laments that it would take a poet to tell the story of Wing Biddlebaum; Chekhov's Ivan feels that he has failed to communicate the secret lives of those who suffer 'behind the scenes' in 'Gooseberries'. And, in perhaps the most famous example of this frustration of the storyteller in modern Western literature, Conrad's Marlowe sits crosslegged on the ship deck, and laments: 'Do you see the story? [...] Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream.' Carver knew well the short story's tradition of centring on that which can be narrated but not explained; he accepted Chekhov's demanding dictum: 'In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, don't know why!'9 The more recent writer from because, - because -I whom he learned about the short story's shunning of explanation was Flannery O'Connor, who insisted that the peculiar problem of the shortstory writer 'is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the
Raymond Carver, Fires(New York:Vintage Press, 1983), pp. 19-30 (p. 26). See Charles E. May, TheShort Story.TheRealityofArtifice (New York:Twayne, 1995). 9 Anton ed by Charles E. May (Athens: Chekhov, 'The Short Story', in TheNew ShortStoryTheories, Ohio University Press, 1994), pp. 195-98, (p. 198).
7 8

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'Do YouSee WhatI'm Saying?'

mystery of existence as possible'. O'Connor argued that since the writer has only a short space to do it in and cannot do it by statement, 'he has to do it that his by showing, not by saying, and by showing the concrete -so is to the concrete double time for how make work him'.?1 problem really Because of the influence of this tradition on Carver, his stories frequently focus on characters who express their frustration with either their inability to tell or their listener's inability to understand. 'Fat' from Will YouPlease Be QuietPlease? (1976) and 'Why Don't You Dance?' from What We TalkAbout When We Talk About Love (198 ) are paradigmatic examples of encounters that cannot be explained but must be constructed. Whereas the other characters in 'Fat' try to reduce the fat man, the female narrator knows that he is too big for thatthat he is an archetype, not a she was 'after stereotype. Realizing something' but doesn't know what, she senses that it can be captured only by story, telling Rudy, 'He is fat [... ] but that is not the whole story.' Indeed, 'the whole story' demands the reader's recognition of the fat man's archetypal nature, even if the teller can only inchoately intuit it. Just after the narrator reports the fat man saying, 'there is no choice', Rita says, 'This story's getting interesting now', for she anticipates an explanation for why the man is so fat. However, the storyteller is not interested in causal explanations; she is enthralled by the mysterious nature of his plentitude, his simultaneous bigger-than-life reality and his universal human destiny of being trapped within flesh. Rita says it is a funny story, but the narrator says, 'I can see she doesn't know what to make of it.' The young woman in 'Why Don't You Dance', who has seen the mysterious display of a man's furniture arranged on the lawn just as it was inside the house, tries to get her listener to 'see' the situation as something more than a lawn sale. The young woman intuitively knows that she and her husband have unwittingly walked into a externalization of the secret life of the other and that she has seen herself there. 'Why Don't You Dance?' ends with a common short story device (what might be called the Ancient Mariner obsession) with the woman needing to tell her story: 'There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.' As Randall Jarrell has noted, 'The root of all stories is in Grimm, not in La Rochefoucauld; in dreams, not in cameras and tape recorders.' We take pleasure, Jarrell says, as our stories show, 'in repeating over and over, until we can bear it, all that we found unbearable'."1

'Gazebo', the story in What We TalkAboutWhenWe TalkAboutLovethat

John W. Aldridge criticizes for its lack of explanation or motivation, is actually about the futility of explanation.12 Duane's repeated 'Holly, I go' is an expression of talk's hopelessness; it is what one says when there is nothing
10 andManners (New York:Farrar,Straus & Giroux, 1996), p. 98. 1 Mystery in New Short pp. 3- 4 (p. 5). 'Stories', Theories, Stogy 12 Talents and Technicians: Chic and the New Assembly-Line Fiction (New York: Scribner, Literamy
1992), pp. 5 54-

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to say. Holly, who, like many Carver characters wants Duane just to stop talking, replies, 'Holly nothing', to which Duane inevitably responds, 'I feel all out of words.' When Duane asks what they can do, Holly resorts to story, reminding him of the time in Yakima, when, while driving around, they stopped to get a drink of water from some old people who had a gazebo in the back. 'I thought we'd be like that', Holly says. 'Dignified and in a place and people would come to our door'. When Duane says that one day they will look back and tell the story of the motel with the crud in the pool, he prays for a sign, urging the classic Carver plea, 'You see what I'm saying?'. But the story ends with one of the most bleakly comic expressions of the futility of explanation in all of Carver's stories. 'Duane', Holly goes. In this too, she was right. Aldridge's scorn for 'Gazebo' is a result of his failure to understand the conventions of the short story. Calling Duane's actions impulsive and arbitrary, rather than 'the result of developing discord or frustration between him and his wife', Aldridge does not recognize that whereas the novel may very well chart a developing discord, the short story most often does not. Aldridge criticizes 'Gazebo' for doing what the short story has always done: present characters who are 'captured by the incredible' and who implore their listeners, 'Do you see the story? Do you see anything?'13 Another story in which talk achieves nothing, 'A Serious Talk', derives its black comic effect from the silent traces of the past: the halo of pumpkin from the dropped pie, the ashtray filled with strange butts, the turkey carcass in a bed of parsley 'as if in a horrible nest', the cone of ash that fills the fireplace. It is also evoked by the absolute silence with which Burt gets up from the sofa and places all five logs on the fire, puts the six pies on his arms and leaves. Although he thinks they will have to 'have a serious talk soon', he can really think of nothing he can say except to tell her, 'the goddamn ashtray was a goddamn dish, for example'. 'One More Thing' ends similarly, with the departing L. D. thinking he just wants to say one more thing, 'But then he could not think what it could possibly be.' Most critics agree that 'Will You Please Be Quiet, Please', the title story of because it is Carver's first collection, is a precursor to the stories in Cathedral 'richer in background information and authorial guidance' and because the story is more forgiving than the other stories in the collection.14 However, the key to the 'impossible changes' that Ralph feels moving over him at the end of the story cannot be attributed to any articulatable understanding he has achieved, but rather the mysterious visual image he recalls of seeing his wife on the balcony of their honeymoon house in Mexico.
(New York:Norton, 197 I), p. 27. Joseph Conrad, HeartofDarkness Phillips,' "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?":Voyeurism, Dissociation, and the Art of Raymond Carver', IowaReview,I (1979), 75-90 (p. 88); Arthur Salzman, Understanding Carver (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), p. 68. Raymond
14 David Boxer and Cassandra
13

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'Do YouSee WhatI'm Saying?'

Typically, critics have tried to explain the significance of this image realistically by suggesting that it indicates Ralph's awareness of his wife's sensuality as an 'essential difference' between them. However, what Ralph most recalls about the scene is that it puts him in mind of'something from a film, an intensely dramatic moment into which Marian could be fitted but he could not'. When Marian tells Ralph about her infidelity and his imagined 'unthinkable particularities' become real, he enters into a dazed realm of reality very much like his disturbing sense of Marian in a dramatic scene from a film. Ralph's 'nighttown' journey is like a film, complete with his assuming the role of a dramatic character from his youth named Jackson. When Ralph returns home, wondering what is to be done, his son asks him to tell them a story, but his daughter says, 'It's too early for a story. Isn't it, Daddy?' And indeed, it is too early, for Ralph is still too involved in the experience, has not yet made the discovery he always felt he was on the verge of making when he was taking literature and philosophy classes in college -that is, that there are no explanations for why we do what we do and no practical ways to prepare oneself for the contingencies of life. He wonders: 'How should a man act, given these circumstances? He understood things had been done. He did not understand what things now were to be done.' When his wife tries to explain, he says, 'Will you please be quiet, please', for he does not want explanation or justification; he wants to be alone to create his own story about the event and his role in it. 'Fever' (Cathedral,1983) is one of Carver's most explicit treatments of the inadequacy of talk. For example, when the protagonist Carlyle calls his girlfriend Carol, she says she understands his wanting to be alone, adding, 'I can respect that.' Momentarily falling into the seductive lure of psychobabble, Carlyle says, 'Thanks for being there when I need you.' When he hangs up he wishes he had said something else, for he had never talked that way before in his life. Over the summer he receives letters from his ex-wife Eileen asking for his understanding for her leaving him, saying, 'That which is truly bonded can never become unbonded.' Carlyle hates the word 'bonded', thinking his ex-wife must be 'losing her mind to talk like that'. When she wants to talk about his karma, Carlyle is hardly able to believe his ears. At one point when his ex-wife says that money is not important except as a necessary medium of exchange, he holds the phone in front of him and looks at the instrument from which her voice is issuing in amazement. Mr and Mrs Webster are embodiments of the magic of touch as opposed to the empty nature of talk; her first act is to fasten the top button of Carlyle's son's pyjamas and move the hair away from his daughter's face. Through the window Carlyle watches Mr Webster bend down under the dash in the car and imagines him touching some wires together. He feels as if a burden has been lifted because of the magic touch of connection. In his art class, he guides his students' hands, much as the protagonist in 'Cathedral' does,

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exerting 'just a touch' and feeling 'on the edge of discovery'. When he gets ill, his wife tells him he should write about how he feels, translating his fever into something usable. To this, Carlyle shakes his head: 'Jesus, I don't know what to say to that. I really don't.' Mrs Webster encourages him to tell the story of his marriage and his wife's leaving him, saying that it has to be talked about and that she wants to hear it. 'And you're going to feel better afterwards', she says. 'Something just like it happened to me once, something like what you're describing. Love. That's what it is.' 'Put Yourself in My Shoes' is one of Carver's most self-conscious treatments of the use of storytelling. The visit to the home of the Morgans that makes up most of the story is characterized by Mr Morgan's telling Meyers, the writer, stories that he might be able to use, all the while barely suppressing the story he really wants to tell of the Meyers' misuse of their home while they stayed there. After telling the first story (of a teacher who had an affair with a student, broke up with his wife, and had his son throw a can of tomato soup at him) Morgan says, 'Put yourself in the shoes of that eighteen-year-old coed.' When Morgan says it would take a Tolstoy to tell the story correctly, Meyers, who knows that Morgan knows nothing about storytelling, only smiles and says it is time to go. After telling the second story (about Mrs Attenborough who returns Mrs Morgan's lost purse while they were in Germany and then dies in their living room) Morgan ponderously says, 'Fate sent her to die on the couch in our living room.' Meyers, who knows that such explanations have nothing to do with the mysterious confluences that make up story, begins to laugh, which makes Morgan say if he were a 'real writer' he would 'plumb the depths of that poor soul's heart and try to understand'. Using nineteenth-century novel conventions of identifying characters as alphabetical letters, Morgan then tells about the time the Meyers stayed in his house. However, he gets the Y's and Z's mixed up, claiming that the 'real story' is about 'Mr and Mrs Z, I mean Mr and Mrs Y invading the Z's house, opening boxes marked "do not open" '. However, the real story is, of course Meyers's story, entitled 'Put Yourself in My Shoes'. In an ending that is as close as Carver is willing to go towards a postmodernist, self-reflexive story, Meyers silently watches the road on the way home, for, 'He was at the very end of a story.' The central emphasis in 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love' is on the inability of people to talk about love in any way except by telling stories, which, inevitably, listeners do not understand. First Terri tells about a former lover who loved her so much that when she left him, he drank rat poison and finally shot himself in the mouth. Although Terri insists it was real love, Mel says he is not interested in that kind of love. When Mel says he wants to tell a story that ought to make everyone 'ashamed when we talk like we know what we're talking about when we talk about love', Terri asks him not to talk as if he is drunk, and he echoes the 'Will you please be quiet, please' line in Carver's previous book: 'Just shut up for once in your

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life. Will you do me a favor and do that for a minute?'. Knowing that the story has a purity he does not want spoiled by explanations and interruptions, Mel tells about the old couple in the hospital after a car wreck and the husband's depression because he cannot see his wife through the eyeholes of his cast. Mel urges his listeners to visualize, to identify with the old man, to see the holistic totality of the story: 'Can you imagine? I'm telling you, the man's heart was breaking because he couldn't turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.' He concludes with the ultimate Carver storytelling challenge: 'Do you see what I'm saying?'. Central to 'Where I'm Calling From' are the stories J. P. tells the narrator: first about falling into a well when he was twelve and watching flocks of birds fly overhead and then about meeting the young chimney sweep he married. 'In short, everything about his life was differentfor him at the bottom of that well [... ]. Then his dad came along with the rope and it wasn't long before J. P. was back in the world he'd always lived in.' When J. P. tells about starting to drink, he sighs the common Carver complaint, 'Who knows why we do what we do?'. However, the narratorlistens to the story avidly, urging J. P., 'I want to hear the rest of this, J. P. You better keep talking.' Elliott Malamet is, I think, perceptively correct when he notes that the narrator's placing ofJ. P.'s stories alongside his own 'invokes the function of a parable', a mode of figurative language thatJ. Hillis Miller says cannot be described directly in literal language.15 The central event in Carver's most widely-praised story, 'Cathedral', is a quintessentialmetaphor for Carver's need to make the reader 'see' the story. When the blind man asks the narratorif he has any idea what a cathedral is, he cannot describe it in such a way as to make the blind man 'see' the spiritual reality of the structure.When the narrator says he does not believe in anything, the roles reverse and the blind man tries to make the narrator 'see' by engaging him in a concrete empathetic experience. When they begin to draw, the blind man says, 'Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub. Well it's a strange life. We all know that.' The narrator closes his eyes to simulate the blind man's experience and thinks, 'It was like nothing else in my life up to now', feeling that although he is in his house, he doesn't feel as if he is in anything. 'It's really something, I said.' I'm CallingFrom(I988), 'Intimacy' Among Carver's final stories in Where and 'Errand' are the clearest examples of his exploration of the uses of storytelling. 'Intimacy' begins with the ex-wife telling the writer/narrator that his readers should come to her if they want to hear a story. When she insists, 'Areyou listening to me', he replies, 'I'm all ears', for throughout the story, he remains quiet, responding to her queries with one-line cliches. Like many Carver characters, when the ex-wife talks about the past, she is
15

Parables, (I99 ), 59-74 (p. 63); J. Hillis Miller, Tropes, Performatives (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, i990), P- 135.

in English,17 Elliott Malamet, 'Raymond Carver and the Fear of Narration', Journalof theShort Story

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astonished by the mystery of their previous intimacy, asking, 'Can you imagine it?'. The narrator, a professional storyteller, provides his ex-wife with the opportunity to tell her own story so that ultimately she will release him by giving him permission to 'tell it like you have to'. When the narrator leaves, the ex-wife tells the writer to make a story out of the experience, just as Mr Morgan does in 'Put Yourself in My Shoes'; ironically, however, although she has been given the illusion that she is free to tell her story, it is the writer who tells her story, the story 'Intimacy'. Carver's use of story in 'Errand' is more complex. Describing the origins of the fiction in his reading of Henri Troyat's biography of Chekhov, Carver suggests that the bellman and the mortician, who are not in the biography, are what 'breathes life' into it.16 'Errand' is seemingly a straightforward, unemotional, and realistically detailed presentation of the last hours of Chekhov's life. However, what makes it more than a fictionalized report is the introduction of the young servant who is asked to bring in the champagne that Chekhov drinks just before his death and Olga Knipper's urgent instructions to the young man at the end of the story. Although the young man sees the body of Chekhov in the next room on the bed, he also sees the cork from the bottle on the floor near the toe of his shoe. The moment is a delicate one, for as the young man awkwardly stands there listening to Chekhov's distracted wife asking him to go and get a mortician, the two seem to exist in two different worlds. What Carver brilliantly captures in the story is Olga Knipper's storytelling effort to send the boy on his errand. As usual, in Carver's stories, she repeatedly asks him, 'Do you understand what I'm saying to you?'. As he grapples to understand, she concludes the story by telling him a story describing his own actions in performing the errand. He is to behave 'as if' (the key words of fictional discourse) he were on a 'very important errand'; to keep his actions purposeful, he should 'imagine himself as someone moving down the busy sidewalk carrying in his arms a porcelain vase of roses that he had to deliver to an important man'. Because Olga's narrative of the projected future event is described as if it were actually taking place, the tense of the verbs reflects the inevitable shift from future to present: 'The mortician would be in his forties. [...] He would be modest, unassuming. [...] Probably he would be wearing an apron. He might even be wiping his hands on a dark towel.' At this point, the point of view shifts to present tense: 'The mortician takes the vase of roses [... ] the one time the young man mentions the name of the deceased, the mortician's eyebrows rise just a little. Chekhov, you say? Just a minute, and I'll be with you.' However, as Olga urges the waiter to perform his important mission, the young man is thinking about the cork at the toe of his
16

ed. by William L. Stull (New York:Vintage, Please:Uncollected Writings, Raymond Carver, No Heroics,
p. I24.

1991),

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shoe, and just before he leaves, he leans over without looking down and closes his hand around it, an embodiment of those seemingly innocuous, but powerfully significant, details that constitute the true genius of Chekhov's art. It is the most poignant example in Carver's fiction of his understanding of his Chekhovian realization: 'It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a language, and to endow those things stone, a woman's earring -with immense, even startling power.'17 Critics who have scolded Carver for his minimalist shortcomings have done so for the same reasons that in previous generations they criticized Poe, Chekhov, and Sherwood Anderson. Clearly, those who spent much of the 198os scorning Carver's so-called cryptic tales for the same reasons that previous critics have criticized the short story in general, were more comfortable with the later, more explanatory versions of such stories as 'The Bath' and 'So Much Water Close to Home'. However, Carver adds explanatory information to 'A Small, Good Thing' that adds nothing significant to the original version entitled 'The Bath'. For example, in 'The Bath' the parents are trying to fasten on to some term that will categorize and thus normalize the son's condition, but each time they use the term 'coma' the doctor simply says, 'I wouldn't call it that.' In A Small, Good Thing', Carver puts into the doctor's mouth a verbatim definition of a coma from Webster's New WorldDictionaiy, as a state of 'deep, prolonged unconsciousness', which does nothing to clarify the essential mystery of the boy's inaccessibility. In 'The Bath', when orderlies come in to get the boy for a brain scan, 'they wheeled a thing like a bed'. However, in 'A Small, Good Thing', Carver uses the word 'gurney'- certainly a more informative term, but one that loses the sense of disorientation the parents feel. This addition of such bits of information serves polemical purposes in the long version of 'So Much Water Close to Home'. In the short version, when the wife reads about the death of the girl in the newspaper, she sits thinking and then calls and gets a chair at the hairdresser's. In the long version, we are told what she is thinking: 'Two things are certain: I) people no longer care what happens to other people; and 2) nothing makes any difference any longer. Look at what has happened. Yet nothing will change for Stuart and me.' Chekhov would never have approved of the added explanation, complete with parentheses, that sounds more like a freshman composition essay than the muddled emotions of a woman who has identified with the image of a dead girl floating just beneath the surface of the water.18
17 Fires, p. 15. 18 I have no desire at this time to enter into the debate about the relative merits of the conclusions of

the two versions of these stories. My own view is that the death of a child is a mysterious assault that is unlikely to be assuaged by coffee and rolls, regardlessof how well intended. Furthermore, it seems to me that when the female narrator in the long version of 'So Much Water Close to Home' begins to provide a polemical argument in politically correct terms, the complex ambiguity of her reaction to her husband's actions is lost.

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The storyteller's effort to make the reader see what does not exist in the world of external perception is a primal source of the storytelling impulse, as old as myth, legend, folktale, fable, and romance - all forms that attempt to objectify and actualize in the listener's view that which exists as a purely subjective state. In the nineteenth century, when this projective impulse began to combine with realistic assumptions developed by the eighteenthcentury novel and the subjective perspective of the romantic teller, the focus shifted from allowing the story to hover anonymously in space to an imaginative perspective of a single teller who had seen something, experienced something, felt something, that he or she desperately wants the reader to see but that is impossible to explain. Given the nature of short fiction, which has always been a form that tries to make us see that which does not exist in the external world, it is little wonder that even as the teller tells the tale, he or she doubts its efficacy. Even as Hawthorne's narrator describes Goodman Brown's encounter in the forest, he questions, doubts, undermines that which he describes. Because of this basic nature of the short story, writers who know the form well and practise it faithfully are constantly aware of an inherent tension between the desire to tell the story and the frustration that telling will never quite evoke or make the reader 'see' what the narrator desires him or her to see. Critics often complain that there is no depth in Carver, that his stories are all surface detail. However, when the storyteller says he wants someone to see what he is saying, he does not mean merely the surface detail, but rather how the detail creates a meaningful pattern. As Flannery O'Connor says: If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentiallymysterious [... ] then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery, because for this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted.19 Many think that Carver's stories beginning with 'Cathedral' have more depth simply because Carver seems to get inside the minds of the characters to probe motive and provide explanation. However, asJohn Barth has said: 'The oracle at Delphi did not say "Exhaustive analysis and comprehension of one's own psyche may be prerequisite to an understanding of one's own behavior and of the world at large"; it said, "Know thyself".'20
19Mystery andManners, pp. 4 I-42. Times Book 'AFew Words About Minimalism', New Tork Review,i 8 December 1986, pp.

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