by Sarah Malone
photo: Maury Postal
Raymond Carver—‘minimalist’?
He excludes details, certainly; characters’ physical traits go unmentioned, dialogue lacks accompanying gestures; locations go unnamed, or are indicated generically (“downtown someplace,” 134); he mentions chain-store names from the post-war American shopping strip (“Rug City,” 118) that sound more generic than no name at all.[1] Rarely do we dip into the past for more than a few sentences. But more than detail, Carver minimizes sound and rhythmic variation. His is the evenness of depression, resignation, suppressed rage, and then—full stop—the statement allowed to ripple across the stillness, the gunshot with silence to echo in. Carver uses this depressed language as a cover for an extraordinary density of different types of information that may not strike us as such because it all sounds the same—like the days of his characters’ lives. His innovation is in sentences. Even now, his sentences have a radical plainness. His stories are relatively traditional in structure, with beginnings, middles and ends, but their sound and sense force us to pause.
The stories run on a tight clock, taking place over a few hours or days, often in unbroken sequence. “What Do You Do In San Francisco” is unusual both in covering a longer period and in leaving the interregnum between its beginning and end defined only as “a bit” (60). However no detail in Carver is stray; the first-person narrator, a mailman, otherwise keeps disturbing track of the days in his: “For six days running… their mail stayed in the box” (60); “It was one morning a week or so after his return” (61); “he was only there another five days” (62). Time clues us into the narrator’s obsession. It’s a natural way for a man with such a repetitive schedule to experience the world. But Carver leaves us enough ‘breadcrumbs’ to judge it. The narrator is prejudiced against the newcomer for not working; on the first page the narrator advises us—as an overly familiar mailman might—that a man who isn’t working (as if that’s common?) has “too much time to dwell on himself and his problems” (53). A truism, but taken with his assertion that the story “has nothing to do with me,” and his mention of being divorced for twenty years and of not having seen his two children in almost that long (53), we know the type—eager to talk about himself, desperate not to reveal anything—and we know what to make of the last lines:
There isn’t much [mail]. And I don’t mind. It’s all work, one way or the other, and I’m always glad to have it. (63)
The mailman’s self-importance and apparently genial freedom with platitudes conceals a desperately bored and unhappy man concocting fabulous inferences from nothing:
We seldom exchanged a word, just nodded at each other if our eyes happened to meet, which wasn’t often. He was suffering, though—anybody could see that—and I wanted to help the boy somehow, if I could. (61)
A traditional reading might be to object that Carver gives us no evidence of suffering, but that’s precisely the point, and the hinge upon which our gaze should turn back upon the narrator. Carver never breaks the surface of the narration to give us this information, never departs from what is literally real and plausible within the story; he lets the narrator trip himself up. Like Chekhov, he uses juxtapositions to guide our responses, and gives us what we need to judge; unlike Chekhov, I think, he fully intends us to condemn.
The density that Carver achieves within apparently plain paragraphs is very Chekhovian, shifting in time, subject, and type of detail: event, situation, characterization, and indirect dialogue. In “Are These Actual Miles?” one section begins:
By the end of the paragraph, can we blame Leo for drinking? The repeated use of “to be” underscores finality; things are not happening, with active verbs; they are—or else they’re finished. It isn’t even the kids who “say” anything; it’s the letter.
The paragraph is follows a simple logic: where Leo is, what he’s doing, why he’s doing it. But within this, Carver places different types of information, giving us Leo’s relationship with his kids, his social life, and his state of mind, without ever going into his thoughts. For all Carver’s minimalism, this is about emotion; not Leo’s as much as our. By taking Leo out of the picture for a few sentences, and giving us, instead, what Leo knows, he lets us feel what Leo feels. The detail that the kids are away and that their letter was the only one all summer not demanding payment in full does quadruple duty: Leo is profoundly alone; no one writes to him except the kids—once—and when they do they don’t take much care with the letter; and there have been multiple other letters demanding payment—“in full,” which tells us he’s bottoming out; people have had it. It’s a marvelously efficient concatenation, as no senders other than the children are even mentioned. And the children are with Grandma! Long enough to have a new dog, which gives their visit the suggestion of permanence. Then we’re out, and Leo gets his drink, which, after all, is what all this was about—seventy-one words; seven lines in the text; brief enough not to register as back story and barely register as an aside; perhaps, we think, this is what’s in Leo’s head in permitting himself to take his drink outside, and pour another.
photo: Maury Postal
The combination of Carver’s density and precision and the vagueness of his unspecified Anytowns—on East Street, in buildings never described—produces a uniquely hermetic sense of looking through a microscope, with all sense of perspective and correspondence to the outside world cut off. Carver doesn’t eschew philosophizing or ‘telling,’ if it’s what a character would do. He eschews explanation.
We could say this of other writers, if, with most, to a lesser degree. But Carver’s more cryptic endings, it seems to me, are different to the point of being truly new. The details, the sentence rhythms, and even the spacing on the page—lots of white space—combine to stop time. He brings us to a precipice, but doesn’t show what we’re leaning over, or how far down it goes. At the end of “Neighbors”:
“My God,” she said, “I left the key inside.” He tried the knob. It was locked. Then she tried the knob. It would not turn. Her lips were parted, and her breathing was hard, expectant. He opened his arms and she moved into them. “Don’t worry,” he said into her ear. “For God’s sake, don’t worry.” They stayed there. They held each other. They leaned into the door as if against a wind, and braced themselves. (93)
Still without breaking the surface of the literal narrative—he’s describing their stance; that’s all—Carver allows himself a metaphor. The wind could mean the returning neighbors discovering Bill and Arlene’s snooping when they return; it could suggest what Arlene and Bill have allowed themselves while snooping. We know how to read symbol in this way. On a literal level, the scene is overwrought—they could get a locksmith. But Carver has brought us to a point where we’re thinking about getting caught, and we’re as taken by surprise by the lock as Arlene and Bill are. With the staccato repetition of “They” and the short sentences pausing us; the short words—only ‘expectant’ has more than two syllables—Carver is as interested in the sensation of significance as in any meaning itself. Other writers can guide us to decipher their work; how many leave us feeling our explanations are so insufficient to the experience of reading, and that in the bright glare of resistant declarations, understanding is the least part of experiencing their work? Carver, in paring back his sentences almost to music, leaves us where characters have been brought less to epiphanies than to pauses:
He waited. He waited for it to move once more, to make the slightest noise (85).
It’s the cadence of epiphany, with the repeated “he,” “to” and “m”. But Carver is describing a man waiting with a shoe to kill some pest—we don’t know what—whose eyes he saw in the dark.
[1] In Carver, named place are less likely to be where the story takes place than places the character would like to get to but can’t or hasn’t, or regrets leaving: Reno, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Alaska. And even those places are generic.
Works Cited
Carver, Raymond. Where I’m Calling From: Selected Stories. New York: Vintage, 1989.
