Table of Contents, Exercises of History

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 WINTER 2016/SPRING 2017 Issue 5/6, Special Feature on James Carver, presents an excerpt from Raymond Carver Remembered by His Brother James. This memoir by Raymond Carver’s younger brother and only sibling offers significant details and vignettes of Raymond Carver’s childhood and early adult life; the memoir is accompanying by a review essay, “Raymond Carver and Biography,” from Sandra Lee Kleppe, Director of the International Raymond Carver Society.  Issue 5/6 includes five peer-reviewed essays: Taylor Johnston’s “‘Inside anything’: The Evacuation of Commodified Space in Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedral’” examines how the decomodified experience of co-drawing a cathedral “relocates the act of reading from the entrapments of the consumer apparatus to symbolic indeterminacy”;  Madeleine Stein’s “Keeping Our Eyes Closed: Unsustainable Transformation in Raymond Carver’s ‘Cathedral,’” uses lenses of narrative distance and gender relations to analyze the metaphorically blind narrator’s transformative interaction; In “‘Kill who?’: Forgiving the Immigrants in Raymond Carver’s ‘Sixty Acres,’” Ann Olson reviews the conflict between Yakama tribesman Lee Waite and trespassing white duck- hunters as a re-enactment of historical complexities; Cameron Cushing’s “The Negative Pastoral in Raymond Carver’s “The Compartment” locates Myers’ decision not to meet with his estranged son in Strasbourg in an interstitial space between Terry Gifford’s concept of an external “contextual pastoral” and Martin Scofield’s concept of an internal “negative pastoral”; and Jonathan Pountney’s “Raymond Carver and Haruki Murakami: Literary Influence in Late- Capitalism” considers how Murakami’s acceptance of Carver’s influence rests in a corresponding desire to depict a societal dislocation tied to the mass-commodification of the late-twentieth century labor markets in America and Japan. Table of Contents Introduction 
 Robert Miltner, Kent State University at Stark News
 Robert Miltner, Kent State University at Stark 
 
 Special Feature: James Carver 
 Raymond Carver and Biography 
 Sandra Lee Kleppe, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences Excerpt from Raymond Carver Remembered by His Brother James 
 James Carver
 
 The Raymond Carver Review Peer Reviewed Essays 
 “Inside anything”: The Evacuation of Commodified Space in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” 
 Taylor Johnston, University of California Berkeley Keeping Our Eyes Closed: Unsustainable Transformation in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” 
 Madeleine Stein, New York University “Kill who?”: Forgiving the Immigrants in Raymond Carver’s “Sixty Acres” 
 Ann Olson, Heritage University The Negative Pastoral in Raymond Carver’s “The Compartment” 
 Cameron Cushing, University of Idaho Raymond Carver and Haruki Murakami: Literary Influence in Late-Capitalism 
 Jonathan Pountney, University of Manchester, UK Contributors The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 6 with her as a co-editor, I now recognize that I was just as equally an apprentice to a master craftsperson. May all scholars be so fortunate to have such a colleague and friend as I have in Vickie Fachard. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 7! Raymond Carver and Biography Sandra Lee Kleppe Now that we have entered the “post-truth” age, we can look back on a long line of biographical sources about Raymond Carver (RC)—memoirs, biographies, interviews, photographic and personal essays—with both suspicion of fabricated images and admiration for meticulous documentation.i James Carver’s newly published memoir, Raymond Carver Remembered by his Brother James (London: Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd., 2017), attempts to sort through some of the myths surrounding his brother’s life by calling out falsehoods and praising precise fact checking. However, his book is perhaps most valuable for what it adds to the piece of the puzzle of RC’s life. It is especially the childhood years, the ones both close to James’ heart and farthest from public knowledge, that are filled in here with details about the caring environment created by the Carver parents. Contrary to the popular consensus that the Carver boys grew up in a dysfunctional family with an alcoholic father, James Carver (JC) explains that his parents seldom drank, and when his father did, it was the occasional binge. However, Clevie Raymond Carver did pass on his low tolerance of drink to his son Raymond Clevie Carver, certainly a contributing factor to the writer’s later struggle with the chronic alcoholism that almost killed him in the 1970s. This connection between father and son is explored in an emotional poem RC published in 1968: “Father, I love you,” he writes, “yet how can I say thank you, I who can’t hold my liquor either” (All of Us 7). For readers interested in the biographical details of RC’s life there are several sources with varying degrees of reliability that have accumulated over the years. James Carver’s memoir is an important addition to the growing number of accounts about the life and times of one of America’s most prominent writers. As the last living member of the Carver nuclear family, James has access to a whole world of information preceding even the concept of “Carver Country,” a term that took root following the publication of Bob Adelman’s photographic essay Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver in 1990. This lovely book is both a biographical documentary as well as an imaginative and artistic portrayal of the people, places, and events that were significant in Carver’s life. Many of the photographs are of Carver family members and other people RC knew, while others seem included to reinforce a specific milieu long-associated with the writer: that of the struggling lower classes. For example, a photo of the “Employee of the Month at the Red Lion Inn, Yakima” from 1989 is included on the same page as a shot of a cannery worker in Yakima the same year. On the opposite page is a photo of a saw filer at a The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 8! company where RC’s father actually worked. While it is true that Clevie Raymond Carver worked much of his life as a saw filer, the images here present a story we like to repeat about RC: that he grew up in the underprivileged working class and was expected to continue in his father’s footsteps. We get a more nuanced version of this topic in James’ memoir, a book filled with authentic photos from his personal collection. Being a saw filer was an important job with an above-average salary, considered so essential, James explains, that Raymond senior was not drafted during WWII (JC 36). At the same time, the boys’ mother Ella did indeed work in a cannery in Yakima, but James clarifies that this was a 10-hour a day volunteer job to help the war effort and keep fruit from spoiling. Thus, James offers us quite a different picture of the family background than the one we are accustomed to from various accounts. In fact, one of the many sources for false information about the Carver family came from RC himself, as James explains: My brother’s life has been sliced, diced, analyzed and dissected, with the apparent consensus that he rose to literary prominence despite drunken parents and a deprived childhood…. Ray himself may have been responsible for some of this confusion. (JC 15-16) For example, James points out that in an interview from 1983 RC claims that he was expected to follow in their father’s footsteps. This interview can be found in the book Conversations with Raymond Carver, where RC says to the interviewer: “all through high school it was assumed that I would graduate and go to work at the sawmill” (Gentry and Stull 34). James refutes this “falsehood;” both parents, on the contrary, wanted a better life for their sons than the one they had lived (JC 64). RC’s perpetuation of this working-class image was due both to his love of storytelling—inherited from his father—and his need to hone a façade that would promote his work. The many interviews gathered in Conversations with Raymond Carver and elsewhere are very rich biographical sources, but sorting the true from the fabricated is a tedious process. One of James’ aims with his memoir is precisely to help correct some of the inaccuracies that continue to propagate about the writer and his life. He takes issue with the tendency to collapse actual facts and fictional stories. Stories such as “Elephant” and “Boxes” both present poignant episodes in family lives where RC used certain details from real life events to enhance the overall effect of the fiction. In “Elephant,” the narrator feels hounded by a long line of family members wanting money from him. The brother in the story is not much like the real James, who both borrowed and lent money to RC throughout the brothers’ adulthood. In “Boxes” the mother is constantly moving and never feels settled; Ella Carver, on the other hand, eventually settled comfortably in Sacramento, near her son James. In both of these stories, RC The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 11! heavily on both of them. Despite this sad memory, the gist of the book offers us glimpses into the oft-misunderstood early years of growing up in Yakima, Washington. These were mostly happy and exhilarating years for the brothers where they forged an inseparable bond. They also received a solid foundation from their parents that served them well into adulthood. RC’s love of stories, for example, came from his father’s habit of entertaining the young brothers: “several times a week, Dad told us great stories. He was a marvelous storyteller with a great imagination …. Ray and I were mesmerized” (JC 59). This shared experience between James and Ray is one of many described in his memoir, a book that refutes the largely exaggerated accounts of domestic violence and alcoholism in the Carver family homes in Yakima. Compared to other biographical sources on Raymond Carver, James’ book is precisely most valuable for what it fills in about the family milieu growing up in Washington in the 1940s and 50s. We learn, for example, that their father was a strong union man and that both parents were democrats who greatly admired the accomplishments of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There were also many books in their childhood home besides the notorious Zane Grey novels sometimes cited by scholars as the only reading material to stimulate the budding writer RC.iv Mostly, we learn that big brother Raymond, despite being 5 years older, was James’ best friend and mentor throughout childhood and well into adulthood. RC has paid homage to his brother in his poem “Drinking While Driving,” where he writes that “I am happy/ riding in a car with my brother” and that “I could gladly lie down and sleep forever” (All of Us, page 3). A moment later he adds, “My brother nudges me,/ Any minute now, something will happen” (ibid.). This atmosphere of imminence and expectation is one that the brothers shared their whole lives. James explains that it was a private joke between them that soon things would “bust wide open” and that they “laughed about that phrase a year before Ray died” (JC 92). Perhaps RC had the last laugh with the wave of enormous success that he finally witnessed during the final years of his all-too-short life. Luckily, we have his brother’s memoir to fill in some of the gaps of this fascinating writer’s life, the ups and downs, myths and truths, and the ultimate busting wide openness of RC’s career. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” the word of the year 2016, see https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/16/post-truth-named-2016-word-of-the- year-by-oxford-dictionaries/?utm_term=.71b050c1626a ii Several of Carver’s stories have two or more variant titles depending on the collection in which they were published. “Everything Stuck to Him” appeared in What We Talk about When We Talk about Love in 1981 in a pared-down Lish version; Carver called the story “Distance” in Fires published in 1983. To compare different versions of stories readers can consult the Library of America Collected Stories from 2009. iii The final meeting between the brothers in 1988 is depicted in the chapter called “Glimpses” on pages 115-119 of James Carver’s memoir. iv James Carver discusses the books in the Carver home on pages 58-59 of his memoir. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 12! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Works Cited Adelman, Bob. Carver Country: The World of Raymond Carver. Introduction by Tess Gallagher. New York: Scribner’s, 1990. Print. Carroll, Maureen P. and William L. Stull, editors. Remembering Ray: A Composite Biography. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1993. Print. Carver, James. Raymond Carver Remembered by his Brother James. London: Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd., 2017. Print. Carver, Maryann Burk. What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006. Print. Carver, Raymond. At Night the Salmon Move. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1976. Print. ---. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. Print. ---. Cathedral. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. Print. ---. Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1983. Print. ---. Where Water Comes Together With Other Water. New York: Random House, 1985. Print. ---. Where I’m Calling From. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988. Print. ---. Elephant and Other Stories. London: Harvill, 1988. Print. ---. A New Path to the Waterfall. Introduction by Tess Gallagher. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. Print. ---. All of Us: The Collected Poems. Edited by William L. Stull. Introduction by Tess Gallagher. New York: Random House, 2000. Print. ---. Collected Stories. Edited by William L. Stull. New York: Library of America, 2009. Print. Gallagher, Tess. Soul Barnacles: Ten More Years with Ray. Edited by Greg Simon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Print. Gentry, Marshall Bruce and William L. Stull, editors. Conversations with Raymond Carver. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Print. Halpert, Sam, editor. Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995. Print. Romon, Philippe. Parlez-moi de Carver: Une biographie littéraire. Paris: Agnès Viénot Editions, 2003. Print. Sklenicka, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life. New York: Scribner, 2009. Print. ELEVENTH A VENUE In 1951 , Dad finally gave in and bought us a new house in a better part of Yakima. 1419 South Eleventh A venue was a two-bedroom tract home with a modem bathroom. All the houses on our street were brand new, identical to one another, all painted white with big perfect lawns in the front and back yards. There was a giant willow tree in the back yard, right outside the window of the large bedroom Ray and I shared. Every street in our neighborhood was clean and paved with new asphalt, no dirt roads. Even the kids we met were dressed well. Some of the houses in the neighborhood next to us were slightly different from each other, but most likely not built any better than ours. Of course, that didn' t occur to Ray or me at the time. We wouldn' t have cared anyway. My whole family felt we had finally become middle class and we were overjoyed to be there, especially my mother. I remember how the smell of apple pies baking filled our house. Our mother was a great cook and we always had good food for the family. Many times we came home from school and could smell fried chicken before we even got to the door. On Sundays we 'd have a big breakfast of sausage and eggs and potatoes, or bacon and eggs. Mom kept a coffee can full of bacon grease next to the stove and that grease flavored everything! We now know bacon grease is not good for us to eat, but at that time most people did not realize the health risks. Just thinking about that food makes me hungry. Shortly after we moved in, Dad bought us our first television set. It was a new RCA console-black and white, of course. We were one of the first in our neighborhood to have TV. Before we got one, Ray and I used to peek in the windows of the few neighbors who already had television and watch as long as we could until someone took notice. 25 under. I remember being there with Ray and Dad in the still and quiet of late afternoon, and how the cry of peacocks would suddenly break the silence, but not the peacefulness we shared. We always had a great family Christmas with a fresh tree we cut down ourselves and decorated. There were many presents and good food all day. On Christmas mornings, Ray and I found games, books and toys under our tree-one year trains and bicycles another. Every Easter before dawn, the four of us would attend sunrise service at Terrace Heights Memorial Park. There, on the beautiful grounds with white swans swimming in serene ponds, we and several hundred listened to the sermon as the sun rose over the horizon. After service, we went home to eat a big Easter breakfast: sausage and eggs or ham and eggs, with hot cross buns that had a white cross of sweet frosting on each one. We usually had ham with all the trimmings for dinner, and Mom' s delicious pumpkin and pecan pie for dessert. It was always a very quiet and peaceful day with plenty of good food all around us. Now, I read from many different people about how unhappy and impoverished we all were supposed to be at this time. What a misconception. Life was good and we all enjoyed what it had to offer. In 1951 , our beloved dog, Mike, died. He had been our dog for as long as I could remember. Dad later made up for it, bringing home a black Labrador mix puppy for my ninth birthday. We named him Toby. Like Mike, Toby was our best friend and went everywhere with us. He appears in many of our family snapshots. One night while Ray and I were sleeping in our bedroom, Toby growled loudly enough to wake us. I jumped up to look out the window. Just as I put my nose against the windowpane, I saw another face outside with his nose pressed against mine. It scared me enough that I screamed, waking the whole family. The next morning, Ray and I looked in the back yard for footprints. We found large shoeprints in the vegetable garden. Ray had a fingerprint set and dusted for prints. I can remember how smart we felt, investigating as 28 detectives would, but we came out with only one smudged print. Our neighbors had similar experiences with a prowler. The men in the neighborhood banded together and caught the Peeping Tom. He turned out to be a man our father knew from the mill. Dad often took us duck and pheasant hunting, and on fishing trips to the lakes and rivers all around Yakima: Rim.rock Lake, Natches River, Wenas Lake, Tieton River and Blue Lake, to name a few. Most of my memories of fishing are from after we moved to Eleventh A venue. Before I was old enough to go, he took Ray fishing for sturgeon in the Columbia River. I can remember how excited I was when they came home with several large sturgeons. Dad would put them in the bathtub and they were so big they covered the whole bottom of the tub. My father always kept us well-supplied with fishing rods, reels, guns, boots and clothes for hunting and fishing. I know for a fact that is where much of his money went and he probably did not have the money for those things. Once I was old enough to come along, Dad took us both fishing on the Columbia River. I remember being awakened around 5 AM on those Saturday mornings. Dad would usually fix a breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon; our mother stayed in bed. One morning, we noticed the eggs had a gray appearance, but we ate them anyway. After we finished, Dad asked how we liked our eggs. We told him we did. He then told us they had pork brains, which he liked, mixed in. We would not have eaten them had we known. After breakfast, Dad, Ray, Toby, and I would drive out to the river; it usually took an hour and a half I'll never forget how cold it was on that river in the fall. We'd fish for whitefish- called "white" because of their silver appearance in the water. They were long and slender and one to five pounds in weight. We used maggots for bait. Many of the old fishermen would keep the maggots underneath their lower lips for easy access. Our maggots stayed in the can. We built 29 a small fire to keep our hands warm but some of the other fishermen built larger fires in metal barrels. Thankfully, the bone-chilling mornings got warmer as the day progressed. Ray and I were determined fishermen. We loved the outdoors, fishing and hunting, even if it meant freezing in the cold sometimes. We both enjoyed every minute of these trips and seldom went home with less than a dozen fish. On hot summer days, Dad took us to Rim.rock Lake, about an hour and a half northeast of Yakima. Dad told us the lake was a crater of an ancient volcano; it was so deep that the bottom had yet to be discovered. He would blow up the rubber raft he bought from the Army Surplus Store and we'd drift out on the clear water, so clean you could drink it but it much too cold to swim in. We would fish all day. In winter, Rimrock Lake froze over with a solid sheet of ice, so we cut individual holes in the ice to fish. The three of us sat on campstools in a totally pristine atmosphere under an unending blue sky, white ice as far as the eyes could see. Eagles circled high above while Ray and I watched our father smoke his Camels, catching glimpses of our breaths in the chilled air. We were enveloped in a blanket of silence and snow. Not until one of us spoke would the silence break. I shall never forget those wonderful times we spent together with our beloved father. Another great fishing spot was Wenas Lake, northeast of Yakima, a small lake that sat in a pocket surrounded by dry hills. We three never missed opening day. The day before opening, we rented a boat or used our own rubber raft and floated around on the lake, just enjoying ourselves. Sometimes Dad put up a tent, but more often he slept in our car. Ray and I were always too excited to sleep. We stayed up most of the night, just hanging around and listening to the jukebox in the little all-night cafe that sold bait, hamburgers, snacks and drinks. 30 Summers were as hot as the winters were cold. On warm summer nights, Ray and I often slept in the back yard with our sleeping bags, our faithful dog Toby right beside us. We would lie and gaze up at a sky heavily filled with bright stars that weighed down upon on us, listening to the crickets and other night sounds we couldn't identify. Time did not seem to matter, it had no meaning for us; it would last forever. We both told stories and talked for hours. I don' t remember Ray then being an especially good storyteller as has been written. One night, the whole yard and back of the house turned a light blue, then a very bright luminous blue. We looked up and saw a large luminescent blue object moving slowly and silently over the house; there was not a sound. We both jumped up and ran to the back window, yelling for our parents to come out to see what we were seeing. I believe, as Ray did, we had witnessed a UFO. This was in 1952 and there were reported sightings over Washington State at that time. That was my first and only encounter, but Ray later told me that he and his first wife Maryann saw another one in the early 60 ' s when they were living in Chico, California. It was on Eleventh A venue that Ray developed a genuine interest in reading. Our father liked to read adventure books and magazines and kept many in the house. He had a collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan series, as well the John Carter on Mars series and many Zane Gray westerns. Dad also had books on the Civil War and President Roosevelt's Administration. Ray and I read all of Dad' s books, except maybe the ones about the Roosevelt Administration, we were a little young for those books, but I'm sure we read all the others maybe three or four times. We also read his outdoor magazines which were always filled with adventure. Several times a week, Dad told us great stories. He was a marvelous storyteller with a very creative imagination. He made them up as he went along. Ray and I were mesmerized. I believe Dad' s 33 stories certainly helped motivate Ray' s interest in storytelling, and later his desire and driving need to write fiction. In the book, "Carver Country," it was said that Ray grew up in a home where there were only Zane Grey books to read. This is totally untrue. We may not have had classics or contemporary literature at the time, but we did have many other books to read besides Zane Grey. I am sure this writer also may have come from a working class family and most likely did not have great literature lying around either. How many working class families do? Was Ray supposed to be reading great literature at a young age? By the time he was in high school he had read most of the classics, including Tolstoy and Chekhov; courtesy of his high school sweetheart, Maryann. The fifties brought about Rock ' n Roll, a blend of Southern Blues and Gospel music. Ray and I loved that music when it first appeared on the scene. Some of our favorite artists were Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly and Richie Valens. Our mother liked Dinah Shore, Johnny Ray and Perry Como. I have read that Ray and my family liked Country Music. Not true, as are so many other things that have been written about us. My parents also played the records of Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and other popular singers of that era. There was a lot of different music in our house, but never Country. Every week during baseball season, Dad took Ray and me to Parker Field in Yakima to see the Yakima Bears, a local minor-league team. Dad would buy us all popcorn, hot dogs and cokes. We'd sit under the bright lights in the crisp night air, cheering with the crowd for our home team and following the game on the huge illuminated scoreboards. Ray and I loved watching the games and sharing them with our father. 34 All in all, we were typical boys during these years, playing rough games boys usually play. We liked catch, baseball and some basketball- weren't much interested in football , but occasionally we tossed one back and forth. Young people in those days were more self-sufficient and creative; we did not have all the technology kids do now. Back then, we had to be inventive in finding our own fun, and we always were! My brother and I seemed to enjoy more creative things like chemistry sets, fly-tying kits and stamp collecting. We constructed buildings from Lincoln Logs and Erector Sets. Ray and I used our minds while playing inside. When playing outside, we were always physical. 35 The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 15! consumerism (unlike, say, the distorting surrealism of Warhol). Bobbie Ann Mason’s novel In Country exemplifies this operation. As Phillip Simmons observes in “Minimalist Fiction as ‘Low’ Postmodernism,” brand names and consumer products do their usual symbolic work to serve the novel’s characterizations. The character Anita is marked as elegant by the protagonist Sam because she “smelled like a store at the mall that has a perfume blower in the doorway” and prefers Betty Crocker brownie mix over Duncan Hines (53). For Simmons, the reliance on consumer culture is an historically authentic strategy that “questions the adequacy of the mass cultural idiom while remaining sympathetic to the characters’ use of that idiom” (57); however, contemporaries of minimalism objected to consumer language for its collaboration with late capitalism, and, more specifically, for its compromise of both the morality and meritocracy of literature: The marked presence of mass culture in these texts, in which outward signs of emotion or psychological conflict . . . are given as a choice between fast food outlets or the impulsive decision to buy a ceramic cat at the mall, is seen by some critics as a renunciation both of moral seriousness and the rigors of the novelist’s craft. That reliance on mass cultural allusions makes this fiction “shallow” in its characterization and historical sense is another instance of the complaint that postmodernism sacrifices “depth” for a banal poetics of “surface.” Worse than banal, the reliance on mass culture is seen as an abandonment of the historical awareness necessary to stave off cultural decline. (315) One such critic, Diane Stevenson, writing the same year In Country was published and four years after “Cathedral” first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, describes minimalism’s allegedly complacent treatment of consumer objects as the following: The writer tells you his character eats Cheerios. The Cheerios he means are not something you eat. They are not themselves. They are simply code (a sign). And here’s the rub, everyone knows that the Cheerios augur ill, allude to something lacking in the character. There is consensus here, and this is the real break with modernism, the issue of consensus: which consensus? Everyone will see green after red, say the modernists. Everyone will see a class code, a consumer code, a code of enervated character when he sees Cheerios—this is the leap the postmodernist makes. (author italics 88) Reading her irritated account of minimalist writing, one begins to wonder about the status of the “everyone” gazing at the Cheerios being consumed by the lower-middle-class character. Six years after Stevenson was writing, Fredric Jameson noted that while we may cast lamenting looks at our fellow Cheerio-eaters, we are all in a literal and figurative sense eating postmodern Cheerios now The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 16! that “aesthetic production . . . has become integrated into commodity production generally” (4). Not only that, but the Cheerios discourse has learned to neutralize countercultural observations of the kind that Stevenson is attempting. In other words, mass culture now knows that “Cheerios augur ill, allude to something lacking in the character” and can thematize this lack. We need only think of the recent advertising campaign that depicts Jack-in-the-Box meals as junk that people would only choose to eat late at night while high in their parents’ garage. In “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Jameson warns against moralizing critique along the lines of Stevenson’s by describing both the all-encompassing nature of capitalist influence and its efficiency in coopting all capacity for critique into its own functions. As in the Jack-in-the-Box commercials, mass culture seems to acknowledge the ways in which it has been (and might yet be) criticized, and incorporate that critique as its own content. A more notable example of this procedure is mass culture’s response to sixties social critique: it simply reproduced that critique as its own material (think mass-produced tie-dye shirts with peace signs). For these reasons and others that I will observe, the critic and the content she criticizes are now in the same cultural category: [I]f postmodernism is a historical phenomenon, then the attempt to conceptualize it in terms of moral or moralizing judgments must finally be identified as a category mistake. All of which becomes more obvious when we interrogate the position of the cultural critic and moralist; the latter, along with the rest of us, is now so deeply immersed in post-modernist space, so deeply suffused and infected by its new cultural categories, that the luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable. (Jameson 46) In postmodernism, the historical specificity that enables real political engagement has been replaced by a simulacrum of the past (more on this in a few pages), and the subject is disoriented to the extent that viable criticism has been abolished. And still no leftist theory has been able to forgo “the possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive Being of capital, from which to assault this last” (48). Taking the postmodern subject’s cognitive disconnect from global capital as a metaphor, Jameson configures this critical impotence as a spatial problem that denies us the “time- honored formula of ‘critical distance,’” that persistent darling of the Left; “our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically) incapable of distantiation” (49). Multinational capital has successfully inhabited the realms we have considered pre-capitalist (the psychological, for example), an invasion which even the conspiracy theories pervasive on the left have failed to account for (49). Most simply put, a category separate from The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 17! capital and its functions does not exist. All forms of resistance the Left has cherished—from guerilla warfare to The Clash—“are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it” (49). The critique of minimalism like Carver and Mason’s as a collaborator in late-capitalist cultural decline (along with all similar critique of postmodernism generally) has been effectively debunked by this argument. The only hope for culture as a political intervention in our present historical context exists in a hypothetical aesthetic, as of yet completely unrealized; this representational strategy would have to restore the subject position proper to criticism and to an uncompromised awareness of capitalism’s totality, as the compass once oriented explorers to totality mediated by the stars and the mathematics of triangulation (52). As hopeless as this sounds, however, Jameson elsewhere observes a different kind of potential in leftist postmodern productions that has had to narrate the exhaustion of American radicalism “by way of that very cultural logic of the postmodern which is itself the mark and symptom of [this] dilemma” (25). These works achieve a distinguishing self-consciousness even if they do not constitute a true alternative. E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, for example, takes the twentieth-century demise of the Left as its “elegiac backdrop,” at the same time collaborating with the ahistoricity symptomatic of that demise; an apparently realistic novel, it is “in reality a nonrepresentational work that combines fantasy signifiers from a variety of ideologemes in a kind of hologram” (23). It is a mix of historical and fictional characters exceed the usual operations of historical novels by reifying Houdini, Tateh, Coalhouse, etc. into a simulacrum that evades historical specificity (24). Moreover, Doctorow’s particular use of the simple declarative sentence renders the plot a series of “isolated punctual event objects” that are severed from the contemporary context (24). But in this sense, the novel and its postmodern cohort does ironically achieve a kind of historical mimesis: a “realism” that is meant to derive from the shock of grasping [our] confinement and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop history and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach. (25) I will return to this crisis of historicity later, but for now I would like to observe the particular way in which minimalism performs a similar kind of realism, which adopts this aesthetic of ahistorical “mirage,” but to an historically apt effect. Just as Ragtime uses its fantastical simulacrum of history to narrate the very real demise of historical consciousness, writers like Carver empty commodified space in order to depict an alternative that can only exist as fantasy in our historical context. The The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 20! cannot entirely succeed in doing so. His prose strips away as many commodified objects as possible without jettisoning referentiality entirely; in this way, it clears the overpopulated, decorative, excessive space of both consumer culture and the more canonical iterations of postmodernism. A few consumer artifacts necessarily survive the cleanse, but these form part of the ‘biblical’ sparseness that so often makes way for allegorical meaning. In “Popular Mechanics,” the baby becomes not only symbolic of the way parents commodify children in the negotiations of divorce, but also a more general example of the violence of reification. Unlike the magazine, which collaborates with capitalism’s commodifying functions, the story is an oblique warning against them. These allegorical meanings endeavor to preserve the characters from the determining grasp of commodification, enabling a new dignity for their defunct working class who must otherwise vacillate in the purgatory of shrunken political consciousness. In doing so, however, allegory also masquerades as an autonomous space unfettered by late capitalism while surreptitiously collaborating with it every bit as much as the rest of postmodern cultural production, insofar as it relies on generic, ahistorical representation. Is it a sleight of hand to represent “reality” in this fashion? Yes, absolutely, and not least because it promises greater subversive potential than is actually available in postmodernism if we subscribe to Jameson’s argument. But in the context of postmodern realism, this kind of slippage may be the only slim but available means of configuring the possibility and desirability of an alternative political reality. For Theodor Adorno and others of the Frankfurt School, art’s oblique access to critique is the most potent subversion it can enable; the artwork’s semblance of a not yet existing reality verges on consolatory fantasy, and yet persistently reminds us of its own illusion status, as Carver’s stories do in their refusal to provide definitive meaning. The following analysis will propose that “Cathedral” allegorizes the utopian possibility of shedding the artifacts and effects of commodification and, through its allegory, conveys the slimness of this hope for change. Some of the consumer world survives in “Cathedral” as it does in the rest of minimalism (and certainly all of it will revive as soon the story is over), but only as a necessary frame of its startling omissions, relocating the act of reading from the entrapments of the consumer apparatus to symbolic indeterminacy. The effect will necessarily be blurred, ahistorical, and (yes, still) defined by the productions of late capitalism. But the story’s simultaneous uncertainty wishes to pause commodification, positioning itself against the overpopulated landscape of central postmodern content. This tenuous desire is both utopian in its longing for experience that predates commodification and ideological in its collaboration with the neoliberal concept of universal, The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 21! autonomous experience. The story’s dutiful attention to the undecidability of these alternatives places a careful wedge for minimalist social critique. In doing so, it breaks with the usual treatment of commodification in minimalism, as I believe many of Carver’s stories do. In “Cathedral” readers meet a lower-middle-class couple, hardly in the crisis of “Popular Mechanics,” though palpably disconnected, who spend most of their discretionary time in the living room, in which the organizing object is the television. Even in this relatively luxurious phase of Carver’s minimalism—which is slightly less paratactic, more ornate, and no longer under Gordon Lish’s tight editorial grip—we have almost no visual sense of the characters and their home apart from its most determining features. We know they have a driveway (in which the wife and an important guest arrive), a kitchen (in which they stuff down what sounds like a 2,000 calorie meal), a bar (in an unknown location which they often frequent), and an upstairs (which interestingly includes a separate room for the wife). Beyond this we have no sense of the objects that populate their home, nor do we see any of their physical traits, which serves to deprioritize whatever sensory experience one could have in this space. We could chalk this muteness up to the depressive mood of the narrator and a certain sensory obtuseness that the wife and their guest also seem to share at times. But if we read our confined knowledge of this commodified space (the lower-middle-class home) against the established genre of minimalism and its flagrant use of the brand name, we recognize Carver’s attempt to empty out a typically over-determined setting (which is also scattered with consumer objects in much of canonical postmodernism and mass-cultural content like advertising). The objects that survive the minimalist trim in “Cathedral” get repurposed for the story’s own critical purposes; the television, for example, becomes the occasion for what turns out to be a transformative moment of quiet subversion in the narrator’s experience. The character who ironically comes into most precise focus is a blind man, their guest and the only character who has a name (Robert). He’s an old friend of the narrator’s wife who comes to visit them after his own wife dies of cancer. We know that he’s a well dressed, “heavy set,” balding man, probably in his late forties, with “stooped shoulders,” a full beard that’s getting some “winter” (an adjective supplied by the blind man based on what he’s heard from other people), a booming voice, and eyes that “seemed to move around in the sockets without his knowing it or being able to stop it” (greatly preoccupying the narrator) (215-6). And we soon perceive his relative emotional adeptness, particularly in relating to the narrator’s wife—much to the narrator’s chagrin, it seems. From the moment he first introduces us to the blind man, the narrator can only begin to comprehend him through the mediation of consumer content. “His being blind bothered me,” he The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 22! tells us—in narration that has a distinctly spoken feel—“My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to” (209). The narrator first encounters the blind man through the tape recorded letters he sends to the narrator’s wife; eventually, the blind man sends a tape in which he comments on the wife’s nascent relationship with the narrator, and she coaxes him into listening to it with her. Even in this preliminary encounter, the narrator can only apprehend the blind man’s aberrant way of corresponding as though it were part of the televisual spectacle; “I got us drinks and we settled down in the living room. We made ready to listen”—only to be interrupted by “a knock at the door, something,” from which they never return, much in the way that one can easily never return to a casually chosen television program (212). The narrator never hears the part where the blind man mentions him, but this disjuncture doesn’t seem to bother the narrator—in the same way that his apparent disconnect with his wife rarely and barely gets any mention as a source of worry. In fact, all content which resists the mode of perception he has clearly borrowed from the hours he spends watching TV seems to slip from the narrator’s grasp—he cannot assimilate it into his more global understanding, nor does he wish to (at least not until the end of the story). The blind man’s inability to interact with the content familiar to the narrator in the “proper” way—the one dictated by consumer code—makes him suspect from the moment he enters the house. The narrator is persistently uncomfortable with the fact that the blind man cannot see the TV when they sit down to watch it (at a later point in the night he tells us the blind man was “leaning forward with his head turned at me, his right ear aimed in the direction of the set. Very disconcerting” [222]). Blind people can’t even see their wives and appreciate them in the way that televisual culture instructs, a fact that disturbs the narrator when he reflects on what must have been this blind man’s relationship with his now deceased wife. “Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved” (213)—a woman outside the hegemonic scheme of the televisual, which requires that she be processed as image. “She could, if she wanted, wear green eye-shadow around one eye, a straight pin in her nostril, yellow slacks and purple shoes, no matter” (210), much in the way the blind man’s right eye is often “on the roam without his knowing it or wanting it to be” (218). This kind of life-gone-rogue from the televisual mode proves threatening to the narrator—less because it is estranged from his own way of apprehending the world, and more because it evades the guiding hand of hegemony that dictates when and how one The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 25! omnipresent hum of television serves as a soporific cocoon against the intrusion or consideration of social discontent” (103)—the kind of discontent this narrator seems to feel over the futility of his current work. Yet he is unable to synthesize this futility with the one experienced by the individual laborers who built the cathedrals, in the way the blind man seems to do intuitively. And this disconnect in itself constitutes a blindness of cognition. The reception history of this story has explained the narrator’s experience as various kinds of blindness (that prove far more blind than the blind man’s blindness)—a willful spiritual blindness (Peterson 168), a general lack of interest in examining feeling on the part of Carver’s characters (Clark 113). These readings offer a compelling account of the narrator’s particular obtuseness, but his condition also pertains to a more collective blindness, a class blindness, which refuses to see its condition as a historically situated one. It surfaces in the narrator’s attempts at describing cathedrals, as it variously does at other moments. In this way, the narrator becomes a figure for the postmodern “waning of our historicity” described by Jameson. The past that produced the surviving artifacts of the cathedral blurs into the commonplaces of the cultural present in the narrator’s account of it; “In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be closer to God. In those olden days, God was an important part of everyone’s life. You could tell this from their Cathedral building” (225). Moreover, the narrator is hardly unaware of the impotence of these remarks; his preparations to make them read like an attempt to summon the working class urgency for which Carver longs in his biographical writings. “I stared at the Cathedral on the TV. How could I even begin to describe it? But say my life depended on it. Say my life was being threatened by an insane guy who said I had to do it or else” (224). These mental exercises fail to produce, which the narrator finally acknowledges to the blind man; “I’m sorry . . . but it looks like that’s the best I can do for you. I’m just not good at it” (225)—at producing anything other than utterly generic notions of the “olden days” that therefore remain in the obscurity of Jameson’s “stereotypical past.” Cathedrals do not really signify much of anything for him—a fact he attributes to his indifference towards religion— but even his own agnosticism remains culturally nondescript: “I guess I don’t believe in it. In anything. Sometimes it’s hard. You know what I’m saying?” (225). He seems not to know quite what he’s saying—or what this religious “it” is exactly. “The truth is, cathedrals don’t mean anything special to me. Nothing,” he continues; “Cathedrals. They’re something to look at on late-night TV. That’s all they are” (226). The narrator’s inability to generate historically specific content is a social rather than a personal poverty, indicative of his interpellation by the hegemonic, largely televisual discourse; and The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 26! this content determines, even scripts all that he can say about cultural artifacts like, say, cathedrals. But the blind man, provisionally and paradoxically allows him to break out of this class “blindness.” Much ink has been spilt over the meaning of the narrator’s apparent epiphany in the final scene of the story. In it, the narrator draws a cathedral on a shopping bag he recovers from the trash while the blind man follows his movements and then retraces his lines. The act of drawing finally obviates his pseudohistorical attempts to explain the structures. And the moment abruptly becomes an occasion for what we the readers experience as unexplainable intimacy; “His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now” (228). Critics often describe this experience as a kind of awakening—spiritual or otherwise (Peterson 168)—and the story’s somewhat incidental religious content (cathedrals) assist this kind of reading. I would add, however, that in this moment sensory experience becomes a stand-in for the emotional depth and understanding the narrator lacks (like so many of Carver’s characters). Instead of an epiphany of understanding, he gets the rapture of shared sensory experience (drawing a cathedral with the blind man) that leads to greater intimacy, at least provisionally. This small miracle goes largely unexplained, though readers can easily recuperate its origins, in light of the way it interacts with the symbolic elements I’ve already identified—the narrator as a figure for postmodern lack of historicity and political consciousness, and the blind man’s growing candidacy as a faintly possible alternative. The beginnings of the narrator’s drawing resemble his other efforts to recover something of cathedrals, with his own limited means; “So I began. First I drew a box that looked like a house. It could have been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At the end of the roof, I drew spires. Crazy” (227). In constructing this unfamiliar historical artifact, he is literally using the tools of his own domestic sphere—the commodified space of what is likely (though significantly we’re never told) his small tract home or condo in a lower-middle-class suburb. This reliance renders the drawing as culturally and historically indeterminate as his previous attempts to explain cathedrals. The narrator himself admits that, while the box he draws could be the likeness of a medieval structure, it could just as easily be his own house—until he adds the simulacra of historical detail he’s gleaned from the television program, his persistent mediator. But rather suddenly his tacit awareness of this mediation seems to dwindle in the fury of the creative act; “I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn’t stop” (227). The more his sense of himself as creator grows in these urgently brief sentences, the greater his precision becomes, until he’s actually naming the very details of cathedrals that before either eluded him or came off as inadequate souvenirs of what the TV told him. And then, “the TV station went off the The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 27! air. I put down the pen and closed and opened my fingers. The blind man felt around over the paper. He moved the tips of his fingers over the paper, all over what I had drawn, and he nodded” (227). It would be easy to read this moment as the senses supplanting cognition (Clark 110) or some other surmounting of the numb quality that has until now characterized the narrator. This interpretation would be a sensitive one, if also somewhat blind to the more prevailing allegorical meaning that emerges from this sparely illustrated moment; for the channel going off marks something else as well—the apparent receding of hegemonic determinants in the narrator’s experience. His drawing still relies entirely on the content of the television program, but he no longer mentions TV or wants to remember it at all. The allegory amplifies this small change, to the extent that the narrator’s wife is unable to fathom their project when she suddenly wakes up, saying “What’s going on? Robert, what are you doing? What’s going on?” (227). What she seems to register as uncanny is in fact the real significance of this moment: the narrator’s provisional power over the media which until now stymied his ability to create—or to say anything worth hearing at all. And for the first time, what he creates, in this case draws, can mean something to the blind man; “We’re going to really have ourselves something here in a minute” (227) the blind man says, affectionately, following which he tells the narrator to close his eyes: Then he said, ‘I think that’s it. I think you got it,’ he said. ‘Take a look. What do you think?’ But I had my eyes closed. I thought I’d keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Are you looking?’ My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. ‘It’s really something,’ I said. (228) The narrator is now as blind as Robert the blind man, and as blind to specificity as he ever was—he doesn’t feel like he’s inside anything at all, let alone inside a class history that might somehow include cathedrals. But if nothing else, he experiences this make-believe silencing of the hegemonic as a welcome and striking novelty he wishes to extend, even just for a few moments. And for the reader as well, the entirety of the story’s commodified space is emptied, leaving us a few lines of darkness in which to contemplate this character’s experience as something other than its role in late capitalism. The story adamantly refuses to reassure us about the significance of these final events. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 30! beige and white Maud Sienna carpet covers most of the floor. (Easton Ellis Qtd. in Weinrich 68) This narrative obsession with the minutia of commodified space confines the novel’s meaning to the surface of Bateman’s words and actions (68); even the heinous murders he commits are unfelt and unjustified. The dichotomy of Ellis’ congested prose and Carver’s omissions corresponds to Benjamin’s distinction between information and storytelling as a retreating form. In particular, the novel has disembodied the modern act of reading, banishing the artisan process by which the oral narrator of epic, folklore, and fairytales conveys his experiences as counsel to his listeners (though writers like Leskov still succeed in replicating this act). This kind of knowledge has been supplanted by modernity’s obsession with information: Every morning brings us the news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it … The most extraordinary, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the events is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks. (Benjamin 89) We can read Ellis’ novel as a parodic exaggeration of information’s determining effects (though ironically “the psychological connection of the events” is nonetheless banished by the sheer quantity of both descriptive details and the murders), and Carver’s stories, an aesthetic and social counterpoint, as an attempt to recuperate the symbolic openness of storytelling. Their meaning derives from the extent to which the reader is permitted to “interpret things the way he understands them.” The negative spaces left by the stories’ abstention from explanation are where their intensity surges through, and where allegorical meaning finds its location. Though they must speak to each other across theoretical schools, Iser and Benjamin are actually closer than we might think in their shared desire for a reading practice that prioritizes the reading (or listening) subject’s participation. For Benjamin, storytelling grants the reader a collaborative role in meaning denied by the novel. The story’s “chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis” (what better descriptor of Carver?) and resistance to “psychological shading” has the strange effect of installing it more completely in the reader’s memory (91). This in turn means the story has been integrated into the reader’s own experience, making him more inclined to The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 31! repeat the story and its wisdom (91). In describing the reader this way, Carver subtly removes the reader from the status of interpreter to that of co-experiencer and co-author; in both the moment of the story’s recounting and the subsequent times when the reader will tell it again, the reader becomes an intimate associate of its contents and effect. This status puts the reader in closer, more sensory proximity to the writer as well; storytelling does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel. (92) It is exactly this kind of contact that thrills the narrator in the culminating moments of “Cathedral,” with the blind man’s hand encouragingly pressed to his own; representing the cathedral to the blind man enables a moment of counsel between them as much as it produces an informational understanding of the cathedral’s structure. And the indeterminacy of this act creates a parallel experience for the reader, who has the impression of a creative subjectivity behind the imperfect rendering. The utopian desire for this kind of subjectivity, free from commodification, is precisely what “Cathedral” allegorizes in this last scene. But how can such a recruitment of Iser’s “Reader” serve what I have interpreted as the story of a class-specific experience? After all, this undetermined reading act is a virtual experience of the kind of subjectivity that no longer seems possible in late capitalism, according to Jameson and the Frankfurt School before him: that of the autonomous subject with meaning and value-making capacities not limited by the political context, as meaning in Carver is often undetermined by the text. The narrator is allowed his few moments of sovereign darkness, and we too have the quiet space with which to supply our interpretation of whatever revelation has occurred (or not). This may seem like the ideological fantasy of independence entertained by the bourgeois subject that Adorno and others have so thoroughly problematized, yet it is at the same time utopian, albeit in an ahistorical sense. Carver’s narrator, like all postmodern subjects, can no longer have the autonomous experience he may wish to have and believe he is having. For Adorno, however, this kind of fantasy is constitutive of the artwork’s critical capacity: Fantasy is also, and essentially so, the unrestricted availability of potential solutions that crystallize within the artwork. It is lodged not only in what strikes one both as existing and as the residue of something existing, but perhaps even more in the transformation of the existing. (173-4) The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 32! We can locate this “transformation of the existing” in the story’s repurposing of a hegemonically determined setting as autonomous, creative space. The narrative’s provisional enactment of autonomy may be the only kind of utopia its characters—and we as readers—can access at all, a fictional critique of both the seeming inevitability of late capitalism and art’s collaboration with its operations. Moreover, our identification with what seems like the narrator’s own experience in “lack of symbolic closure” collapses the kind of readerly moralism Diane Stevenson practices in her objection to Cheerios. Both reader and narrator are determined by late capitalist productions, and in turn the dismissal of those productions functions as a utopian alternative in both the diegetic world and our own. Consolidating reader and characters may seem like a reinstallation of the bourgeois subject as ideal recipient and an erasure of the story’s class awareness. But such a move is either universalizing in Iser’s mode or utopian in the Benjaminian sense of recapturing a creative act that predates commodification. I locate the story’s most important moment of critique in the very simultaneity and undecidability of these two contingencies. They sustain the crepe-like thinness between utopian and ideological thought, a thinness essential to art’s critical functioning. As Adorno has described, art wishes to be utopian, “yet at the same time art may not be utopia in order not to betray it by providing semblance and consolation” (32). To avoid crystallizing into this static, self-satisfied utopia, a kind of fluctuation is required, between the ideology of empirical reality and the autonomy towards which the aesthetic necessarily, though problematically, strives: Artistic experience is brought of its own accord into movement by the contradiction that the constitutive immanence of the aesthetic sphere is at the same time the ideology that undermines it. Aesthetic experience must overstep itself. It traverses the antithetical extremes rather than settling peacefully into a spurious median between them. (349) In “Cathedral,” the moment when we might distinguish between the utopian and ideological intentions of the aesthetic is configured as blindness with a double valence; the narrator can literally close his eyes, remove the hegemonic narrative, even if these few moments are a delusion of autonomy. And this allows for brief tenderness with the only person he has encountered who can sidestep the hegemonic, through a disadvantage that ironically enables fledgling access to affective, social, and historical knowledge—the blind man, Robert. Moreover, the narrator’s experience with Robert generates a creative act parallel to the reader’s own interpretive co-authorship in Benjamin’s analysis. When Carver’s narrator closes his eyes in sympathy and concentration, the space of his home recedes to the point that he doesn’t feel like he is “inside anything”—itself an ahistorical, The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 35 Abstract Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” can be read as a story of a metaphorically blind narrator’s intimate and transformative interaction with a physically blind man, an interaction in which the narrator evolves from someone who“[doesn’t] believe in anything” into someone capable of finding meaning in life. By focusing attention on the parallel de-evolution of his wife’s engaged presence, this essay suggests that the couple inhabit a world of the dispossessed in which agency is a zero-sum game, and thus questions, in part through consideration of narrative distance and gender relations, whether the story can promise any lasting change. Keeping Our Eyes Closed: Unsustainable Transformation in Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” Madeleine Stein The arc of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” appears smooth and complete: a narrator warily and grumpily awaits the arrival of a blind man whom his wife has invited to dinner. He seems bent on getting through most of the evening by sharing a series of sardonic jokes with himself (“It’s one of our pastimes,” he says to the blind man after offering him a drink (216)), but his plans to remain disengaged are derailed when he is called on to describe a cathedral to the blind man. He takes a minute to absurdly consider if he could describe a cathedral even if his “life was being threatened by an insane guy who said [he] had to do it or else” and finally tells the blind man that it just “isn’t in [him] to do it” (226). He doesn’t have the words. But the blind man, who by now seems more divine messenger than guest, has an idea: they will draw one instead. And so they do, on an old paper shopping bag, with a ballpoint pen, the blind man’s hand resting on the narrator’s until, with his own eyes closed, he gets it. Throughout the story the narrator, even more unreliable to himself than to us, reveals his hopes and fears through the choreography of mundane actions and objects--his clueless search for a ball point pen, or an onion skin floating ominously at the bottom of the shopping bag. Determinedly anhedonic at the start, he experiences a moment of intimacy and freedom, maybe even joy, as he and the blind man draw. His last words to us are: “It’s really something”; as such the ending not only exemplifies but helps us to define epiphany. On initial reading, the narrator’s wife neatly provides a motivating counterpoint. Ten years earlier, on a different coast, she had worked as a reader for the blind man and stayed in touch with him through tapes. Early on, the husband turns aside from his own narrative to tell us the history of this friendship, and what clearly astounds him (but not us) the most is that on her last day on the job, the blind man touched her, tracing the shape of her face “—even her neck!” (210). Robert C. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 36 Clark suggests that the narrator, by dwelling on this detail of touch, is retrospectively recognizing that his wife “provided the impetus for the drawing scene…by demonstrating how engaging in a sensory exchange with another person can lead to profound understanding” (113). Thus the wife (and to the end she is known as “my wife”) is established as one whose sensibility is exactly that which escapes the husband. Unlike him, she is, in this reading, “actively involved in the process of living,” and finding meaning in her life, as Vanessa Hall suggests is typical of Carver’s female characters (60). To her ability to be intimate with another is quickly added emotional delicacy (her suicide attempt in the face of an unfeeling military establishment), her inclination to turn towards words for solace and escape (she tried to write a poem about the touch, as was her habit), and her ability to move outward into the world (she is at the outset, out of the house, gone to pick up her friend at the train) or what Kirk Nesset calls “her independent nature in general” (124) —all those exact attributes without which the narrator is trapped inside himself. All is in place, but, as with most rich literature, the story turns itself over with each reading to reveal more complications, and at a certain point what is revealed begins to undermine this neatness and even the reliability of the concepts of epiphany and transformation in reading this story. Does the narrator, in fact, undergo a change? That in this story the narrator has experienced something for the first time is made explicit: “It was like nothing else in my life up to now” (228). But, do all epiphanies—all realizations or revelations—by their nature bring about change? It seems likely that one of the oldest scenes of epiphany—that is, the Epiphany, the manifestation of Christ to the Magi—did bring about felt change. Like other religious revelations, what was revealed concerned our relationship to divinity, and, in a worldview that includes divinity, there is a story, an arc, and most importantly, the possibility of existence in a world made meaningful by its relation to another world. But that’s not Carver’s world. Carver writes from a world narrated by a man who says, “I guess I don’t believe in anything” (225), a world in which revelations/epiphanies, as powerless as those who experience them, occur simply as that—brief revelations, or glimpses, that not only do not in themselves last but do not necessarily impinge upon life as lived and perceived by an individual, because the world, as experienced by Carver’s narrator, is only a parallel, or even subordinate, world to an unspecified other world in which larger forces bring about change. In his world, even interior changes are tenuous and passing, no more capable of sustaining themselves in the face of external circumstances and pressure than the uplift after the first sip of Scotch. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 37 The nature of this world is made clear, and in some ways set, as if by contract, in the first sentence. The opening word of the story “this” (followed by “blind man,”) first induces our awareness of the narrator’s (and so our own, for already with this word he has established his occupation of ourselves, and his interest become ours) futility and absurdity. “This” (the more neutral version would be “a”) connotes not only his distrust of the world and his need to keep his distance but also his perception that his situation is a given, which, although as yet unspecified by him, has been specified somehow by a force larger than himself. This sense continues throughout the story, through the use of short passive sentences (“Arrangements were made” (209)) that say to the reader: you know what I mean, it’s all been written already, and his use of parentheses (later in the story, he sums up his responses to the blind man’s question in this fashion: “How long had I been in the present position? (Three years.) Did I like my work? (I didn’t.) Was I going to stay with it? (What were the options?)” (218))—parentheses that say: What else could I say; what else could be true? Do I have any choice? And, anyway, you know all this. How this particular nameless working-class white man, and maybe we, can continue to live with this inevitability, is then the question that carries us through to and beyond the end. That there is no explicit change recorded does not, of course, preclude the fact of a change. Robert C. Clark, in an exploration of the aesthetic of Carver’s minimalism, sees the story’s narrator as an example of a minimalist narrator who “objectively reports past sensory experiences” but cannot grasp their significance (104). Specifically, he notes that “time and distance have not granted [the narrator of “Cathedral”] the capacity to explain why he is different” (111). The change, the difference, this would imply, then manifests itself in the intervening time and space between the narrative and the reading. But has time, in fact, passed; has distance been covered? Clark would say yes, as this “oft-anthologized tale is a first-person retrospective narration, a crucial fact that most scholars tend to either miss or ignore” (108; emphasis mine). The narrator’s position, he articulates, is “one of remembrance; he is thinking back to a previous state of ‘self.’” While possible, maybe even probable, this is not the only reading, and there are others that free the narrative more from the present time of the reader, the one into which presumably time has passed. The fact that the narrative is recounted in the past tense may seem enough to support Clark’s claim and, according to Genette’s taxonomy, this fact is enough to make the narrative a subsequent narration (220) yet Genette, in his examination of subsequent narrating, recognizes that “one of the fictions of literary narrating—perhaps the most powerful one, because it passes unnoticed, so to speak—is that the narrating involves an instantaneous action, without a temporal The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 40 But in Robert’s presence, the exchanges begin to acquire a different tone, and it is in this sense that they provide counterpoint, one that undermines our, the reader’s sense, of the wife’s positioning as the healthy, wise, and agentic one. After the wife protests the train question, Robert answers and responds thoughtfully as if there was nothing odd at all about it. Because it turns out he does know which side he sits on, he does know the difference between color and black and white TV, and he probably would go bowling as quickly as he would try smoking a joint. (“Robert, I didn’t know you smoked,” the wife says. “I do now, my dear. There’s a first time for everything,” Robert says” (220).) And so, from this point onward, with each step, it is the wife, not the husband, who is excluded, shunted more and more to the edge of the conversation, until, in fact, drunk and a bit stoned, she falls asleep. The husband, at first a bit alarmed at being alone with the blind man and with us, distracts himself by playing the role of an oaf, telling us that his wife had, in falling asleep, exposed “a juicy thigh,” and that he had begun to draw her robe over it. But no sooner does he let out this ironic caricature of objectification than he thinks, “What the hell!”—the blind man can’t see— and flips the robe open again (221) in wry recognition at the absurdity of his ever gaining an edge in his world. What is noteworthy is that as she sleeps, the husband begins to awaken from what Hall refers to as Carver’ protagonists’ “inexplicable lethargy” (60). When the blind man asks him whether he minded if the blind man stayed up longer, the husband says, “I’m glad for the company.” (222) And then, as if coming upon himself from behind, he turns to us and adds, “And I guess I was,” as if he had come upon himself unawares, and was allowing himself to take note of something previously unknown. He also soon drops into his narration that he usually stayed up alone at night, smoking dope, as long as he could, because he “had these dreams” from which he’d wake, “[his] heart going crazy” (222), and then, after that intimate glimpse, he turns quickly back to the television. From then on his narration is taken up with his attempt to convey to the blind man what is on the TV, but in the middle, a strangely layered bit of narration occurs. He says to us, “Then something occurred to me, and I said, ‘Something has occurred to me. Do you have any idea what a cathedral is?’” (223). The phrasal repetition “something occurred”, a mocking authorial intrusion, or possibly a half conscious self-mocking intrusion on the part of the narrator, both amuses us and joins the moment of experience to that of narration, and, more significantly, suggests that in this The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 41 passage the narrator considers for the first time what it feels like to be someone else, considers that there are other ways of being. But still he can’t, it turns out, convey experience, even televisual experience, with just words. And so he and the blind man literally escape the new sofa and sit on the carpet in front of the coffee table, like children, to draw. As the narrator draws, the blind man closes his hand over the narrator’s (a healing hand, the same hand he once placed on the wife’s neck) and the reader watches, breath withheld, as if our hands, too, were on top of theirs. Rather than the narrator suggesting, as Clark has it, that his wife has provided the impetus for the drawing, the narrative’s staging suggests that she seems to have to disappear for the drawing to happen. Consistent with his reading, Clark also connects the wife with the narrator’s present interest in telling the story. “Carver,” he writes, “omits one of his speaker’s primary motivations for telling the story: he is indirectly admitting that he has a better understanding of his wife” (113). It is this understanding that he identifies as the “difference” the narrator cannot apprehend. Samira Sasani, focusing not on the story so much as on the narrative (217), goes further; not only does the narrator understand his wife, he is imbued with her sensibilities, in a process that Sasani describes as “the gradual transformation of the male narrator [of “Cathedral”] to the female narrator [that] happens when the narrator sees the blind man in his house” (221). Here she invokes Rebecca Warhol’s distinction between a “distancing” male narrator and an “engaging” female narrator, in which distance—and here Warhol too draws on Genette’s analysis of narrative discourse, is the distance between narrative and the story. The more intrusive narrator, by reminding us (through his or her presence) of the fictionality of the story, creates more distance. Sasani sums up Warhol’s distinction in this way: Generally speaking, a distancing narrator, as the name implies, discourages the actual reader from identifying themselves with the narratee, with the characters and in general with the story. The distancing narrator may evoke laughter or annoyance in an actual reader who do [sic] not like to identify with the narratee. The task of the engaging narrator, in contrast, is to evoke sympathy of an actual reader who is unknown to the author (218-19). With this theoretical approach established, Sasani then points out that the early narrator of “Cathedral” aims for “comical effect” (221), one that will allow him to retain a “manly” distance and to highlight the fictionality of the narrative and thus not engage the reader’s empathy. Later, Sasani says, “the more the narrator gets familiar with the blind man the more she employs engaging strategies” (221), using the pronoun “she” at this point to refer to the voice of the husband’s The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 42 narration. Thus, while in Clark’s reading the ending signifies that the husband reaches a new understanding of his wife, in Sasani’s the ending signifies that the narrator becomes capable of empathic narration. When the wife wakes, she finds the husband and the blind man, hand over hand, drawing a picture of a cathedral on an old shopping bag. She is unsettled and says, “What are you doing? Tell me, I want to know” (227). The narrator reports that he doesn’t answer and that Robert answers, “We’re drawing a cathedral. Me and him are working on it,” but turns right back to the husband: “Press hard.” Neither of them look at her, though the narrator notes her robe has fallen open, so she repeats, now directly challenging the blind man: “What are you doing?” “It’s all right,” he says, and then, without explanation, turns again to the husband: “Close your eyes now.” He does; he closes our only eyes, and she’s gone to us. The narrative continues to unfold, paced like love- making, until Carver has the narrator tell us: “It was like nothing else in my life up to now;” the words themselves sound like nothing else we’ve read in our lives up till now. “I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything,” the narrator tells us, before closing with what he says to the world: “It’s really something.” The issue of getting out, literally and metaphorically, is pressing throughout the story. But although the wife’s ability to move outward from the home (we know the narrator goes off to a job, but his parenthetical resigned responses to Robert’s questions about his work tell us that he does so in an even more numbed state than that with which he leads his life at home) suggests that the husband, counter to stereotypical gender roles, is confined to the domestic space, there really isn’t much of a domestic space, a space of home—or a safe haven—for either of them. Their common space is a vulnerable one. In the early paragraphs of the story the narrator tells us about his wife’s life before their marriage. “How do I know these things?” he feels compelled to ask us; “She told me,” he answers, as if telling one’s story is remarkable (210). She told him, for instance, and also told the blind man by means of the tapes she made, that “she loved her [first] husband but she didn’t like it where they lived and didn’t like the military industrial thing” and “got to feeling lonely and cut off from people she kept losing in that moving–around life” (211). She swallowed all her pills and got in the bath to die but instead, the narrator tells us, got sick. Why does the husband tell us specifically of her response to the military? In this detail that doesn’t enter otherwise into the story’s plot, what foreshadowing is Carver offering in this tightly resonant story? The story was written in 1981, the events related “ten years ago,” and when the narrator tells us that he has “these dreams” from which he awakes, “his heart beating like crazy” (222), the narration The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 45 Works Cited Carver, Raymond. “Cathedral.”Cathedral. New York: Vintage, 1984. Print. Clark, Robert C. “Keeping the reader in the house: American minimalism, literary impressionism, and Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral.’” Journal of Modern Literature 36.1 (2012): 104-118. Web. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. Tran. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 1980. Print. Hall, Vanessa. “Influences of Feminism and Class on Raymond Carver’s Short Stories.” The Raymond Carver Review 2 (Spring 2009): 54-80. Henningfeld, Diane Andrews. “Cathedral.” Short Stories for Students. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Literature Resource Center. Web. Nesset, Kirk. “Insularity and Self-Enlargement in Raymond Carver’s Cathedral.” Essays in Literature 21. (1994): 116-128.Humanities Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. Osborne, Sandra. “Re: Cathedral.” Message to the author. 21 July 2015. E-mail. Sasani, Samira. “Raymond Carver, Male and Female Interventions in ‘Cathedral.’” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 4.1 (January 2014): 217-223. Literature Online. Web. Warhol, Rebecca. Qtd. in Sasani. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! ! 46! Abstract Raymond Carver’s “Sixty Acres” is an early story, first published in 1969 and then included in his 1976 collection Will You Please be Quiet, Please? In this essay, Ann Olson examines the historical complexities of native versus immigrant relations. The story’s main character, Lee Waite, is a Yakama tribesman in the late 1950’s who re-experiences, on an absurdly smaller scale, what his ancestors lived through one hundred years earlier: a resolve to avoid further bloodshed and live in peace with white intrusion. Working against unspoken directives from his children, mother, and neighbors to kill the intruders on his land, Waite takes his gun, confronts young white duck-hunters, and—verging on the paternal in his forgiveness—lets them go. “Kill who?”: Forgiving the Immigrants in Raymond Carver’s “Sixty Acres” Ann Olson Americans have a long history of love-hate relationships involving immigrants. We regularly hear news of hate crimes like that of recently-executed Mark Stroman, the white-supremacist “Arab slayer” who, in imagined retaliation against the 9-11 terrorist attacks, shot three convenience store clerks in Dallas, killing two. All three of Stroman’s victims were South Asian Muslims—not one was Arab. Raisuddin Bhuiyan, a Bangladeshi immigrant, survived Stroman’s gunshot to the face. Working against the pattern of violence, Bhuiyan fought to save Stroman from Death Row. Bhuiyan even mounted a lawsuit against former Governor Rick Perry and the state of Texas— believing that the answer to violence against immigrants is not more killing. Bhuiyan believed that forgiveness and letting go are essential to reconciliation and the healing process (Giridharadas). A story with similar implications of violence, Raymond Carver’s “Sixty Acres,” explores the long and complicated history of native vs. immigrant relations through Lee Waite, a fictional Yakama Nation tribal member who is trying to live in peace with whites on reservation land. Waite confronts the descendants of immigrants who stand for the cause of all his troubles and, like Mark Stroman, he takes his gun with the threat to kill the intruders. Instead of violence, however, Waite opts for a fatherly forgiveness, yet that does not mean the story has a happy ending as the interstices of history and story demonstrate. A difference between the Texas incident and Carver’s story is the perception of who is native and who is immigrant. Stroman, based on his whiteness and American citizenship, assumes to be “native” American while othering immigrants of color. Waite, based on his aboriginal status and citizenship in a sovereign Indian nation, assumes his identity as “native” while perceiving Carver’s The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! ! 47! white duck hunters as immigrants. In each situation, the “natives” (both Stroman and Waite) see themselves as protectors of their native land. From the perspective of the youthful duck hunters, “native” (with its early and late historical connotations of savagery, etc.) is othered and disempowered while “whiteness” (with its early and later historical connotations of civilized) is empowered. From Waite’s perspective, on the other hand, he strives to retain his power of “native” connoting an original and spiritual relationship with his environment. Waite sees the duck hunters—the white immigrants—as the violent, destructive new-comers and usurpers. In the Texas incident and in Carver’s story, the white v. other and the native v. immigrant binaries shift claims, perceptions, and assumptions of power.1 These same binaries of power are the very stuff of Carver’s story as it incorporates past and present history of the Yakama Nation. “Sixty Acres” is a small-stage repetition of the broader, historical, European-immigration into the New World, specifically of the nineteenth century European-immigration into the Yakima Valley. What the story historicizes is the personal and communal psychological dynamic that is missing from the “history” of the 1855 treaty and which continued into the mid-twentieth century of Carver’s home place and, indeed, into the twenty-first century, as recent American-Indian protests againt the oil pipeline running through sacred Indian lands attest to. What happened between Mark Stroman and his immigrant victims, and what happens whenever a “native” population is forced to deal with a new wave of immigrants into an area, has all played out before in the United States. William Bradford, the first governor and committed historian of Plymouth Plantation, characterized the New World as a New Canaan, blatantly claiming that the land was granted to them by God.2 While there were some initial and lasting friendly relations between the English immigrants and the Indians, Bradford also chronicles several violent skirmishes, the most notable being the “War” with the Pequots, who by mid-nineteenth century were nearly exterminated.3 This ideology of God-given land evolved into the notion of “manifest destiny,” which fueled the westward expansion of the nineteenth century and the displacement of nearly all indigenous people east of the Mississippi River. North European immigrants (Mark Stroman’s ancestors ironically among them) stretched their presence and influence across the continent, killing Natives and confining them to reservations.4 When the settlers began reaching the Pacific Northwest, there were tribes who fought back. The Yakama, under Chief Kamiakin, led the would-be ancestors of Carver’s fictional character, Lee Waite, in armed resistance. Most battles between indigenous people The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! ! 50! boys, so his own children’s eagerness for killing reflects the historical reality of tribal loss through violence that Waite wants to avoid. The next and perhaps strongest appeal is from Waite’s usually unresponsive mother who is dozing in a chair by the heat; when he “glanced covertly” at her in Carveresque silent communication, “She squinted her eyes at him and nodded” (50). He could take the nod as a sign of her approval, but Waite can’t be sure what the nod means; in fact, “he didn’t know any more what her little signs and signals, her silences, were supposed to mean” (50). He speaks directly to her but she will not respond: “Waite looked at her for a minute and watched her tug at the ends of her braids, waited for her to say something. Then he grunted and crossed by in front of her, took his hat off a nail, and went out” (51). The final appeal is another stare and nod, which comes from fellow tribal member and neighbor, Charley Treadwell: He [Waite] remembered what Charley had told him a few days ago, about a fight Charley had had last Sunday with some kid who came over his fence in the afternoon and shot into a pond of ducks, right down by the barn. The ducks came in there every afternoon, Charley said. They trusted him, he said, as if that mattered. He’d run down from the barn where he was milking, waving his arms and shouting, and the kid had pointed the gun at him. If I could’ve just got that gun away from him, Charley had said, staring hard at Waite with his one good eye and nodding slowly. (51-52) The “If I could’ve . . .” phrase is left unfinished; Lee must infer Charley’s meaning from the hard stare and the slow nod, so similar to his mother’s silent signals. What Charley leaves unspoken is that he could have killed the intruder, could have taken the kid’s gun and shot him with it; after all, the kid had threatened him with the gun first, and on his own property. Waite’s mother’s nod and unspoken message to “do it” made him so uncomfortable that he had to leave the room, and his exchange with Charley also makes him uncomfortable as he “hitched a little in his seat. He did not want any trouble like that. He hoped whoever it was [poaching ducks] would be gone when he got there, like the other times” (52). Like Kamiakin before him, Lee Waite is tired of the burden of protecting the land and the life dependent upon it, and now there’s the added spoken, and therefore more powerful, burden of this idea that the ducks trusted them with their survival—“as if that mattered,” Lee thinks. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! ! 51! Waite seems to understand exactly what Charley means about the ducks’ trust, as it reminds them both of the ancient covenant with the Creator that has been nearly erased by time and circumstance, by the loss of the ceded lands, and by the fact that they and the ducks live in the shadow of Fort Simcoe that has made that trust nearly impossible to protect. Waite had just driven past the entrance to the Fort, hawking spit in disdain at the permanent symbol of tribal losses and white interests in the Treaty settlement. For the local Yakamas, the Fort is a symbolic gate blocking historical Yakama trails to Columbia River salmon and confining Indian life to the reservation. Chad Wriglesworth explains how Fort Simcoe represents complex layers of colonial oppression of the Indians: “Prior to white occupation, the land at Fort Simcoe was an indigenous seasonal camp near a trail that led to Celilo Falls, a salmon fishing site that was used by the Yakamas and other Mid- Columbia River Indians for at least ten thousand years” (“Stepping” 63). The US military built the fort to subdue the Yakamas in their wars against white incursion in 1855. It is no accident that Carver set “Sixty Acres” on Toppenish Creek just east of Fort Simcoe on or near the site of the October 5, 1855, Battle of Toppenish Creek, the first recorded conflict in the Yakima Wars 1855-58. Chief Kamiakin and his cousin won against U.S. Army Major Haller, driving the government soldiers from Indian homeland back to the Columbia River, killing eight and wounding seventeen. Tribal forces were later defeated on the west side of the Yakima River near present day Union Gap (Splawn 46-48). As a result, ever since the Tribe has been trying non-violent measures, under their Treaty rights, to protect the trust of the land, but always under the reminder of what Fort Simcoe means for them. After the Treaty, Fort Simcoe housed the boarding school which forced assimilation and acceptance of allotment farming that replaced the traditional hunting, fishing, and gathering. By 1955, the one-hundred-year anniversary of the Treaty and the approximate time of Carver’s story, Fort Simcoe had been designated as historically significant and preserved as a state museum, ironically, under a 99-year lease from the Yakama Nation. However, there is no fort or standing symbol to protect the Native American interests in the Treaty settlement. In Carver’s story, there is only Lee Waite, alone with this burden of his inheritance: “Waite was the one it came down to, all of it” (53). “All of it” is more than the 60 acres his father intended for his sons (of his three sons, Lee is the only survivor of dire reservation statistics): “all of it” seems to imply here the whole complicated, unjust history of Indian-White relations, and it makes Waite spit as he passes by the state monument to violence. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! ! 52! Waite, doing what his family and his tribe expect of him, confronts the Treaty-breakers and catches them red-handed with their game pockets stuffed with dead birds. Though they are only “kids,” they still stand as representatives of their great-grandfathers of Treaty times, and all their words and lies recall the nuances of the Treaty that felt like lies to Waite’s ancestors. When Waite asks, “How do I know you wasn’t here before?” One boy sobbed: “Word of honor, sir, we never been here before. . . . For godsake. . . . That’s the whole truth” (54-55).9 With all the negative connotations of historical lies that these phrases (“word of honor” and the “whole truth”) must hold for Waite, Carver shifts the atmosphere to reflect Waite’s growing anger: dark falls, rain drizzles, the drake who survives the massacre at the pond complains loudly, and the trees around them take on “awful shapes” (55). When the boys lie about their names, Bob Robertson and Bill Williams, Waite understands that they are young and scared, but still something in him, his reserve, snaps. He shocks himself with his own intensity, “You’re lying! . . . Why you lying to me? You come onto my land and shoot my ducks and then you lie like hell to me!” In anger, Waite points the shotgun directly at the boys; he even lays “the gun over the car door to steady the barrels.” Something about Joseph Eagle—perhaps the thought of how a violent confrontation with whites might affect the old man, alone and vulnerable “up there in his lighted house,” or perhaps the opposite thought of why should he bother with all this while Eagle sits with his feet up, listening to the radio?—causes Waite’s potential violence to pass, but it was very close because “his knees unaccountably began to shake.” He says, “Go ahead and go. Go on!” When the boy in the driver’s seat worries what will happen if he “can’t get this thing started,” Waite offers his help with fatherly exasperation, “I guess I’d have to push you out” (55). As he watches their taillights fade toward Toppenish, he considers: “He had put them off the land. That was all that mattered. Yet he could not understand why he felt something crucial had happened, a failure”(56). On Waite’s returning home, his wife tells him he did “right” to let them go. But he looks only at his mother, her “black eyes staring at him” as he experiences a kind of cultural déjà vu: “He tried to think about it, but already it seemed as if it had happened, whatever it was, long ago” (57). A legal “letting go” had happened nearly a century before, when Chief Kamiakin experienced firsthand what white “word of honor” could mean. In 1853 a transcontinental railroad survey team entered the Yakima River Valley, assuring Chief Kamiakin that “Americans had no interest in settling this grassland country,” that they only wanted to lease a right of way across Indian land. Isaac I. Stevens was the survey overseer and recently appointed Washington territorial governor, the one who would The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! ! 55! white control, and now the land whose future will go to some local hunting club as one of the only ways to serve Waite’s children. Waite is trying to do the right thing, to live in peace with all life on what is left of this sacred, Creator-intended land even if it means forgiving the ignorant and thoughtless, the self-entitled descendants of those first Treaty-bearing immigrants. Because the alternative—the unspoken answer to his mother’s “Kill who?”—was never a choice. 1 In Carver’s later story “Pastoral” we see a further shift in these same binaries when a white, middle- aged fisherman/hunter assumes the role of knightly protector/steward of the wildlife with his fishing rod as his lance. He confronts young white hooligans (newcomers from a temporary construction camp) who have shot a deer badly and then threaten the white “knight” with their guns. He fails to protect nature against these destructive new-immigrant intruders in a similar way to Lee Waite’s failure to save his ducks. 2 See Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, which covers the period from the “Pilgrims” leaving Leyden, Holland, and landing at Plymouth, Massachuesettes (1620), to the dissolution of the Plymouth Plantion during the 1640s (his history ending at 1648). 3 For detailed and extensive discussion of the ideology of early American colonization see Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (1978) and The Rites of Assent (1993). 4 Steven Olson summarizes this movement from 1780 to post Civil War, including land purchases, classification of frontier and settled lands, technological developments in transportation, land acts, and “Indian Removal” (pp. 4-6). For more complete discussions of these issues see Billington and Ridge, Westward Expansion, (passim and especially pp. 413-18, 591-610), and Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune, on land acquisition (pp. 61-84), Indian removal (85-118), and American land policy (137-54). 5 It is noteworthy that Me-ni-nock’s statement points out the shared cultural belief between European-immigrant claims and native claims of a supreme being’s deeding both people the same land. This shared belief, of course, is catalyst for opposition and continued disagreement. Consider Puritan claims of the “promised land” and nineteenth-century claims of Manifest Destiny, as noted ealier. 6 Another noteworthy and ironic instance of circulating discourses appears here. Woody’s statement asserts the present-day discourse that defines a positive unity or harmony between native and nature, a discourse that empowers the native and disempowers the white destroyers. Not discounting the value of this discourse nor the broadly accepted validity of Woody’s empowering statement, it is worth considering Shepard Krech’s The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. Krech convincingly presents evidence that the Noble Indian living in holistic harmony and unity with all of nature is a construction—one that is, in part at the very least, a product of Euro-American stereotyping-colonization. Krech quotes notable historian Richard White, who posits that such a construction “demeans Indians. It makes them seem simply like an animal species, and thus deprives them of their culture” (Krech 26). Krech himself claims that such a construction “distorts culture. It masks cultural diversity. It occludes its actual connection to the behavior it purports to explain. Moreover, because it has entered the realm of common sense and as received wisdom is perceived as a fundamental truth, it serves to deflect any desire to fathom or confront the evidence for relationships between Indians and the environment” (27). That is, in short, it dissolves interest in and dismisses the need for further, particular study. 7 Similar to the one described in the immediately preceeding note, another complication of the discourse is revealed here. A closer look into environmental history in the Pacific Northwest will tell a far more complex narrative, particularly regarding the preservation and use of salmon. Many tribes, now working in alliance with the federal government because they need employment, are engaged in activities that would be viewed as questionable by most environmentalists’ standards. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! ! 56! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I insist, however, despite these complications in the historical, fluid discourses, the dominant discourse—the most broadly accepted and therefore most powerful and arguably the presently real discourse, or truth--is the one expressed by the examples of Me-ni-nock and Woody, and as expressed in Carver’s story. 8 Here is yet another instance showing the complexity and depth of the cultural exchanges—the fluid, historical discourses—as they are incorporated in Carver’s story. What Waite sees here, but perhaps doesn’t fully recognize, is that the Yakama are by no means immune from America’s gun-culture leanings toward violence. Somewhere, Waite’s children have consumed the same narrative . . . despite being set apart on a reservation. 9 This passage reveals another aspect of the fluid discourses—the privileging of written over oral language. The boy pleads, not in terms of “written” testimony, but in terms of orality. The irony is, of course, that the boy pledges “honor” orally, implying the binding power of, the truthfulness of the spoken word in the native discourse, whereas the historical backdrop of this scene evokes the whole idea of treaty making and the colonizers’ demand for “written” documentation and Kamiakin’s response to the demand. The boys seem to perceive themselves as lacking power, ironically as natives in a sense. And ironically, Waite also feels like a traditional white land and order man. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! ! 57! Works Cited Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison, Wisconsin: U of Wisconsin P, 1978. Print. ---. The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Billington, Ray Allen, and Martin Ridge. Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier. 5th ed. New York: Macmillan, 1982. Print. Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation. 1620 and later. Available in various formats. Carver, Raymond. “Sixty Acres.” Raymond Carver: Collected Stories. Eds. William I. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll. New York: Library of America, 2009. Print. Fisher, Andrew H. “'This I Know from the Old People': Yakama Indian Treaty Rights as Oral Tradition.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 49.1 (1999): 2-17. Print. Giridharadas, Anand. The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014, Print. Krech, Shepard, III. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1999. Print. Olson, Steven. The Prairie in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry. Norman and London: U of Oklahoma P, 1994. Print. Pambrun, Andrew Dominique. Sixty Years on the Frontier in the Pacific Northwest. Fairfield, Washington: Ye Galleon Press, 1978. Print. Scheuerman, Richard D. and Michael O. Finley. Finding Kamiakin: The Life and Legacy of a Northwest Patriot. Pullman: Washington State UP, 2008. Print. Sklenicka, Carol. Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life. New York: Scribner, 2009. Print. Splawn, Andrew J. Ka-mi-akin, The Last Hero of the Yakimas. Portland: Kilham Stationery & Printing, 1917. Secretary of State, Legacy Washington. Web. 4 Nov. 2014. Retrieved from http://www.sos.wa.gov/legacy/publications_detail.aspx?p=24. U.S. Department of State. Treaty with the Yakimas. Camp Stevens, Walla-Walla Valley. Washington: GPO, 1855. Print. White, Richard. “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West. Norman and London: U of Oklahom P, 1991. Print. Woody, Elizabeth. “People of the River—People of the Salmon Wana Thlama—Nusuxmí Tanánma.” Water and People: Challenges at the Interface of Symbolic and Utilitarian Values. 2008. United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service. (General Technical Report PNW- GTR-729). 177-99. Web. 4 Nov. 2014. Retrieved from http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/pnw_gtr729.pdf Wriglesworth, Chad. “Stepping on the Yakama Reservation: Land and Water Rights in Raymond Carver’s ‘Sixty Acres.’” Western American Literature 45.1 (2010): 55-79. ---. “Trampling Kamiakin’s Gardens: The Legacy of Theodore Winthrop’s Stay at St. Joseph’s Mission.” Columbia 24.4 (Winter 2010-11): 30-35. Print. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 60! however, Myers shakes his head as if to to eject that “horrible” memory from his consciousness. In an act of escapism, Myers gazes out of the train, imagining himself living a life within the pleasant pastoral landscapes he sees, in which farm houses stand in the middle of farm fields. What these first contextual landscapes confirm is Myers’ escapist tendencies and his inability to live within his own reality. As such, as “Compartment” begins, readers are given a fictional character who lacks the personal character to make peace with his own negative pastoral. The memory of the father-son fight serves to escalate the underlying menace of the story. After the expensive watch that Myers bought as a reconciliation gift for his son is stolen, Myers becomes filled with anger. This current anger over the stolen watch calls up that anger Myers has had ever since he last saw his son eight years ago during their fight. Readers are shown Myers looking outside the slowing train as his anger is projected onto an urban landscape: Farming and grazing land had given over to industrial plants with unpronounceable names on the fronts of the buildings. The train began slowing. . . . He got up and took his suitcase down. He held it on his lap while he looked out the window at this hateful place. (398) During this time, Myers’ contextual pastoral changes. The pleasant pastoral rural landscape has been replaced by an unpleasant urban landscape of “industrial plants” that he views as a “hateful place.” This shift in the contextual pastoral initiates and enacts the negative pastoral as Myers’ perception of the pastoral landscape shifts with his rising anger as his internal landscape becomes negative; his bizarre passion becomes the lens through which he sees the world. Using the words “given over,” unpronounceable,” and “hateful” creates a sense of dark angering tension, and as the pace picks up in these few sentences even though the train is slowing to a stop, Carver’s narrative tone matches Myers’ internal landscape. Instead of describing what Myers is feeling and the landscape outside the train as opposite, Carver expertly utilizes the urban landscape to offer Myers an opportunity to confront his negative pastoral. Prior to pulling into the Strasbourg train station and having his son’s watch stolen, the contextual pastoral represented a stable place of escape. Yet the landscape no longer represents a sense of escape, but instead prompts a realization: It came to [Myers] that he didn’t want to see the boy after all. He was shocked by this realization and for a moment felt diminished by the meanness of it. He shook his head. In a life-time of foolish actions, this trip was possibly the most foolish thing he’d ever done. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 61! But the fact was, he really had no desire to see this boy whose behavior had long ago isolated him from Myers’s affections. He suddenly, and with great clarity, recalled the boy’s face when he had lunged that time, and a wave of bitterness passed over Myers. . . . Why on earth, Myers asked himself, would he come all this way to see someone he disliked? He didn’t want to shake the boy’s hand, the hand of his enemy. (398) It is not until the landscape outside reflects what Myers’ is struggling with that he is able to face his passionate enmity towards his son. The urban landscape serves as a reflection of the change Myers is undergoing. The urban setting represents everything Myers’ despises, and, interestingly, his son is settled in that urban landscape. Myers’ “realization” represents what David Boxer and Cassandra Phillips call “Carver’s chosen task”: “to convey through the most fitting language and symbols the special moments when these people have sudden, astonishing glimpses behind the curtain which separates their empty lives from chaos” (76). As well, it relates to Scofield’s argument because what exists behind the curtain of the contextual landscape of “The Compartment” is Myers’ complex bizarreness. As Myers’ gaze of the landscape outside the train’s compartment shifts to match his landscape behind the curtain, he “become[s a voyeur of his] own experience” (Boxer and Phillips 76). Pointedly, Boxer and Phillips redefine voyeurism in the context of actions by Carver’s characters: “voyeurism is used advisedly [. . .] to mean not just sexual spying, but the wistful identification with some distant, unattainable idea of self” (76). Myers’ realization arrives because he is a voyeur of his own life. Everything Myers gazes at is his form of taking action, for voyeurism is Myers’ way of internalizing his lived experiences. As he gazes out onto the urban landscape he identifies it with his true feelings about his son, while the rural landscapes highlight a disconnect within Myers which represents the “unattainable idea of self.” Boxer and Philllips use the term “dissociation” to describe the kind of disconnection seen in Carver’s characters, that is, as “a sense of disengagement from one’s own identity and life, a state of standing apart from whatever defines the self, or of being unselfed” (75). The urban landscape represents Myers true passions about his son. All previous pleasant pastoral landscapes represent Myers as “standing apart from” himself; for that reason, Myers daydreams of living within one of the old farming complexes surrounded by a wall. Myers has dissociated himself from himself and the thing that drove Myers to continue to dissociate his internal feelings about his son, and what caused him to take this trip in the first place, was the word “Love” in a letter he received from the “boy” several months previously [emphasis in the original] (Carver 395). Myers’ son ending the letter with The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 62! the word “Love” causes Myers to further mollify the repulsion he has for his son. Kirk Nesset discusses how Carver’s use of love is as “a darkly unknowable and irreversible force, a form of sickness not only complicating but dominating the lives of characters” (293). In “The Compartment,” Carver uses the word “love” to complicate Myers’ negative pastoral. Eventually, Myers sheds that dissociation, eventually confronting his enmity for his son that is reflected in an urban contextual landscape. This realization leads to Myers feeling at peace with himself, though in the bizarre way wherein passions become, according to Scofield’s concept of the negative pastoral, “twisted into strange and contorted expression.” When the train comes to a complete stop in the Strasbourg train station, Myers watches domestic behaviors taking place on the train platform. Ironically, these domestic behaviors appear to bring him peace even though they are the actions he avoids with his own son. This act of Myers finding peace in watching everyday events resembles what Carver termed “‘dis-ease’”: “‘a certain terrible kind of domesticity’” (Nesset 292). Even though this act of gazing out of his train’s compartment is a normal human behavior, it is actually dis-ease that results from the negative pastoral, for Myers finds these domestic behaviors as a bizarre balm that helps solidify his decision not to see his estranged son. Myers is not presented as a very loving father, for his relationship with his son is shown to include a physical altercation, distancing himself over time from his son, and then deciding not to meet his son despite arranging to do so. It is ironic, then, that Myers finds comfort in watching the very acts of others which he himself physically avoids: “These days he lived alone and had little to do with anybody outside of his work” (Carver 393). Interestingly, Nesset describes Carver’s writing as a road to recovery: “the road to recovery is part of the journey . . . the remedy for such dis-ease lies in its cause” (310). Therefore, “the remedy” for Myers is this urban landscape his son lives in, one in which a voyeuristic character who lives vicariously through what he sees uses an urban contextual landscape to bring about peace with his bizarre “dis-ease.” Furthermore, Myers’ watching the loving domestic behaviors on the train station highlights how the word “love” dissociated Myers from his diseasing “negative pastoral.” Carver had his own character read the letter without observing love-like behaviors in a contextual landscape. Since Myers is a voyeur of his life, his observing loving notions outside his train compartment helps confirm the love-like dissociation and push him towards a personal realization. In “Faces in the Mirror: Raymond Carver and the Intricacies of Looking,” Christof Decker identifies three types of gazes that Carver’s characters exhibit: “narcissistic, televisual, and The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 65! (L 19-24). In this poem Carver participates in a “cinematic gaze” and then articulates what he experiences, similar to what Myers does while gazing cinematically at the urban landscape of Strasbourg and the train station; however, reader are the ones left to articulate what Myers is embodying. After Myers has had his moment of clarity, which is not articulated but simply embodied, he scrunches down in his seat and voyeuristically gazes out at the cinema before him. This contextual landscape reflects Myers cinematic participation, experiencing a tranquil moment after coming to grips with the fact that he is a terrible domestic kind of father. By using landscapes to show the evolving movement towards Myers’ dis-easing passion, Carver gives the readers an embodied experience that is concurrently dark and beautiful; it is dark because Myers is abandoning his only child and taking away that chance of reconciliation—a potential healing, and beautiful because for the first time in the story Myers is at some sort of peace with himself. Decker writes “What the characters are looking at, how their look is qualified, and how it affects their (self-) knowledge becomes vitally important against the background of a pervasive feeling of speechlessness” (43). As mentioned earlier, Decker describes a crucial aspect of how Carver’s characters’ gaze “revolves around the issue of how the observer fits into the scene he or she is watching” (43). After realizing his dis-easing quality via the changing contextual landscapes, Carver has Myers internalizing happy and loving domestic behaviors from the people at the train station. This renders the reader speechless, and Myers speechless, because Myers’ realization represents both a terrible apprehension of what it means to be a distant and unloving father, and a bizarre feeling of peace. Myers accomplishes the act of deciding to not see his son without conversation. Many of Carver’s short stories demonstrate how language often falls short of being able to capture emotion, a trait often associated with minimalism. Bramlett and Raabe write that the unnamed narrator in Carver’s story “Intimacy” “seeks something beyond the power of language to convey emotion . . . ‘No ideas but in things’” (185). Such moments of conversation that take place in “The Compartment” are not even conversations, they are instead necessary statements of trying to get information, materials, greetings, pardons, and Myers attempting to find who stole his boy’s watch. Carver, as readers notice, uses various landscapes to bring out the emotive experiences of Myers throughout the story. Myers’ “speechlessness” is embodied and conveyed to and for the reader by how Carver uses the landscapes Myers gazes out upon; the things Myers looks at represent The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 66! everything he is trying to seek “beyond the power of language”: a reconciliation with his own “‘dis- ease’” that makes him who he is. It is not so much Myers seeking the love a parent has for their child nor the love of a lover, but rather an acceptance of one’s true self. Using a term from May’s “Chekhov and the Modern Short Story,” Carver “apprehends” Myers’ paternal failure and acceptance via the impressionistic landscapes and lack of conversations that exist in “The Compartment,” that is, “a basic impressionistic apprehension of reality itself as a function of perspectival point of view” (199). In the final scene where Myers has accidentally been “uncoupled” from his original train compartment and enters a completely different train compartment full of “small, dark-skinned men who spoke rapidly in a language Myers had never heard before,” he falls asleep (401). This is significant because sleep has been a struggle throughout the story for Myers. His mind will not let him fall asleep until he comes to some kind of mindfulness about the emotional situation in which he has put himself. When Myers does fall asleep, it demonstrates two things. First, this story is about Myers’ struggle to reconcile with his own “‘dis-ease’” as a father who is distant and unloving regarding his only child. Second, conversations cannot be the device that reveal this “bizarre” reconciliation for Myers because this struggle is “beyond the power of language” (Bramlett and Raabe 185); this seems evident from the ways in which “The men went on talking and laughing. Their voices came to him as if from a distance. Soon the voices became part of the train’s movements—and gradually Myers felt himself being carried then pulled back, into sleep” (Carver 401). This new train compartment’s landscape is a cinematic scene where Myers seems at peace with himself as a result of his engagement with the negative pastoral that exists in a space between his bizarre anger and a negotiated peacefulness. As well, it is no use for Myers to attempt to understand where he is headed because he cannot understand anybody and no one can understand him— conversation is mute. At this moment, where Myers is surrounded by unfamiliar people, languages, and train compartments, he is tentatively a grounded participant in a contextualized landscape. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 ! ! 67! Works Cited Boxer, David, and Cassandra Phillips. “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?: Voyeurism, Dissociation, and the Art of Raymond Carver.” Iowa Review 10.3 (1979): 75-90. Print. Bramlett, Frank, and David Raabe. “Redefining Intimacy: Carver and Conversation.” Narrative 12.2 (2004): 178-94. Print. Carver, Raymond. “Happiness.” Poetry 145.5 (1985): 251. Print. ---. “The Compartment.” Raymond Carver Collected Stories. Eds. Stull, William, L., and Maureen P. Carroll. New York: Library of America, 2009. 393-401. Print. Decker, Christof. “Faces in the Mirror: Raymond Carver and the Intricacies of Looking.” American Studies 49.1 (2004): 35-49. Print. Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print. May, Charles E. “Chekhov and the Modern Short Story.” The New Short Story Theories. Ed. Charles E. May. Athens: Ohio UP, 1994. 199-217.Print. ---.“‘Do You See What I’m Saying?’: The Inadequacy of Explanation and the Uses of Story in the Short Fiction of Raymond Carver” The Yearbook of English Studies 31 (2001): 39-49. Print. Nesset, Kirk. “‘This Word Love’: Sexual Politics and Silence in Early Raymond Carver.” American Literature 63.2 (1991): 292-313. Print. Scofield, Martin. “Negative Pastoral: The Art of Raymond Carver’s Stories.” The Cambridge Quarterly 23.3 (1994): 243-62. Print. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 60 realistic situations, people whose outwardly satisfactory lives leave them feeling unfulfilled and who live on the edge of some devastating discovery” (258).4 If the connection between Carver and Murakami is less apparent for English language readers, then in Japan, Murakami has undoubtedly had a big influence on how people experience Carver’s writing. He has translated all of Carver’s fiction, including his posthumous stories, and also published interviews and articles about him. And even though Murakami’s translations and fiction are distinct entities, there is clearly an intricate relationship between the two outputs. In May 1983, only a year after he had read Carver for the first time, Murakami published his first translation, Boku ga denwa o kakete iru baso [Where I’m Calling From and Other Stories], in the same month that he published his own first collection of short stories, Chugoku-yuki no suro boto [A Slow Boat To China]. This patterned continued for the early part of his career, demonstrating the close correlation between the two processes.5 The strong synergy is further emphasized by Murakami’s translation technique which is painstakingly meticulous, working word by word, so that his translation, in his opinion, personifies the deceased writer and conveys “the rhythm of his breathing, the warmth of his body, and the subtle wavering of his emotions” (Remembering Ray 131). Murakami refers to this process as “experiencing Raymond Carver”, a feeling so powerful that he claims he becomes one—“body and soul”—with Carver (131).6 While Carver is a central influence for Murakami, the development of his distinctive literary style has a broader base that just one man. Born in 1949, Murakami made a notable diversion from his ancestral past when he was young. It was possibly his proximity to Kobe and Osaka—two east-coast mercantile port cities—that began to shape his sensibility for Western culture. Discovering English language paperbacks in second-hand bookshops when he was a teenager, Murakami began to immerse himself in the fiction of Raymond Chandler, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Evidence of the influence of those American writers can be found in his first two novels Hear The Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973.7 Both novels found a small but committed audience among the young, postwar generation but conservative Japanese critics denigrated their explicit references to Western pop culture and condemned them as items for popular consumption (Miyoshi 234). It was not until 1982 when he published his third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase—significantly, the year he first encountered Carver’s fiction—that his writing reached a wider audience.8 The commercial success of the novel allowed Murakami the financial stability to immerse himself further in his writing. His fourth and fifth novels, Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and Norwegian Wood, bare the hallmarks of his early Americanized fiction, but also denote a shift towards the exposition of a clearer critical evaluation of the contemporary Japanese experience.9 The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 61 In Issue 1 of The Raymond Carver Review Brian Seemann offered a thought-provoking analysis of what he considered to be an existential connection between Carver and Murakami’s short fiction. While there is value in pursuing this line of enquiry—one that finds its precursor in the foundational Carver scholarship of David Boxer and Cassandra Phillips—it is the proposition of this article that Carver’s influence on Murakami resides most powerfully in the example or model which he set of how to negotiate, for better or worse, the complex and shifting socioeconomic foundations of the late-twentieth century. This new—and tentative— theory of influence is untethered to Bloomian psychoanalysis and more closely associated with contemporary academic discussions of aesthetic representations of late-capitalism.10 This article argues, therefore, that the process of reading and meeting Carver enabled Murakami to engage with, and think through, his own similar yet distinct socioeconomic experience. Murakami is, I propose, a good candidate for this influential model because he is not only clearly influenced by Carver but he is also consciously working within, and often against, the boundaries of late- capitalism. I will present my argument through a number of comparative close textual readings, position each in its relevant socioeconomic context, before judging the extent and limitation of Carver’s influence. Ultimately my readings suggest that Murakami’s acceptance of Carver’s influence rests in a corresponding desire to depict a pervasive societal humiliation and dislocation; one that is distinctly tied to each author’s experience of the mass-commodification of the labor market in America and Japan in the late-twentieth century. I will then conclude by suggesting that both writers attempt to map out an undogmattic spiritual solution, which, while offering some release from the pressures of late-capitalism, ultimately fails to provide a wholly successful resolution. : : In what has become the prescient account of the socioeconomic transformation that occurred in the late-twentieth century, the anthropologist David Harvey declares that working life in America was marked by the inability of the hegemonic Fordist system to contain the inherent contradictions of capitalism (141-42). The Fordist principles that had dominated since the early 1900s, designed on the premise of the mass production and mass consumption of goods, led to a postwar boom and eventual market saturation. As a result, the long-term, large-scale fixed capital investments that had proved stable in the past became increasingly profitless. The labor force, instead of adapting to new markets, became rigid—reallocation was problematic—and any attempt to overcome these rigidities were opposed by the immovable force of working class power. Unable to maintain the compromise, the capitalist system shifted, as Harvey describes, to a system of flexible accumulation.11 Resting not on the premise of rigidity but flux, this new The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 62 system was designed to promote flexibility in labour markets, labour processes and consumption. As a result those attempting to achieve socioeconomic prosperity through a Fordist mentality of constant work and consumption were blocked by a system designed to directly confront the rigidity of the Fordist narrative.12 Instead of long-term narratives, which offered delayed gratification, institutions began to focus on short-term plans and short-term goals. Thus in a perverse paradox, despite rising economic expectations, many Americans did not see an increase in long-term personal prosperity. In order to prevent an economic slowdown a debt economy was introduced, and credit became easily available. The result, as Richard Sennett notes, was that the economy promoted an attitude of quick profit, which left large groups of middle-Americans feeling like their lives (that is, their long-term plans of socioeconomic prosperity) had been cast adrift, and the lack of long-term occupational future destroyed the hopes of attaining their American Dream (7). : : Growing up in the postwar period, Carver felt the effect of this transition. Writing about his experience in “Fires”, an essay published in 1982, he recalls—in a moment uncannily reminiscent of Harvey’s description of the failed Fordist narrative—when he realized that his long-term plans for economic and social mobility were little more than fantasies, “We had great dreams, my wife and I. We thought we could bow our necks, work very hard, and do all that we had set out hearts to do. But we were mistaken” (31). Carver never fully reveals what their “great dreams” were—although we can surmise they involved education, movement out of the working class and a successful writing career—but the Carvers’ ressentiment fails to account for a reality beyond their control. Critic Ben Harker helpfully unpacks this when he suggests that: They [the Carvers] invested in the hegemonic narratives of contemporary consumer society—working hard, loyalty, trying to advance themselves through education, doing the right things. But the socioeconomic world inflicted experiences—bankruptcy, unemployment, and working hard and getting nowhere—about which these hegemonic narratives had little or nothing to say (720). One need only spend a short time studying Carver’s early life to find a number of pertinent examples to illustrate this. Most applicable for our discussion is the account of their first bankruptcy in 1967. Carver, who had just completed his university education at Humboldt State, was honing his writing while working a variety of low-paid jobs, most notably as a night janitor at a local hospital. His wife, Maryann, on the other hand, was beginning to earn a reputable salary as a saleswoman. Still, despite a level of financial security, Carver found a number of outstanding debts—mainly college loans and credit cards—to be a daily burden. After meeting a The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 65 attempt at a cultural education before they buy the obligatory consumer capitalist appliances and luxury goods that denote graduation to middle-America. Their compulsive spending reflects the consumer zeitgeist described by Sennett: In using things we use them up. Our desire for a dress may be ardent, but a few days after we actually buy and wear it, the garment arouses us less. Here the imagination is strongest in anticipation, grows ever weaker through use (137-38). For Leo and Toni the initial freedom offered by an expendable income in consumer-capitalist America mutates into a consuming addiction. The convertible is a significant symbol in this regard.16 Its symbolism is concomitant with Gareth Cornwall’s notion that Carver’s characters have “no limit to the range and scale of their desire” and therefore presents a defining paradox for Toni and Leo (346). One might expect the acquisition of their most notable consumer item, the convertible (the sky’s the limit), to be the catalyst to release them from the confines of their working poor life, but instead, it becomes a prison of consuming addiction. Consequently it is that addiction and the impending humiliation of bankruptcy that leads to the collapse of their upward economic and social mobility. For Leo and Toni hard work and consumption does not lead to the acquisition of long-term socioeconomic dreams. The sky is not the limit. Instead they are caught in the dark-side of America, where, just like Carver’s experience in real life, hegemonic narratives are undermined by a capitalist society in transition.17 : : The effect of Carver’s literary response to his socioeconomic situation on Murakami’s own fiction can only be understood with clarity by placing it within the context of the social and cultural crises that Murakami’s fiction depicts in late-twentieth century Japan. Prior to the dramatic socioeconomic changes after 1955, Japanese life was defined by the humiliating defeat in the Pacific War, the Emperor’s surrender and the subsequent military occupation by the U.S. The level of poverty in immediate postwar Japan was high, but advances in industrial technology and procurement orders from the U.S. military during the Korean War ignited economic recovery. From 1955 onwards, consumption of traditional necessities declined as the country began to adopt more Western ideals, most notably increasing expenditure on leisure, education and financial investments (Takafusa 322). This coincided with Prime Minister Ikeda’s income- doubling plan in 1960 which began a period of huge economic growth. In an effort to improve exports many companies moved towards the Pacific coast causing significant migration. In Murakami’s home region, Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe, for example, the population increased by 62% (Takafusa 379). The movement towards the Pacific was significant in a cultural sense, too, as television ownership increased and imported American films and television programs began to The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 66 have an impact. The media became American-centred—the material and social success of the postwar period in the U.S. became an emulative model—and depictions of American families surrounded by consumer goods had a powerful impact on the Japanese mind-set. Marilyn Ivy recognises that “The middle-class ‘American way of life’ became the utopian goal and the dream of many Japanese in the 1950s”, a goal tied to the classic American (even Fordist) conviction that unflagging hard work is the basis for commodity acquisition (249). Crucially this positive impression was passed on to the postwar generation, “‘When I was in my teens in the sixties,’ Murakami recalls, ‘America was so big. Everything was shiny and bright’” (Kelts 38). The specific boom period between 1966 and 1970, known as the Izanagi Boom, paved the way for a swift change in lifestyle priorities for the Japanese people in two distinct ways. Those who were older, who were tied to corporate infrastructure and could remember Japan’s immediate postwar poverty, embraced their new prosperity with vigour. They became intensely proud of their achievements, and began to enjoy their gains in an increasingly materialist society. Commodities such as electrical appliances and cars became common among the masses. If the “American way of life” was their goal then they were certainly coming close to achieving it. The postwar generation however, like Murakami himself, had a different attitude to Japan’s rise. Many of them, embedded in Japanese universities, began to harness a particularly strong grievance against the established priority given to the economy and industry, which they viewed as leading to an excessive level of corporate control on individuals.18 This came to a head in 1968 with widespread rioting at the universities.19 Writing two decades after the event, Murakami’s novel, Norwegian Wood, gives a fictional account of the riots. His farcical descriptions undermine the protester’s attempt at revolution. The novel’s protagonist, Toru Watanabe, unimpressed with their propaganda, claims that “The true enemy of this bunch was not State Power but Lack of Imagination” (75). The novel’s mocking tone belies the fact that Murakami initially became involved in the riots. However, he came to view the political organizations that erected barricades and pursued a violent agenda as hypocritical. When the police were called in to break up the students the revolutionaries gave in easily and the Establishment claimed victory. After almost a year of closures, universities began to reopen and the majority of students came back the following semester. Those who had once thrown rocks and handed out propaganda were now studiously taking notes in lectures preparing for life in Japanese society. “The mood of excitement and idealism collapsed”, Rubin writes, “leaving in its wake a terrible sense of boredom and politeness” (23). Talking in an interview with Larry McCaffery a number of years later, Murakami summed up the events of his youth in this way: The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 67 I belong to a generation of Japanese people who grew up during the counterculture era and the revolutionary uprisings of 1968, 1969, and 1970. The Japan when I was a child was poor, and everybody worked hard and was optimistic that things were getting better. But they are not. When we were kids, we were a poor country but very idealist. That began to change in the sixties; some people just got rich and forgot their ideals, while other people struggled to save idealism […] Then, very quickly, all that simply disappeared. The uprisings were all crushed by the cops and the mood became bleak. The whole sense of the counterculture rebellion seemed finished (117). It is this sense of humiliation before the hegemonic narrative of Japanese life that Murakami is responding to in much of his fiction. Like Carver’s bleak depiction of the ubiquitous humiliation of middle-Americans caught in a world where full time work is in decline and low paid, irregular work is increasing, Murakami’s portrayal of the boredom and politeness of corporate work and consumption in post-1970s Japan represents a national sentiment. It is a feeling that is still so pervasive that Rubin recognises that Murakami’s fiction continues to “attract readers too young to have experienced the events themselves, but who respond to the lament for a missing ‘something’ in their lives” (29). The crux of Murakami’s fiction is often found when characters, distracted by corporate conformity or a consumerist mentality—a way of life that Murakami clearly depicts as an unfit antidote for the prevalent malaise in late-twentieth century Japan— realise they are still suffering from the debilitating burden of post-1970s humiliation. For, in Murakami’s fiction of the 1980s we frequently meet characters who are awkwardly and painfully caught between the failed idealism of the 1960s and the materialism of the 1970s and 1980s. The resulting sense of humiliation as characters reflect on their lost idealism echoes the kinds of humiliation suffered in Carver’s America. : : Boku, the narrator of Murakami’s story “The Second Bakery Attack”, is typical of a character struggling to come to terms with a post-1970s humiliation.20 One night he wakes up suffering from “tremendous overpowering hunger pangs” (36). Sitting at the kitchen table with his wife he reveals that he suffered a similar feeling when he was caught up in the anti-establishment riots as a student. His resistance to corporate infrastructure was so firm at the time that he refused to get a job even to buy food. So, in order to eat he and a friend decided to rob a bakery. The foolishness of their plan is underlined when their violence is deflated by a baker who offers no physical resistance, and instead gives them free bread on the condition that they sit and listen to an album of Wagner overtures. The students decide to accept the offer because it was not work “in the purest sense of the word” (40). When Boku’s chosen form of escape—violence—gives The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 70 Carver cause rushed to the archives to invalidate the journalist’s spurious claims, only to be disappointed and find that, yes, it seemed Lish had played an important role in shaping the Carver aesthetic. The “Evolution Theory” was disproved. His early writing was as “generous” as his late writing. A move soon followed to establish and publish Carver’s original manuscripts, thus preserving the purity of the Carver canon. William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll completed Beginners, the original and unedited text of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in 2007.22 The situation regarding Lish is complicated by Carver’s lack of denial concerning Lish as a negative influence. In fact, more often than not, despite their fractious relationship, he tended to present a positive front and praise Lish for his editorial involvement—or at least for giving him the opportunity to begin his career.23 His death, ten years before D. T. Max’s article, and Lish’s continued reticence additionally obscures any attempt that scholars might have at full clarity of the situation. A second factor further obfuscates the issue: Carver’s relationship with Tess Gallagher. It seems to be no accident that Carver’s publication of longer, generally positive and more expositional stories coincides with the reduction of Lish’s editorial control and the development of his relationship with Gallagher. The critic Chad Wriglesworth is convinced that Carver’s relationship with Gallagher “remains the most significant influence on his spiritual and relational recovery” (149). Evidence of this abounds, Wriglesworth claims, not only in Carver’s latter fiction and poetry, but also his non-fiction prose. He offers Carver’s final piece of writing, a short essay written for the University of Hartford’s 1988 graduation ceremony at which he was due to receive an honorary doctorate, as an apposite example. Carol Sklenicka reinforces Wriglesworth’s claim when she notes a strong undertone of Gallagher’s vision in the text, “the Hartford speech moves in a rhythm that sounds more like Gallagher’s than Carver’s”, although she does concede that “there’s a definite Carver touch in his valedictory paragraphs” (469). The address echoes a belief that Carver claimed to hold in the sacred toward the end of his life and turns on a phrase he borrows from Saint Teresa, “Words lead to deeds…. They prepare the soul make it ready, and move it to tenderness” (123). Carver moves on to describe phrase as being “mystical” and focuses particularly on the words “soul” and “tenderness”, finally exhorting his audience to “remember that words, the right and true words, can have the power of deeds” (125). Such power comes, in the speech’s own admission, from a spiritual place, especially in a time “less openly supportive of the important connection between what we say and what we do” (123), a sentiment that, since Carver’s death, Gallagher has placed as a template for Carver’s second-life recovery: The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 71 [Carver] never heaped credit upon himself for having overcome his illness. He knew it was a matter of grace, of having put his trust in what AA identifies as a “higher power”, and of having miraculously been given the will to turn all temptation to drink aside (199). While it is easy to be sympathetic towards the argument that Carver’s post-alcoholic life and work evinces a spiritual recovery—although, Wriglesworth is quick to point out, that it is a spirituality “not bound by orthodox creed or specific doctrine” (133)—it does seem that balancing this spiritual solution with the material, socioeconomic diagonosis found in his earlier fiction, is rather problematic.24 Even leaving aside Lish’s role in shaping Carver’s aesthetic, the posthumous publications that Gallagher has commissioned—Call If You Need Me, Carver Country, Soul Barnacles, A New Path To The Waterfall—with their overt spiritual content, seems to lead towards a curious, and partisan, veneration of Carver’s name. Gallagher concludes her foreword to Call If You Need Me, for example, by asserting that Carver’s writing holds an almost scriptural property, one that “we can dip into at any point and find something to refresh and sustain us” (xv). Again, when considered against the intensely materialist world of Carver’s fiction, Gallagher’s remarks seem to obscure as much as they illuminate. One wonders if whether, for good or ill, this new narrative is motivated in large part by an attempt to usurp an older and more established view of Carver’s life and canon and present a new spiritualism that denies—or rather, forgives—his minimalist persona or his personal, wilful involvement in the actions of his first-life. It may be associated with the acrimonious break-up of Carver’s first marriage, or with the negativity associated with his “Running Dog” alcoholism—the abusive relationships, the infidelities, and the defrauding—but one is apt to point out—for the sake of balance, for we all admire Carver’s work—that the image that Gallagher has attempted to preserve since Carver’s death subtly denies the sin of his first-life. Her rhetoric promotes a redeemed view of Carver—a recipient of a kind of literary salvation—that fails to accept broader socioeconomic factors— financial circumstances, relationships and Carver’s own will power—that might have contributed to his recovery. Whether or not we choose to accept or deny what Wriglesworth calls a “manifestation of a sacred reality” in Carver’s second-life fiction (139), it is interesting to note that Murakami’s more recent publications offer a correlative proposition to the idea that words have the power to provoke actions of tenderness and spirituality. This idea is very much part of his answer to the postwar obsession with corporate identity and materialism and post-1970s malaise. Perhaps unsurprisingly too, Murakami’s move to a clearer critical response is marked—much like Carver’s—by a profound real-life experience.25 In 1995 catastrophe hit Japan twice in the space of three months. In January an earthquake struck Murakami’s home city of Kobe and killed over The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 72 6,000 people and in March the cult Aum Shinrikyo dropped multiple bags of sarin gas on the Tokyo subway and killed 12 people and injured over 1,000. Pulling the events together, Murakami viewed both disasters as wake-up calls to the mindless corporate conformity or excessive materialism that had dogged Japan since the 1970s. In Underground, a non-fiction account of the Tokyo gas attack, he explicitly highlights what he sees as the problem for Japanese society at large. Writing with a rhetoric which curiously reflects Carver’s phrase “words lead to deeds”, Murakami calls for “words coming from another direction, new words for a new narrative” that will have the power to “purify the [old] narrative” of mindless conformity to work and consumption (197). : : Murakami’s call is mirrored in the fiction that he produces after these two events. Set in February 1995, the month between the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo gas attack, his story collection after the quake documents how the natural earthquake acts as a wake-up call for characters caught in the net of post-1970s malaise. The severe hangover that Yoshiya, the protagonist of “All God’s Children Can Dance”, is suffering from is surely the physical symptom of what Murakami sees as an increasingly “spiritual” void amongst the young, post-postwar generation.26 Attempting to regain some kind of semblance after a hedonistic night, Yoshiya epitomises the addiction to hyper-consumerism in post-1970s Japan. Suffering too from a spiritual void, he elicits a plea to the heavens, “Please, God, never let this happen to me again” (43), a cry, which we suspect is uttered more in despair than in genuine petition. Yoshiya’s mother, who he still lives with, conducts a hypocritical life. On the one hand a devout member of a Christian cult, she holds to the purity of a works-based religion, and on the other succumbs to the depravity of her sexual desires for her own son. With the perverse, organised religion of his mother offering no real alternative to his hyper-consumerism, Yoshiya embarks on a series of alternative sexual experiences, but these also fail to remedy the void of his spiritual nature. Claiming that Yoshiya has no biological father—an ideology proffered by her cult—his mother one day describes a string of sexual experiences she had with an obstetrician before his birth. Spotting a man on the train that matches the obstetrician’s description the day of his severe hangover, Yoshiya begins to trail him. When he alights he follows him in a taxi before pursuing him on foot and losing him in a series of dark alleys. Left in a void of blindness and silence, Yoshiya’s quest represents a broader search for meaning in 1990s Japan: What was I hoping to gain from this? he asked himself as he strode ahead. Was I trying to confirm the ties that make it possible for me to exist here and now? Was I hoping to The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 75 For more on the stylistic similarities between the two writers see Naomi Matsuoka’s excellent article in which she argues that Murakami bases his representation of the quotidian on the “subtle but realistic and humanistic depiction of life [in] Raymond Carver” (425 5 From the mid-1980s to the year 2000, Murakami published the following translations of Carver’s fiction (publication dates given in parentheses after the title): Boku ga denwa o kakete iru baso [Where I’m Calling From] (1983), Yoru ni naru to sake wa … [At Night The Salmon Move] (1985), Sasayaka da keredo, yaku ni tatsu koto [A Small, Good Thing and Other Stories] (1989), Carver’s Dozen: Reimondo Kava kessakusen [A Dozen of Raymond Carver’s Best Stories] (1994), the eight volume Reimondo Kava zenshu [Complete Works of Raymond Carver] (1990-7) and finally Carver’s posthumous collection Hitsuyo ni nattara denwa o kakete [Call If You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose] (2000). Note, the dates of Murakami’s own story collections in the same period: Chugoku-yuki no soro boto [A Slow Boat To China] (1983), Kangaru-biyori [A Perfect Day For Kangaroos] (1983), Hotaru, Naya o yaku, sono-ta no tanpen [Firefly, Barn Burning and Other Stories] (1984), Kaiten mokuba no deddo hiito [Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round] (1985), Pan’ya saishugeki [The Second Bakery Attack] (1986), TV Piipuru [TV People] (1990), Murakami Haruki zensakuhin 1979-89 [Murakami’s Collected Stories 1979- 89] (1990-1), Rekishinton no yurei [The Lexington Ghost] (1996), and Kami no kodomotachi wa mina odoru [after the quake] (2000). 6 Jay Rubin supports this idea. At a symposium on Murakami’s fiction at the University of Berkeley in 2008, Rubin, in response to a question about Murakami’s translation technique said, “I remember reading a Raymond Carver story twice in one day—once in English, once in Japanese—and it was like reading the same thing twice.” 7 While both novels were published in 1979 and 1980 in Japan, they were only published for the first time in the U.S. and the U.K. in English translation in 2015. 8 A Wild Sheep Chase sold 50,000 copies in Japan in its first six months of publication (Rubin 96), and while I am keen not to equate sales figures with literary merit, it is worth emphasising the large readership that Murakami’s fiction had in Japan, even at this very early stage of his career. 9 Norwegian Wood, for instance, depicts the social turmoil of the 1960s and has also been viewed by many critics as mirroring Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. 10 While I may not subscribe to all of the arguments posited in Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge’s Reading Capitalist Realism, their recent publication presents a useful compilation of approaches to the question of the relationship between social context and cultural production. 11 For a more in-depth account see Part II of Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, “The Political-Economic Transformation of Late-Twentieth Century Capitalism” (121-197). 12 As a brief example, take the restructuring of labor contracts in the 1970s and 1980s, which moved work arrangements away from regular employment to part-time, temporary or sub-contracted agreements. These shifts in labor had their most profound effect on middle-America. In her account of the period, Katherine S. Newman argues that 1985, a year when 600,000 white-collar management jobs were dissolved, was exemplarily of the situation (34). Much of these shifts can be traced back to the breakdown of the Bretton Woods currency agreement in the early 1970s, which appeared to weaken national constraints on investing and resulted in a period of economic instability. In this period, the ethnographer Richard Sennett argues that “corporations reconfigured themselves to meet a new international clientele of investors—investors more intent on short-term profits in share prices than on long-term profits in dividends” (6-7). 13 Interestingly, at the time, Carver showed little sign of humiliation in going through the bankruptcy process. The final couplet of his poem “Bankruptcy”, “Today, my heart, like the front door, / stands open for the first time in months” (All Of Us 8), reveals a certain level of relief; a chance at a fresh start. It is only later, as we shall come to see, that his writing starts to register the humiliation of the situation. 14 Note that it is not the occupations that were demeaning, Carver’s emphathetical tone makes that clear. These are jobs that any American might hold, and which Carver, as he documented in “Fires”, did at one time (35). Later, in an interview with Bruce Webber, Carver claimed that “the country is filled with these people. They’re good people. People doing the best they could” (92). 15 The story was first published in 1972 as “What Is It?” in Esquire. 16 To illustrate this kind of consuming purchase Sennett uses the example of an iPod whose “commercial appeal consists precisely in having more [memory] than a person could every use.” The car that Leo and Toni buy therefore reflects this desire. “Buying a little iPod similarly promises to expand one’s capabilities,” and here is the crux, apt to the point of cliché, “As the salesman who flogged my iPod said, without any embarrassment, ‘The sky’s the limit’” (153-54). The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 76 17 The symbolism of the story is made even more pertinent when considered in the context of the Carvers’ first bankruptcy, for they too had recently bought a convertible on Maryanne’s salary and were forced to sell it during the bankruptcy. 18 Chie Nakane describes the situation in her anthropological study of Japanese life in the twentieth century. “The point where group or public life ends and where private life begins no longer can be distinguished” she explains. Continuing, and in reference to the average worker in late-twentieth century Japan, she states: Their sphere of living is usually concentrated solely within the village community or the place of work […] The provision of company housing, a regular practice among Japan’s leading enterprises, is a good case in point […] In such circumstances employees’ wives come into contact with and are well informed about their husbands’ activities. This, even in terms of physical arrangements, a company with its employees and their families forms a distinct social group […] With group-consciousness so highly developed there is almost no social life outside the particular group on which an individual’s major economic life depends. The individual’s every problem must be solved within this frame (10). 19 There are clear parallels between the student movement in Japan and the New Left in America in the 1960s. Richard Sennett’s opening lines to The Culture of New Capitalism—which describe life in America—uncannily echo the sentiments of the Japanese student movement, “Half a century ago, in the 1960s—that fabled era of free sex and free access to drugs—serious young radicals took aim at institutions, in particular big corporations and big government, whose size, complexity, and rigidity seemed to hold individuals in an iron grip” (1). 20 Boku is the Japanese word for the “I” that Murakami chooses to narrate the majority of his short stories. It positions Murakami’s short stories in a line, as Rubin elucidates, of traditional Japanese “I-novels” (37). 21 The scene is reminiscent of another Murakami story, “A Slow Boat To China”, in which the narrator describes Tokyo as a place full of dirty facades, nameless crowds, unremitting noise, packed trains, grey skies, billboards on every square centimetre of space, hopes and resignations; and the crux, ‘everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero’ (238). The weak ideology of 1960s Japan, and post-1970s conformity, brings with it hopes but more pertinently, resignations; a parallel of the humiliation of lost Fordist narrative in Carver’s fiction. 22 Beginners was first published in Japan in 2007, of course, translated by Murakami. 23 In “Fires”, writing only months after Lish had severely cut What We Talk About, Carver writes that Lish was one of two individuals who held irredeemable notes of influence on his work (39). A fact that is almost impossible to contest, but one stated, I think, with a note of positivity. 24 For further critical writing on spirituality and religion in Carver, see articles written by Edward Duffy, Steve Mirarchi, Kathleen Westfall Shute, as well as William L. Stull’s “Beyond Hopelessville”. 25 One of Murakami’s English translators, Philip Gabriel, argues that 1995 marks a significant turning point in Murakami’s fiction, as his fiction began to show the “beginnings of a serious critique of contemporary Japan” (89). 26 The idea of a spiritual void amongst the post-postwar generation is mirrored in many of the stories in the collection. In the first story, “UFO in Kushiro”, for instance, the protagonist, Komura, is asked to deliver a mysterious box by a colleague to Hokkaido, an island in the far north of the Japanese archipelago. The transportation and delivery of the box becomes, as Jonathan Boulter recognises, “a portentous emblem, a physical object correlative to Komura’s own emptiness” (87). After delivering the package, and gaining some insight into the significance of his actions, Komura nearly commits a violent act with a woman at a love hotel. The combination of tropes appears to align with the “wake-up” call presented by the natural earthquake, and the potential danger of filling the “void” with, what Murakami sees, as a kind of inner-darkness, as seen in the cult gas attack. 27 While it is my contention that the thematic similarity between Carver and Murakami did indeed contribute to Carver’s success in Japan, it is surely apparent that the commercial success of Murakami’s own fiction in the 1980s contributed to the commercial success of his translations of Carver. In a letter dated 12 September 1986, Murakami informs Carver that his most recent translation had just been released in paperback and was “selling well’”. That particular translation was no doubt aided by the success of Murakami’s 1985 novel Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, which won the prestigious Tanizaki Literary Prize in Japan. The Raymond Carver Review 5/6 77 Works Cited Adelman, Bob. Carver Country. 1991. New York: Quantuck Lane, 2013. Print. Anderson, Sam. “The Fierce Imagination of Haruki Murakami.” New York Times Magazine 21 Oct. 2011. Web. 3 Aug. 2014. Boulter, Jonathan. Melancholy and the Archive: Trauma, History and Memory in the Contemporary Novel. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Print. Boxer, David and Cassandra Phillips. “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Voyeurism, Disassociation, and the Art of Raymond Carver.” Iowa Review 10.3 (1979): 75-90. Print. Campbell, Ewing. Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992. Print. 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