“My wife is in the habit of telling me her dreams when she wakes up. I take her some coffee and juice and sit in a chair beside the bed while she wakes up and moves her hair away from her face. She has the look that people waking up have, but she also has this look in her eyes of returning from somewhere.”
- Raymond Carver, “Dreams”
Perhaps nothing represents the contemporary perception of Raymond Carver’s anthological body of short stories better than the author’s own autobiographically introspective statement from his 1983 essay, “The Art of Fiction LXXVI,” in which he states: “Years ago I read something in a letter by Chekhov that impressed me. It was a piece of advice to one of his many correspondents and it went something like this: Friend, you don’t have to write about extraordinary people who accomplish extraordinary and memorable deeds.” Critically and culturally renowned for his ability to use dialogue to capture the pain and poetry of daily life, Carver’s prose is, today, seen in lambency not unlike the works of Edward Hopper or Norman Rockwell. Utilizing economical, oft-barefaced literary archetypes – much in the same manner that Hopper and Rockwell used straightforward imagery to depict the platitudinous nature of living and dying in America – Carver’s short stories were able to capture the joy and tragedy of a prosaic existence, the blue collar actuality of a lesser-America that often sat capriciously suspended on the precipice of collapse.
Carver, himself of veteran of personal decay and proletarian redemption, treated his characters with a great deal of compassion. He chronicled their bedroom arguments, clandestine drinking problems, and petty insecurities with the soothing hand of empathy. In a way, Carver’s characters were an extension of himself. Carver’s truth was found in the minutes, hours, and days between the ostensibly remarkable, the moments of passion and malaise that elusively weave in and out of lives and relationships.
It is, however, a misconception that Carver attained his truth, the hard-headed genuineness that encompasses his work, wholly through the overtly conspicuous mechanics of rhetorical composition or dialogue. Carver’s linguistic providence and dialogic practicality were, in fact, mere components of the greater vessel that he used to achieve his endgame – a compassionate and holistic delineation of the quiet moments of personal turmoil and moral decline that are stratospherically pedestrian yet fundamentally character defining. And while it would be laughably naïve to deny that these auspices of literary style and character interactivity played a substantively epigrammatic role in Carver’s unique portraiture of American dysfunction, it is of equal derision to deny that the theme of personal isolation and the pressing energy of self-induced insularity did not also fundamentally affect Carver’s ability to resonate. While Carver described an agelessly photographic – albeit a less-than-photogenic – reality, he clearly and determinedly refused to adopt the post-modern tendency of aesthetic mile-marking. And, as such, the political economy is ignored and character revelation is merely hinted, leading myopic critics such as John Aldridge to label Carver as a mundane aerialist, a depthless and failed social realist with “no political agenda and no understanding of his social matrix whatsoever” (Champion 1999). But Carver did, in fact, understand the social matrices omnipresent in his work. He understood, in ways proving tragically blurred to theorists such as Aldridge, that his “social matrix” was one that existed in a world of utility bills, lowbrow substance abuse, and disconnecting forces- a messy, untidy state of being that subsisted outside the tidy conventions of neo-realistic closure and gratifyingly concrete acquiescence.
It would, then, be a shame to overlook the intimate nuances, the fragile literary wisps of benevolent seclusion and character remoteness that waft enigmatically throughout Carver’s anthology of short stories. In fact, to disregard Carver’s axiomatic use of isolation and its role in orchestrating the symphonic synthesis of circumstance and plot is to fundamentally undervalue one of Carver’s most idiosyncratic and comprehensively endearing literary endowments. With Carver, the outside world always existed, burgeoning and crashing on the beaches of cognizance, but the way that world was perceived by his protagonists was almost always constructed, at least partially, within the framework of applied isolation.
Before, however, any discussion of the logistical application of Carver’s use of isolator and insular forces, it is imperative to define the scope and goal of this work. Simply, the purpose of this paper is neither to devalue the importance of Carver’s literary style nor diminish his use of the aesthetic. Such aspects do indeed hold a great and immutable weight in any attempt to theoretically understand Carver and his ability to robustly and responsively describe the pastorally ephiphanic moments of fiction that so strongly correlate to our own lives. This paper, further, does not seek to comment upon either the current, de facto understanding of Carver’s anthological body or argue for politic reconsideration of Carver’s rhetoric. Rather, the intent of this work has three ostensible aspirations; first, to define the various isolator mechanisms employed by Carver; second, to discuss the importance of Raymond Carver’s use of isolator forces within his narrative framework; and third, to provide selected examples of the ways that Carver applied and utilized the aforementioned isolator mechanisms. The comprehensive intent of this work, indubitably, is to provide some sort of illumination on Carver’s rich handling of isolator forces and, further, discuss how such handling co-existed within the traditionally commented upon forces of Carver’s literary structure and character delineation.
Accordingly, in order to categorize Carver’s use of isolation/insularity, it is paramount to first define the term “isolation.” As defined by Mark Conliffe in his essay “On Isolation,” the word isolation athletically “implies a position separate from and presupposes that a force secludes these things…and clearly, the verb ‘isolate’ is transitive.” Conliffe goes on to state that “the meaning [of isolation] is flexible to allow the agent and the object of isolation to be one and the same or different… The separation is not just physical, but can be social and mental, too” (2006). As put forth by Conliffe, then, “isolation,” can be partitioned into two primary, purified states: situations in which the affecting isolator forces are largely emotional and situations in which affecting isolator forces are primarily physical. As conceded by Conliffe, and utilized by Carver extensively, physically and emotionally tangible forms of isolation are often juxtaposed over each other in order to provide a sense of depth and texture, flexibly interacting and influencing the character, the setting, and the plot in a variety of different ways. Such relationship allows for dynamic and caustic reactivity between the character and the surrounding world, a quiet game of brinksmanship that, with Carver, often seemed to breathily end in hesitant irresolution.
Isolation, one should note, carries a definition that is distinct from the conventions of ostracism or alienation. In a sense, isolation is an actualized state of being that results from a manifested desire for separation on the part of the actor. Isolation is reversibly spherical condition that comes into definition precisely because the protagonist has not always been isolated. In a sense, isolation is a life-status change, a purposeful rearrangement of priority and function that is actively sought by the individual. This point is emphasized thoroughly by Conliffe:
“If I find myself in the middle of a desert and my car has broken down, I am both separate and separated from my usual wholes, but I am neither alienated nor estranged. I am only isolated. Despite the fact that I am alone, my activities in isolation will be conditioned by what I know, by what I take from my past or my roots, not just by my present surroundings” (2006).
Alienation and ostracism can, of course, have a separated element, but such separation is born not out of the desire of the part, but rather the desires of the whole. And, therein, the words alienation and ostracism have an ostensibly negative connotation whereas the word isolation is neutral in connotation. If one is alienated or ostracized from society, he is forcibly displaced from the social contract or otherwise removed. And, while separation is ultimately the product of such removal, the action was forced by an entity outside of the affected “part,” and, as such, is discernibly different than the process of isolation. Simply put, isolation, in itself, cannot be accomplished simply by the “whole’s” desire to separate the “part.” The isolating action must either be the product of a substantiated desire (or, at a minimum, a demonstrated ambivalence), expressed by the part, for separation or come about as a result of situational forces outside the control of society. And while isolation can be a result of greater society’s desire for the removal of the “part,” the affected individual must, at some level, have a vested interest in such separation.
Definitions of the previously mentioned constructions of “physical” and “emotional” isolation/insular types can be garnished quite readily, especially in regards to the intents and purposes of this work. The physically tangible form of isolation can be assigned, on its most rudimentary level, to situations and scenarios in which the body (acting as the “part”) is physically separate from the whole. The physical state of “separateness” is manifested through a character’s desire – pursued either passively, aggressively, or both – to be alone. As Conliffe writes, “separation and being alone are priorities [of the acting protagonist]” (2006). However, it should also be pointed out that such desire for separation can be a result of greater society (acting as the “whole”) actively seeking the removal a specific individual. In such cases, the isolation is normally a product of convenience in which both the part and the whole have dependent, if not mutual, goals.
Obviously, then, the concept of emotionally tangible isolation refers to the basal idea of mental/emotional withdrawal. The body may be a part of the whole but the intellective/cognitive elements have been withdrawn or are otherwise absent. This scenario does not explicitly mean that these emotionally communicative elements are not functioning or being utilized by the protagonist in question. Instead, emotional sentiments are not being expressed by the part to the whole. Emotional resonance between the protagonist (or affected character), for whatever reason, has broken down and, at the delineated time and place, there exists a real disconnect between the emotions felt on the part of the isolated element and the perception of that element by the cumulative remainder. In certain cases, such as his handling of Dummy in the “The Third Thing That Killed My Father,” Carver utilizes characters who do not outwardly appear to possess the intellectual acuity required of cogently describe their emotional status. However, even in such cases, the character nonetheless demonstrates a considerable desire to remain cognitively and emotionally separate, often finding solace in their own restricted ability to arrest the gravitational forces of communication.
These paradigms of emotional and physical isolation, it should be noted, have a tense, near-antagonistic relationship with each other. Carver, in most cases, forces one sense of isolation (be it physical or emotional) to directly impact the other. For example, in “A Small, Good Thing,” the emotional detachment suffered by the parents is directly related to their physical detachment from their son and their subsequent desire to privately mourn. Similarly, in “Cathedral,” the narrator’s eventual “enlightenment” is spurred forward by his fascination with a man who, as a result of a physical disability (and isolated as such), has a transcendent ability to not only emotionally detach himself from the normality of pedestrian thought but also to, ironically, utilize that detachment to form an emotional bond with the narrator. In each story, the two forms of isolation have a co-dependent relationship with each other and it is this relationship that effectively forces the action and pace of the story. As such, Carver utilizes the tenuous marriage of emotional and physical isolation as a catalyst for the over-arching purpose of the story. While the actions of each character drive the plot forward, Carver’s application of separation allow the character and the character’s actions important to the reader. Simply, the specific actions of the narrator in “Cathedral” – smoking dope, watching television, drawing a picture of a cathedral with his eyes closed– have relatively no importance on the story or its emotional value to the reader. The important thing, Carver tells us, is the way that the narrator deals with the incongruity between himself and the largely isolated blind man and how such separation devolves into an ironically touching sense of similarity, commonality, and, ultimately, enlightenment (Leypoldt 2001).
Upon the understanding of why Carver’s employment of isolation is important, it becomes pertinent to focus the conversation on the operative, isolator mechanisms that helped shape the functional aspects of his short stories. Of course, the scope of this paper cannot possibly account for each and every one of Carver’s short stories and, as such, it is difficult (if not impossible) to ostentatiously apply a workable sense of standardized classification to the specific vehicles Carver uses to relate isolation on the part of his protagonists. If Carver was anything, he was a writer who constantly sought to fine-tune and rearrange the anatomical components of his prose. There are, however, several cardinal mechanisms that Carver often utilized to establish a tailored sense of isolation. That is not to say, of course, that these components were utilized in any manner that could be construed as formulaic, pre-fabricated, or otherwise manufactured. While present in much of Carver’s prose, these isolator agencies never appeared in the same exact configuration, elusively and respectfully interacting with each individual story in a distinctively conceived manner.
Perhaps the most pervasive and obvious of such isolator mechanisms used by Carver can be found in his initial handling of the setting. Suspicious of exposition and respectful of the mysterious nature of story, Carver fundamentally rejected the provision of overtly- bibliographical explanation. As suggested by Charles May, perhaps such suspicion arose from Carver’s acceptance of Chekhovian dictum which stipulated that “In short stories, it is better to say not enough that to say too much, because – because – I don’t know why!” (May 2001). Regardless of origin, however, the fact is that Carver was something of a doctrinaire when it came to setting the expository tone for his stories. He frequently sought, as the first order of literary “business,” to diminish the value and importance of the surrounding world, preemptively dissolving the forces of macro-drama. By isolating the story itself from the synthesizing elements of the surrounding world, characters are only affected by the forces that directly touch and alter their lives. As such, Carver was able to control both the scope and depth of the story and, effectively, avoid the pratfalls of autoerotic efficacy. And, therein, was a large part of Carver’s recipe for success: to accurately describe the circadian nature of daily life, one must first understand that the things that happen to us, in this life, are rarely a product of a crisply defined causal nexus and cannot be rigidly typified or otherwise constrained. Life moves sporadically and unpredictably, rippling and bubbling in series events that have a direct and personal impact. In a sense, this process of isolating the setting and the context of the story allows Carver to create a scenario in which the protagonist can both identify affecting influences and, subsequently, seal themselves off from those influences. The end product is a modestly Sartre-ian outlook on life in which experience is paramount and reality is empirical.
In the article “On Small, Good Things,” author Gadi Taub remarks that Carver’s process of cleansing the anthropological panorama allows for the emergence of true emotion, precisely because of its rejection the “luxury of cultivated sensibility.” The point here, of course, is that outside influences can (and often do) act as pollutants, adding unnecessary and trivial details that distract and temper the emotional viscosity of story. With Carver, the true importance of the story lies in the actions, and repercussions of those actions, that directly affect the protagonist (s), not era-defining wars, advertising campaigns, or the conventions of pop humanism. By rejecting the macro implications of society, culture, and media, Carver’s designed focus is determinately micro, a philosophic mantra also undoubtedly gleaned from Chekhov. As commented on by Taub, such rejection is not without consequence:
“[Carver] leaves his human landscape diffused, refusing to animate the numbness by inflating it with sentimentality, political agendas, or a sense of great human drama that his protagonists don’t experience themselves. But it is precisely this context that allows for the most basic and ordinary human emotions to emerge with clarity, that reveals we are bound to feel even when feelings in general are numbed” (2002)
Carver was, in fact, quite adept at creating a specific sort of sanctuary for his characters, a realm in which their specific situation was not only the focal point of the story, but the only point of the story. There is a distance between the part and the whole, and therein, Carver’s characters exist in world where extenuating circumstances and third party actors are nonexistent. That is not to say, however, that characters are not affected by outside forces, rather that such forces are chalked up to an angrily protestant God extending the clenched fist of arbitrary fate. Social and political analyses and explanations are aggressively and totally avoided. And, while Carver’s expositional handling of isolation outwardly seems to affect only the study of his rhetorical composition, it is important to note that Carver’s rejection of greater, behavior-shaping forces (i.e. systematic poverty) essentially dictates a scenario in which the protagonists bear the responsibility for accosting and remedying the issues that are specifically affecting them (Scofield 1999).
Carver also utilized a variety of symbolic mechanisms to achieve his sense of character isolation. The symbolic insularity that Carver wove into his prose was presented primarily in the context of a specific character’s physical surroundings. Carver’s use of symbolism corresponds, in large part, to Jung’s conceptualization of symbolism wherein a symbol is “a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning” (1968). Examples of symbolism in Carver’s anthological body are widespread and dynamic, ranging from the presence of endemic alcoholism and misogyny to the ostensible handling of a given character’s surrounding geographical elements (the ocean, the backwoods, summer homes, etc).
In utilizing symbolism, especially as a representation of character isolation, Carver was adroit in his ability to use a minimal presence in an effective manner. Take, for example, Carver’s references to alcoholism: instead of merely depicting the intensity of the drug’s vengeful wrath, Carver often employs illustration of alcoholism (and those affected by the disease) as a line of demarcation, a symbolic element that serves to separate one series of events from another” (Champion 1999). Similarly, references to literary and artistic culture – such as allusions to London’s “To Build a Fire” in “Where I’m Calling From,” and Ansel Adams in “Fever” – are not used as markers to designate the story’s place in the space/time continuum, but rather as artistic references whose subject matter corresponds to the issue at hand.
The most meaningful of the isolator mechanisms employed by Carver, however, are those which manifest themselves throughout the course of character action, character cognition, and character interaction (or lack thereof) with his or her surrounding elements. This technique, defined by Conliffe as “spatial detachment,” can be boiled down to an essential form in which a character appears to be preoccupied or engaged with issues or elements that are not readily, physically apparent. In defining “spatial detachment, Conliffe writes that “there is something spatial, albeit metaphorically, (even if it is temporary) implied when a person who is lost in thought is referred to as being ‘away with the birds.’ He is not completely there despite his physical presence; he is not interacting as he usually might.” Conliffe then ventures further, stating that “He is preoccupied, perhaps caused to take part in the world differently. An aspect of his functioning self alters his usual consciousness” (2006).
And while Conliffe limits his conceptualization of “spatial detachment” to cases in which the physical presence is simply altered, not totally removed, his definition is significant because he valuably touches upon the codependency of physical and emotional isolation. While these two values are not, per se, mutually exclusive, they share a strong kinship in the sense that a normal bi-product of emotional withdrawal is the desire also seek physical removal and vice-versa. In such manner, Carver often treats detachment in a literal sense, painting situations in which the protagonist seeks some sort of therapy by limiting, or restricting in some way, contact with the societal whole. Carver’s characters often possess the dysfunctional inability to fruitfully accost a particular issue and, as such, lack the ability to seek a comprehensive reprieve from their respective afflictions. Begrudgingly and unwillingly, Carver’s protagonists are forced to interact with the outside world while simultaneously expressing a real, viscous desire to be alone
Of course, the dimensions, forms, and mediums of inter-personal communication all play an indispensable role in the ability to project the above-defined paradigms relating to isolator mechanisms. In the sense that isolation refers to a character’s unwillingness to participate, “communication” refers to the specific ability to interact. If communicative forms and mediums are, in fact, available to the character and he/she makes a conscious decision to shun those resources, the protagonist can be seen as actively pursuing isolation through a policy of inactivity. Moreover, protagonists can utilize (ironically) pragmatic information transmission – via telephone, letter, etc – to indicate their decision to seek and maintain a course of insularity. As Laurie Champion notes, “While communicating with others helps heal feelings of desolation that Carver’s characters experience, failing to communicate with others parallels or even penetrates his characters feelings of despair” (1997). The ultimate goal of such desire for communicative separation is rehabilitation, the urge to self-medicate in order to achieve some semblance of successful reconciliation between the integer and the sum. Carver’s characters often seek only a brief reprieve from their normal frequency of communication and, as such, they must first indicate to the surrounding world that their intended separation is necessary and purposeful. In the same sense, once the detached part has achieved their desired emotional plateau, they are then forced to communicate to the surrounding world that they are, in fact, ready to resume participation (as exemplified by Myers communicative exhumation at the end of Kindling). The role of these mediums, methods, and modes of discourse is deeply rooted in de facto practicality, a rhetorically necessary component that both helps propel the expositional framework and reinforces the exoskeletal clarity of the story itself.
While such rationalization may seem abstruse and inapplicable to the task at hand, consider the following example: in Fever, one of Carver’s most “explicit treatments” of the inadequacy of communication, when the protagonist Carlyle calls his girlfriend Carol, she “says she understands his wanting be alone, adding, ‘I can respect that.’ Momentarily falling into the seductive lure of psycho-babble, Carlyle says, ‘Thanks for being there when I need you’” (May 2001). As illustrated, the actual act of communication- that is, Carlyle calling his girlfriend to state he would like to be alone – did not, necessarily, impact his desire to be alone (at least in the short term), but it did allow Carver a venue for relaying, to the reader, that a certain sense of insularity/separation was, in fact, desired by the protagonist. To maintain such separation, however, Carlyle is forced to communicate his desires to his significant other and, consequently, the reader.
A further example of a scenario in which Carver utilizes a specific, communicative medium to serve as his expositional vehicle can be found in the story “Why, Honey.” Utilizing a first person, confessional letter-styled expositional apparatus, Carver speaks from the viewpoint of a mother worried that her politically-powerful but cruel son is trying to harm her. Fearing for her own life, the woman has sought refuge in isolation, when she receives a letter (the initial action leading up to the letter is not remarked upon) from an unknown individual asking about her son. She replies: “I was so surprised to receive your letter asking about my son, how did you know I was here? I moved here years ago right after it started to happen. No one knows who I am here but I’m afraid all the same.” Herein, the woman is clearly indicating her preference for isolation (bourn, obviously, out of fear) yet Carver, ironically, is utilizing that desire for isolation, and the subsequent pragmatic informational communication, to tell the story. As such, the desire on the part of the letter writer has not changed – that is, there is no explicit indication that the woman desires for any one to “know who” she is – yet, at the same time, she is effectively breaking away from her isolation in order to explicate her reasoning for seeking separation in the first place. More importantly, however, is the fact that she is utilizing the letter to describe the circumstances surrounding her isolation and why, exactly, such course of action was necessary.
Carver understood, fundamentally, the ways that isolation and literature could be juxtaposed in order to create a dynamic and important product that transcended the simple cause-and-effect scenarios that inundate the works of lesser authors. Exposition can offer a window into the omnipresent, a clear vista overlooking the plateau of introspection. As utilized by Carver, character isolation, in both its emotional and physical manifestations, allows for real time rationalization of the protagonist’s experiences. For example, in Gazebo, the emotional separation between Duane and Holly, brought about by Duane’s infidelity, is progressively delineated throughout the story, effectively enabling the reader to comprehensively understand the layered and textured sense of pain felt by both individuals. In a sense, the couple’s emotional separation from each other has caused them both to become increasingly isolated from the surrounding world. They ignore the hotel’s customers (both are employed as innkeepers) and their own biological need for food and sleep. As such, their marital dysfunction – represented primarily through alcohol abuse and arguments regarding Duane’s infidelity – preoccupies them to the point where the surrounding world is largely forgotten. Furthermore, as the threat of physical separation becomes closer to realization, the reader understands, implicitly, the tragic consequences of such separation, especially when Duane remarks “Holly was my own true love.”
Furthermore, the operative mechanisms of literary isolation enable Carver’s readers the ability to establish a sense of intimacy with the protagonist, a balmy, albeit familiar understanding between reader and character that transcends simple exposition. As put forth by Conliffe:
“Keying on the isolated individual provides intensive reflection on that specific temperament, on how that individual’s impressions are filtered and his ideas are developed or expressed. Such focus on an individual allows insight to the effect on him of the spontaneous potential of every moment—the chance of mundane routines, unpredictable problems, and unexpected joys—and whether the individual is receptive and empathetic to it. The narrative relays discontent and acceptance and shows how an imagination reacts to such responses. It gives the inner as well as the outer reaction, the individual as well as the general understanding” (2006).
This point is crucial in one’s understanding of both Carver and the concept of isolation. By focusing on the individual and allowing life to occur at its own pace, Carver is reaching out to the reader’s own experience with the intrinsically chaotic nature of the mundane. In mapping out his character’s moments of personal introspection – the fragile moments spent alone in which solace seems not only desirable, but digestively ameliorative – Carver is appealing to our own experience organizing and interpreting of the frequent diaspora of logicality and rationality in daily life. Carver’s emotional spectrum, often culminating as a palpably commonplace yet twisting phoenix of epiphany and sudden illumination (Leypoldt 2001), is only marginally unpredictable. And, as such, the outward actions of his protagonists are rarely extreme or blatantly phosphorescent. However, Carver’s treatment of isolation allows for a panoptic view into each character’s internal mechanisms (be it through the third person omniscient, third person limited, or the first person narrative structures), including their situational and circumstantial processes of rationalization. Accordingly, the “more than meets the eye” convention becomes clear in which each character’s spectrum of being is influenced by both daily conventions of normality and Carver’s unique, albeit sheepishly unassuming, conceptualization of existentialism.
As stated earlier, however, Carver’s employment of isolation and isolator vehicles elusively eschew any sense of anthological conformity. And, as also previously stated, any catalogue conceived solely in the pursuit of simplistic categorization will not only fail, but do so miserably. Instead, upon defining and outlining the abecedarian elements of Carver’s application of insular forces, one can only hope to provide of pragmatic examples of how such energies have been functionally utilized in specific cases. The cumulative hope is, of course, that Carver’s readers will actively recognize, in their subsequent consumption of Carver, the presence and importance of isolation in the his work, effectively enriching both literary and practical perception.
The final aspiration of this work is to analytically comment upon the utilization of isolation in the stories “Kindling,” and “Nobody Said Anything.” Before, however, actual discussion of these texts, it is pertinent to put forth an explanation of the operative methodology behind the selection of these specific stories as representatives of Carver’s idiomatic conceptualization of isolation. As many critics have noted, Carver’s post-“What We Talk about When We Talk about Love” work, commencing with “Cathedral,” is substantially less laconic in its iconography, assuming instead an evolutionary cadence that broke from the minimalistic pangaea of his earliest work. And as this author’s intent is to provide a generalized sense of insight into Carver’s manifestation of isolation and not discourse relating to his literary execution, it is necessary discuss Carver in an expansively ranging scope. Therefore, the selected stories have been chosen because, intrinsically, they illustrate Carver at the rhetorically distinctive poles of his published career, with “Nobody Said Anything” appearing in the 1976 “Will You Be Please Be Quiet, Please?” and “Kindling” appearing the posthumously published “Call If You Need Me.” [1] The hope is, of course, that the sample’s wide chronological breadth will establish a sense of completeness and thoroughness as it relates to the isolator presence.
In “Kindling,” discovered in Carver’s Port Angeles, Washington residence after his death, Carver’s first cognizant move is to scrub away any delineation of the outside, “functioning” world while simultaneously establishing the emotional status of the story’s protagonist, Myers. The story’s first line is poetically abrupt, stating, simply: ‘It was August and Myers was between lives.” In such manner, Carver is removing the story’s context from the contemporary world and isolating it to the degree that time and place become irrelevant. Since the idea of lives cannot be quantified in a physical sense – it is, of course, a relative impossibility for one to move between lives in the physically empirical world – the idea of “lives” must be viewed within the constraints of human mortality. That is, the word “lives” is directly referring the emotionally transient process one goes through when approaching his or her life after suffering blunt force emotional trauma. It is a period of uncertainty and tentative acceptance, scarred with ambiguity.
In Meyers’s case, the reader quickly discovers that he is in the throes of disastrous personal turmoil: “He’d just spent twenty-eight days at a drying out facility. But during this period his wife took it into her head to go down the road with another drunk, a friend of theirs.” As such, Myers’s has, seemingly, been emotionally and physically abandoned by his wife. He is isolated from the normality of his previous “life” and set adrift in a situational frame of cognizance where his emotions are still soiled with the recent memory of his past “life” – a living situation that was seemingly defined in equal parts by his drinking problem and his domestic status. In the process of correcting the former, he loses the latter, leaving him with, comparatively speaking, a new “life.” It is obvious form his wife’s decision to “go down the road” with another “drunk” that Myers’s alcoholism was not the genesis for the marital dissolution and while Carver never explicitly provides the reasoning for the wife’s decision, alluding simply to a life of disillusionment (and, perhaps, the fact that Myers’s friend had recently “come into some money), there is a sense that Myers’s previous life had fallen well short of the American halcyon and, for that reason, he is now experiencing difficulty connecting, both emotionally and physically, to the outside world. Accordingly, Myers is cemented in uncertainty, emotionally insulated and between “lives.” He has neither transitioned to his new “life” nor reconciled with his past “life.”
Carver then proceeds to use Myer’s emotional status to define his physical status. In the first paragraph, immediately following the assertion that Myers is, in fact, between lives, Carver uses the expositional infrastructure to contextualize Myers’s present physical status, saying “So he [Myers] took a few things, boarded a bus, and went to live near the ocean.” The fact that Carver specifically states that Myers has chosen to live somewhere near the ocean is not trivial. The ocean has long been seen as a symbolic getaway from the tightly knot constrains of jobs, bills, and relationships. The oceanside is a place for vacations, a place for man to marvel at the chasmal enormity of ocean and its reaching desolation. As such, Myers appears to be actively seeking to create distance between himself and the world he has been injured by. As discussed by critic Kirk Nesset, Carver’s characters often “seal themselves off from their worlds, walling out the threatening forces of their lives even as they wall themselves in” (1994).
Myers’s living arrangements further isolate him from surrounding society. While he rents a single room from a childless family – a disfigured man named Sol and his fat wife, Bonnie – Myers’s assiduously plans his schedule to avoid contact with his housemates or, as carver states, “he adjusted his schedule to theirs.” While Myers is forced to interact with his surroundings, he does so with great reservation and infrequency, often appearing, as Conliffe states, “away with the birds.”
Carver furthers this emotional/physical dynamic when he describes, at various points throughout the story, Myers’s isochronal case of writers block. As evidenced in lines such as “late that night, before going to bed, he opened his notebook and on a clean page wrote, Nothing.” Since Carver clearly indicates a desire, on the part of Myers, to reconcile his marital relationship, it can be concluded that Myers is to the point where he is so emotionally dysfunctional that he cannot communicate what he is feeling to the outside world and, by striving for physical seclusion, no longer has any aspirations of doing so. Myers’s perceived case of writers block indicates a certain disenfranchisement from his normally functioning self, a deviation in which his desire for isolation is clearly reflected in his inability to push past the arid desert of imaginative nihility.
“Kindling” climaxes with Myers feverishly splitting wood for his housemates. He does so not out of any realistically appreciable affection for the couple, but instead in the hope that such menial labor will provide him with some semblance of therapy, an ameliorative solvent in which mindless toil will allow him to recoup, to feel alive again, to finally complete the transition from his old “life” to his new “life.” Stuck between lives, Myers floundered hopelessly in the deciduous stickiness of uncertainty and loneliness. His emotional disengagement from life and relationships led to his physical separation from society. He sought refuge in loneliness, isolation, and insularity. He sought therapy in the manually-demanding-but-cognitively unassuming world of hard work and pedestrian accomplishment. And through such process, Myers experiences a metamorphosis of sorts. Carver proceeds to describe Myers breaking through the constrains of his metaphorical purgatory. His writers block is gone and, with a clear sense of purpose, Myers begins to write. The story closes with Carver saying “he [Myers] left the window open when he got into bed. It was okay like that.” Finally, it would seem, Myers has transitioned to his new life. He is “okay” with the future and its welling uncertainty, effectively conquering the urge for detachment that served as the genesis for the story.
“Nobody Said Anything,” in contrast to “Kindling,” reveals and effectuates the isolationist theme an enervating stratus that is ostensibly distinct from the implicit and referential forms of discourse primarily utilized by Carver when handling the concepts sexuality and desire. The story, narrated from the perspective of a young boy caught in the sticky throes of adolescence and self-discovery, is inserted within the framework of marital and domestic instability. Published in his first collection, the 1976 “Will You Please Be Quiet Please,” “Nobody Said Anything” relies heavily on minimalist vehicles of discourse and a certain sort of crude language uncommon in Carver’s later works. The sweeping domestic maelstrom of discontent has very obviously distracted the narrator’s parents from their role as caretakers, leaving the boy to feel isolated and unhappy. In fact, the boy’s observational vantage point allows him only participation in the sense that his emerging conceptualization of the world is being dynamically, and tragically, shaped by his parent’s inability to see beyond their marital plight. The boy is further isolation from his younger brother George, who is too young to understand either his parent’s or his brother’s sense of isolation and unhappiness. “You dumb chickenshit,” the narrator says to George, “Their fighting and mom’s crying. Listen.” George, of course, does not understand the gravity of the situation, saying only “I don’t care.” Such attitude, professed on the part of George, leads the narrator to assess his brother as being little more than a “royal asshole.”
The narrator professes a significant desire to be alone when he pleads with his mother to allow him to stay home from school. She readily agrees, seemingly unfocused on determining whether he is actually sick (he is very obviously not), replying in an offhand manner: “Stay home, then. But no TV, remember that.” Carver’s minimalist approach to story fights the urge to offer any straightforward moral comment, instead offering perspective only from the boy’s limited understanding of his observation. He is clearly, however, affected by the surrounding domestic chaos and it is this affliction that leads to his desire to be separated from both his family and the surrounding world. As she leaves for work, the mother comments to the narrator that he should take medicine, hoping simply that “Maybe we’ll all feel better by tonight.” By misdiagnosing her son’s “sickness,” the mother’s perception is very obviously limited by her own troubles. Carver’s implication here, of course, is simply that the mother’s preoccupation with her own marital conflict has limited her ability to actively provide any sort of tangible support for her child’s emotional or physical needs.
The desire for isolation expressed on the part of the narrator is not merely limited to his unwillingness to attend school. As with all children, school is a burdensome, unpleasant task which unfairly consumes time otherwise reserved for allocated for play and discovery and, as such, there is no specific reason to view the narrator’s initial inclination to feign sickness as anything other than a “boy being a boy.” Carver, understanding this, athletically utilizes two further vessels to juxtapose the expositional architecture and climatic action of the story with the constraining forces of isolation.
The first of these isolating forces is manifested in the boy’s gravitational momentum towards the pastoral. Not unlike the forces of rural separation employed by Hemingway in his Nick Adams stories, the young narrator in “Nobody Said Anything” rebukes both television and literature (effectively making a conscious effort to disengage from the societal conventions of media) to instead go fishing. “I thought I would get dressed and walk to Birch Creek. Trout season was open for another week or so, but almost everybody had quit fishing. Everybody was just sitting around now waiting for deer and pheasant to open.” Accordingly, the isolation of the natural world is attractive to the boy as it offers a certain sense of perceived relaxation and, ultimately, escape. This idea is further corroborated when the narrator hitchhikes with a middle-aged woman who remarks “I keep saying that one of these days I’m going to take up fishing. They say it’s very relaxing. I’m a nervous person.” Carver’s employment of isolation is further heightened by his description of the geographical spot along the creek in which the boy decides to cast his line. “”I went up to the embankment and climbed under a fence that had a KEEP OUT sign on the post. One of the airport runways started here.”
Whether or not fishing has ameliorative qualities is unimportant to both the story and the reader’s understanding of the narrator. Instead, Carver is methodically indicating the existence of a desire to be alone and then reinforcing that desire with the physical description of a time and place in which the narrator and the outside world (and, subsequently, its emotionally propulsive qualities) are definitely separated. The capitalization of the KEEP OUT sign places a clear and outward emphasis on its importance. At the same time, Carver symbolically alludes to the airport, which, despite its brevity, is important to the understanding of the use of isolation and insularity within the greater story. As the KEEP OUT sign represents a sense of exclusivity between the boy and the natural world, the airport represents escape, a way to insert physiographic distance between the boy and the negative influence of his domestic environment.
Furthermore, Carver’s pronounced employment of sexual fantasy has a dramatically energetic implication as it relates to the functional utilization of isolation as an affecting force. The narrator’s misunderstanding and crude rationalization of both sex and sexuality initially appears to be little more than a Freudian conceptualization of sexual identification whereupon the young narrator is simply discovering his instinctual, albeit youthfully lustful, desires in spite of the societal forces that preach restraint and active limitation of those desires. The fact, however, that Carver is prolific in his cultivation of such fantasy essentially dictates that the reader must look at the uses of fantasy as more than a mere indication of youth. As such, the narrator consistently uses his sexual fantasies as an escape from the forces of conflict that frame his life, clearly indicating that Carver is using the boy’s sexual desires as a stabilizing mechanism. The ways that Carver reinforces the idea of sexual fantasy as an escape are externalized primarily in the boy’s crudely juvenile conceptualization of the act of intimacy. He snoops through his parent’s drawers, hoping to find something indicative sexual activity. He masturbates incessantly. The woman who gives the boy a ride is described as wearing a “brown sweater with nice boobs inside.” The boy thematically fantasizes about the woman, saying “Suddenly we are in my bedroom under the covers. She asks me if she can keep her sweater on and I say its ok with me. She keeps her pants on too,” and, later: “We were French-kissing on the couch when she excused herself to go the bathroom. I followed her. I watched as she pulled down her pants and sat on the toilet. I had a big boner and she waved me over with her hand.”
The crude language that Carver uses is employed, in part, to reflect the age of the adolescent narrator. However, it would be a mistake to subscribe to the belief that these boyish fantasies are merely utilized in order to reflect the boy’s pubescence outlook on the world around him. While, surely, such idea is, in fact, relayed from Carver to the reader, his fantasies provide him with an escape from the quotidian routine that seems to be dominated by the symphonic interplay of marital disharmony. It’s an easy, inefficient escape from his world, spurred forward the boy’s empirical inexperience. As such, Carver contextualizes his language without removing the presence of isolation from the story. Accordingly, the climactic action of the story – the process of capturing the large fish – is structured by the narrator’s desire to for separation. As the narrator leaves the creek, he notices another boy frantically trying to catch a large fish with his hands. Intrigued, the narrator throws his lot in with the boy in order to capture the fish. However, the narrator is suspicious and aggressively distasteful in both his description and interactions with boy, describing him as looking like “a rat or something,” and calling him an “asshole idiot” on more than one occasion. Initially, the narrator came to the creek in order to disengage from the troubling and complex world swirling around him. And once this sense of insularity is shattered, the narrator reacts in a passive-aggressive manner. His demeanor is restrained in part because he sees the other boy as a means to his end – which is, of course, capturing the fish.
Upon the apprehension and killing of the fish, the narrator and the other boy came to a crossroads: who will keep the catch. Each has a legitimate claim to the fish. The narrator knows that he could physically intimidate the boy in order to keep the fish but he instead chooses to compromise and “half him.” This point bears significance to the story because Carver is demonstrating that despite his difficult home situation, he is still a rational, average boy. In turn, this suggests that the domestic discord experienced by the boy was not endemic to the entirety of his life, instead assuming an ephemeral, transient value. As such, Carver’s minimal rhetoric hints at a temporary sense of isolation. The narrator, despite his delineated desire for separation, has the ability to successfully interact with those around him. Unable to understand why he cannot penetrate the cognizance of his parents, he turns to isolation and insularity (manifested by physical separation and youthful fantasy) as coping mechanism.
When the narrator returns to the house, his parents are, again, arguing. He observes them through the window and sees a pan burning on the stove. “Smoke was all over the kitchen,” Carver writes. “I saw it coming from a pan on the burner. But neither of them paid any attention.” The pan, it would seem, is representational of the narrator: unnoticed by the parents despite the very definite indication that attention is, in fact, required. Attempting to bayonet his way into their consciousness, the protagonist opens the kitchen door and states: “Look here. Look at this. Look at what I caught.” His parents react angrily, perhaps at his intrusion into their spherical world of anger. As Carver writes: “I held the creel out to her and she finally looked in. ‘Oh, oh, my God! What is it? A snake! Please, please take it out before I throw up.” The exchange concludes with the father plainly telling the boy “I don’t want to look…What in the hell is the matter with you? Take it the hell out of the kitchen and throw it in the goddamn garbage.” As the story concludes, the reader sees that the boy is unable to penetrate his parent’s spectrum of cognition and, just as the story began, is on the outside, looking in. The world his parents exist in is one he can observe but never assimilate and, as a result, his paternal needs are left largely unfulfilled. The boy clearly desires his parent’s acknowledgment but his attempts to achieve such attention are fruitless. As a way of coping, the boy seeks a simplistic conceptualization of separation – consummated through his physical and mental detachment from the obese unfairness of his reality – that is, ultimately, deemed to fail.
Obviously, the ways that isolation is represented and handled in “Kindling” and “Nobody Said Anything” are comparably different. While both protagonists seek separation from the whole as an ameliorative solvent to their affecting problems, the outcome is significantly different for Myers than it is for the narrator in “Nobody Said Anything.” Myers achieved a sense of closure, a pragmatic resolution that although relatively inconclusive, offered great hope for a better future. The narrator, comparatively, faced problems of less intensity than Myers but achieved no resolution. Furthermore, the desire to isolated, to be distinctly separate from the whole, is far more pronounced in “Kindling” than in “Nobody Said Anything.” Despite the use of a dream sequence, the use of fantasy is largely ignored in “Kindling.” In “Kindling,” Carver’s fixative use of the emotional aspects of loneliness and separation is developed the bulwark of the story whereas the emotional acuity of the protagonist in “Nobody Said Anything” is mostly uncommented upon.
Of course, the reasoning behind the comparison was partly to pragmatically demonstrate Carver’s variegated use of isolation and isolator techniques. Like the schematics of his rhetoric, Carver’s use of isolation evolved and grew throughout his career. He utilized different isolator methods in different degrees in each individual story. In some stories, the focus was the tangible process physical and/or mental isolated while in other stories, isolation played a more peripheral role. Surely, the role that isolation and insularity played in different stories is not heterogeneous by any stretch of the imagination. Such insular forces play less pronounced roles in stories such as “Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes,” and “Boxes” than they do in “A Small, Good Thing” and “Fever.” The concept of spatial detachment is more significantly applied in later stories while the use of symbolic isolation is significantly more fragile in earlier stories. The true importance, however, is the presence of isolation throughout Carver’s anthological body, the fact that, like his style and cadence and diction, Carver altered the way isolation was used without extracting it.
Carver’s legacy is inherently tied to his ability to depict the everyman with bright notes of complexity and compassion. As Irwin Howe noted, Carver drew “upon the American voice of loneliness and stoicism, the native soul locked in this continent’s space” in an uncommonly alluring manner (Nesset 1994). Like Hopper and Rockwell, Carver’s method of correspondence was unambiguously and unapologetically pedestrian. His stories exist as miniature portraits within the patchwork neurology of greater Americana. Flawed and incomplete, Carver’s characters are pettily and selfishly incognizant of any looming reality that exists outside of what they can hear and smell. They are often lonely and unhappy, bitterly unable to summit the American dream. But always, there is hope. The depressingly absinthian battles fought within the constraining forces of breathing and dying are debilitating but never encapsulating. Carver’s ability to resonate, however, was not and is not tied solely this lucidly magnanimous depiction of the sub- bourgeois. Loneliness and separation, while possessing the potentiality of further catastrophe, can help prepare the mind to accost and cope with the engagingly abrasive phantasms that haunt lives and relationships. It is of no coincidence that Carver’s characters often seek private sanctuary as an alternative to their alcohol and drug abuse. And, herein, Carver saw the monumental power of reflection and the constituent paramountcy of the pacific moments of introspection and digestion that amorphously and succulently offer reprieve from personal tragedy and discontent. With Carver, the emergence of a personal sense equanimity that seeks to overcome the quotidian genocide of the past is often manifested within the constraints of isolation and separation. Self-enlargement is hinted at but never actualized, loftily perched just over the looming horizon. Perhaps mirroring the trials that dotted his own life, Carver recognized that the epiphanic freedom of solitude and self-realization is the fertile geography in which hope is unassailably preserved.
Works Cited
Carver, Raymond. “Fever.” Where I’m Calling From. New York: Vintage Contemporaries/Random House, 1989.
Carver, Raymond. “Kindling.” Call If You Need Me. New York: Vintage Contemporaries/Random House, 2000.
Carver, Raymond. “Nobody Said Anything.” Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? New York: Vintage Contemporaries/Random House, 1991.
Carver, Raymond. “The Art of Fiction LXXVI.” The Paris Review (1983).
Carver, Raymond. “Why, Honey?” Where I’m Calling From. New York: Vintage Contemporaries/Random House, 1989.
Champion, Laurie. “So Much Whiskey So Far From Home; Misogny, Violence, and Alcoholism in Raymond Carver’s “Where I’m Calling From”" Studies in Short Fiction. Vol. 36 (1999).
Champion, Laurie. “”What’s to Say”: Silence in Raymond Carver’s “Feathers”" Studies in Short Fiction. Vol. 34 (1997).
Conliffe, Mark. “On Isolation.” Midwest Quarterly (2006).
Jung, Carl. Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell, 1968.
Leypoldt, Gunter. “Raymond Carver’s Epiphanic Moments.” Style. Vol.35. No. 3 (2001).
May, Charles E. “”Do You See What I’M Saying?”: the Inadequacy of Explanation and the Uses of Story in the Short Fiction of Raymond Carver.” North American Short Stories and Short Fictions. Vol. 31 (2001).
Nesset, Kirk. “Insularity and Self-Enlargement in Raymond Carver’s Cathedral.” Essays in Literature (1994).
Raabe, David. “Carver’s “a Serious Talk”" Explicator. Vol 62. No 4 (2004).
Scofield, Martin. “Story and History in Raymond Carver.” Critique. Vol. 40 No. 3 (1999).
Taub, Gadi. “On Small, Good Things: Raymond Carver’s Modest Existentialism.” Raritan Quarterly. V22. No.2 (2002).
[1] “Call If You Need Me” was published in 2000, 12 years after Carver’s death in 1988. The winner of the 1999 O. Henry Award, “Kindling” is largely viewed as one his final works.
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