Thesis: Carver Selling And Consuming Communities in 1980’s America (Part 2)

At the close of the last chapter, I referred to the “risk of communication” Lloyd manages to avoid by the obstruction in his ear and by Inez’s rush to make her next appointment. In between these events, Inez does tell him what she came to say; but although he can hear her from several rooms away telling his landlady goodbye, he only sees her lips moving wordlessly as she stands in front of him and says her piece (Cathedral 123). What appears to be a moment of global aphasia driven by cognitive dissonance has rendered Lloyd even deafer than the physical blockage did. We might consider what successful communication puts at risk: within the story, discussing each person’s concerns in an honest, mutually-understood manner would most likely lead to Lloyd and Inez admitting out loud (in print) that he is an alcoholic and that their relationship is headed for divorce, two things which both would find distressing, although Inez is much more equipped to handle the facts. He thus defers the transition from known to unknown evil, from the unhealthy, unresolved but familiar relationship among man, woman, (unemployment?) and alcohol to an acknowledged, potentially therapeutic, certainly upsetting separation that will leave him to confront his individual problems alone. Lloyd would have to first locate, then rely on, inner resources and a sense of self which have already severed connections or been unmoored from the larger, higher systems that would grant some sort of meaning or spiritual sustenance. And so he huddles in alcoholic fatuity while his wife allows herself to be distracted, futilely cuts to the chase, and runs off.

So does Sandy’s husband in “Preservation” hide from life and meaningful interaction by rooting himself to the couch after his termination, for three months and counting by the end of the story. He leaves it only to sign his unemployment papers, to use the bathroom before Sandy gets up the morning, to make coffee in the morning and while she is at work, and presumably to eat, also while she is away. His time is spent watching TV, or else compulsively reading every part of the daily newspaper. Sandy also regularly spots him reading Mysteries of the Past, specifically a particular section about the preserved corpse of a man discovered in a peat bog after two thousand years. Like this man and like Lloyd, her husband is wrapped in a cocoon of stagnation that buffers him from outside, preventing the possibility of transformation along with the recognition of deterioration. Again, the woman is the more capable of the couple, caring for a husband whose behavior confuses and disturbs her. Again, she cannot communicate with him beyond the most trivial level, both because of Sandy’s own incapacity to comprehend and thus address his motives (or lack of them) and because he channels what communicative energies he has into unidirectional media that do not require him to respond to their stimuli.

Outside the story, demonstrably successful communication on major issues, whether between or within characters, would endanger the sense of menace engineered in almost all of Carver’s fiction, as well as contribute to a sense of narrative closure that I’m not so sure Carver wants to grant the reader. Carver commonly starts and ends stories in medias res, so that “[t]he reader is too late to catch a glimpse of the stone before it sinks and must be content with the detailed analysis of the ripples made by a stone in water. Nor is he ever allowed to witness the agonizing break of the ripples against the shore” (Chénetier 167). Carver gives a sense of his reasoning in “On Writing,” in which he cites V. S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story as “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing,” and adds that the glimpse must be given life, “turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we’re lucky — that word again — have even further-ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer’s task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power” (Fires 26-7).

Some readers and critics may have precipitately categorized Carver’s stories as incomplete, as offering half-baked denouements with a couple bites taken out of them and a bit of boozy slobber on the edges. But I feel instead that in true postmodern fashion, he understands that all views of a panoramic entirety must necessarily be partial pictures, subjectively positioned, filtered, cropped and framed. Most people do not have scriptwriters following them around all day on campus, at work, and into the kitchen, writing continuous fluid transitions from one glib bon mot to the next. Conversely, his exhortation to fictionally invest the glimpse far from precludes his tacit understanding that these oblique glimpses correspond to wider, more complex vistas; in fact, fidelity to the “iceberg metaphor” depends on it. In the end, the gaps, the awkward pauses, the unanswered questions wind up speaking of what the characters are failing to say or hear, representing accurately how people in the real world do try and fail to communicate, and echoing Carver's confirmation of perceptual and representation limitation.

And neo-Hemingwayan aesthetic agenda or no, because literature, like all art, is still commonly subject to audience suppositions that it “means something,” the narrative lacuna and misfiring dialogues also beg some questions: what is missing, how much is missing, and where else is it missing from, provided the stories reflect things outside themselves that are somewhat familiar to the reader? By treating each story as a random glimpse without final closure, stymieing the reader’s expectations that narrative itches will have been scratched once the sequence of words on the last page has ended, Carver allows these questions to linger. Having placed the burden of interpretation squarely on the reader’s shoulders, he nevertheless leaves unlocked certain doors leading outside the text to a set of particular and fairly consistent views of American society. It’s too much to assume that all readers would move smoothly from perceiving what is evident in a Carver story to filling in the gaps in such an exhaustive way as to entirely rethink the nature of American life in the 1970’s and 1980’s; on the other side, despite what Carver said in interviews, there may always be people who prefer to submit to the genetic fallacy of using the established facts of his life as a semiotic Procrustean bed limiting the possible significances of his stories. Yet I doubt many would find Chénetier too off-base in using a charged word like “agonizing,” as we can more or less agree on the basic types of existential stones and societal shores bracketing the words on the page. We can follow the ripples outward well enough and with some consistency of vision.

Carver drew his characters from the ranks of the blue-collar and the unemployed, people who were "unlikely candidates for a philosophical quest into meaning" (Shute 1). Informing the experiences of the people whose lives he tended to fictionalize were historical conditions specific to the United States in the 1970's and 1980's, the decades during which he was alive and writing. Watergate and the Iranian hostage crisis undermined the credibility and the authority of an American political system founded upon Enlightenment ideals. Due to the conflation of financial worth and self-worth in America's brand of capitalist materialism, the economic malaise represented by "stagflation" and "the energy crisis" led to "'a general sense that things [had] not only gone wrong, but that they [would] never be right again'" (Tess Gallagher qtd. in Meyer 1; his brackets). Reaganomics accelerated the growth of national banks and the national debt, to the point where the ordinary man-on-the-street could indirectly sense (by reading or listening to media pundits who sensed) the vast empty space beneath the surface of the economic bubble. And Reagan's policies also widened the gap between rich and poor, further eroding the intermediary ground between the ideals of a capitalist ruling class and the experiences of those who spent their lives working crap jobs.

In two interviews conducted in Paris in the summer of 1987, David Applefield twisted his interviewee’s arm as delicately as possible, maneuvering the writer past the by-then familiar reiterations of his poor family background and literary influences, in order to persistently coax Carver to speak on the social implications of the content and style of his stories. After some balking and wriggling, Carver at last admitted:

• I don’t like any of what I’m seeing. It’s a horrible situation. Every time one looks around, one sees another social program being cut and another arts program being cut. The private sector has to take up the slack. That’s what we’re told. And we’re told that nobody’s going to fall through the cracks! People are falling through the cracks. Of course I don’t like this (13).

This is, somewhat frustratingly, as political as Carver ever got in print (or anywhere else, to the best of my knowledge). However, without contesting his position that he wrote pure fiction about characters only indirectly influenced by real people he saw and knew, and without contravening the common attitude that Carver treated his characters, his acquaintances, and their various predicaments with empathetic kindness and a suspension of contempt, we can take his brief statement to Applefield as a sign that he reserved no such sympathy for those people in power who promulgated and effected the conditions causing —- or at least exacerbating — these predicaments, even if some might feel that he failed to go on record logically connecting all the dots.

According to Gary Fisketjon’s editor’s note, the thirty-seven stories in Where I’m Calling From are generally arranged in chronological order from over the course of Carver’s career. Some were revised, some were not, all found their way into “Carver’s Greatest Hits.” And all of their narrators, from the boy in “Nobody said Anything,” the first story of the collection, to the (at least) middle-aged history professor in “Blackbird Pie,” its last first-person account, must similarly fall through cracks in their personal lives that mirror the breakdown of social contracts. Every primary character is forced to witness, although they may not consciously understand, how miscommunication and hostility within the family eventually reflects and is reflected by the larger disjunctions outside the family and the story.

Because of preexisting factors before the first scene of “Nobody Said Anything,” the boy’s parents bitterly fight, so his mother’s voice sounds funny, so he says he feels sick to his stomach and stays home from school. I use “so” here in order to denote a progression indeterminately either sequential or consequential, since a paratactic lack of conjunctions in the story itself leaves it up to the reader to decide which actions have predicated others. In a similarly written passage toward the end, it is obvious that the boy’s parents are reacting angrily to the sudden appearance of a severed fish head during the middle of another argument, his father screaming, “Take that goddamn thing out of here! What in the hell is the matter with you? Take it the hell out of the kitchen and throw it in the goddamn garbage!” (WICF 20); but it remains less clear in the previous instance whether the fight the night before led to true psychosomatic nausea, whether the strangeness of his mother’s voice the next morning only coincides with the quaver in his stomach, or whether the kid just wants to ditch school. In either case, we never see what triggers an argument, although the father’s response to an (unrevealed) accusation by his wife implies that one of the children has caught him doing something incriminating and told their mother; just as absent words induce an atmosphere of menace and impending divorce, mistransmitted or misdirected messages actively cause damage to the general welfare.

The final image of the story depicts the boy standing in the dark, outside by the trash cans, cradling his half of the giant fish he had proudly struggled to help catch and with which he had wanted to derail his parents’ anger. The fish, glowing “silver under the porch light,” recalls the standard Christian iconography, possibly perverts or updates the more successfully salutary fish caught in Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” (working off Meyer 44), and reminds Carver’s readers just how often fishing pops up in his work (one more autobiographical resonance). For what it’s worth, the fish also reminded me, though a link or two further down the chain of association, of the cliché declaring that education (retraining?) is the better part of altruism: “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day; teach him how to fish and he’ll eat forever.” Yet although the boy knows how to fish, and has had to apply this knowledge along with some effort, he receives only half a fish, the front end; i.e., the end which works fine as a trophy, less so as a source of food. What he has earned through his hard work, furthermore, provides neither pride nor sustenance for the social group to which he belongs. I doubt Carver intended the closing scene of “Nobody Said Anything” to be an allegory that indicts the gap between right-wing rhetoric lauding the social benefits of individuals pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and the actual inability of many to achieve real, lasting self-esteem and self-sufficiency through their unaided labors. But we may simply look at the image as a flawed piscine Pieta, a snapshot of a mourning but hopeful pseudoparent holding the broken corpse of his sacrificial beloved as its aborted redemptive power deteriorates in the evening air. His fish will not save his family, much less the world, but he gets to feel okay about it for the moment.

“Blackbird Pie” closes with another epiphany that buffers narratorial grief about a long-term disintegration of community with a transient moment admitting the bare possibility of grace. A history professor, one of the most articulate, educated and ostensibly well-off of Carver’s protagonists, has begun the story by celebrating his excellent memory and providing examples of his erudition. He is testifying to an unseen audience about what he judges to be curious inconsistencies and impossibilities in the text of the letter pushed under the closed door of his study. He seems incapable of seeing the letter for what it is: a list of grievances compiled by his wife over twenty-three years of marriage, submitted immediately before she leaves him. Instead, he works to demonstrate a credibility founded upon an expert recollection and understanding of European history, his wife’s character and their time together, although each set of contradictory assertions he offers further undermines his authority and his reliability as a narrator, to the extent that Adam Meyer refers to him as an “emotionally blind” M. Dupin manqué trying to solve the mystery of “the ‘proffered’ letter,” and Randolph Paul Runyon finds occasion to call him “psychotic” (Meyer 158; Runyon 195). Days after the sheriff’s pickup has carried his wife into the fog, he maintains “If I know anything — and I do — if I know the slightest thing about human nature, I know she won’t be able to live without me. She’ll come back to me. And soon” (WICF 510). But “And soon” is directly followed by “Let it be soon,” and the hauteur crumbles as he at last understands and admits he will never see her again:

• It could be said . . . that to take a wife is to take a history. And if that’s so, then I understand that I’m outside history now . . . . Or you could say that my history has left me. Or that I’m having to go on without history. Or that history will now have to do without me — unless my wife writes more letters, or tells a friend who keeps a diary, say. Then, years later, someone can look back on this time, interpret it according to the record, its scrapes and tirades, its silences and innuendoes. That’s when it dawns on me that autobiography is the poor man’s history. And that I am saying good-bye to history. Good-bye, my darling” (510-11).

Having penetrated the stilted Fukuyama-meets-Frazier overtones of his valediction, one can begin to appreciate his conflation of personal, marital, and societal/conventionally-defined history, not only for conveying an emotional charge for the reader as the narrator finally decides peels the scales off his eyes. The nameless, “erased” man’s equation also relates to the postmodern realization of the constructed nature of the subject, its textuality, and its need for a social context for self-ratification, as well as to Barthelme’s subsequent discovery, possibly a first principle for a good historian, that experience itself is a language far richer and slipperier than any fixed, received account of the Battle of Lepanto (to borrow one of the events from his mnemonic demonstrations); the narrator understands his life is effectively the story of trees falling in the forest, and will only make sounds if it is read. These understandings, in turn, point to the quasi-reportorial role Carver plays in writing any of his stories, as insinuated by the line that begins, “Then, years later, someone can look back on this time, interpret it according to the record”; for I can see Carver, almost self-deprecatingly, borrowing stances and attitudes from the fuss over minimalism, summing up his own fictionalized vision of contemporary America in terms of “its scrapes and tirades, its silences and innuendoes.” While the social fabric frays and the public narrative undergoes privatization and Balkanization within a Reaganomicized information economy, each Raymond Carver story records, reconstitutes, and presents for publication and posterity slices from the lives of poor people (though the poverty may not be financial in nature). As the unusually articulate narrator of “Blackbird Pie” presents his fictional autobiographical account — in a story that ironically contains far fewer of the usual, potentially autobiographical elements from Carver’s own life — Carver walks the line between fabrication and reportage, between memories of hard times and his present experience with peace and worldly success, seeking to reconcile his creation, “Autobiography is the poor man’s history,” with the world’s truism, “History is written by the winners.”

Carver also writes a lot about food, a fact escaping or maybe dismissed by many who have written on his work. Besides discussions of Carver’s characteristic style and of the biographic parallels that might be drawn between the lives of Carver’s characters and his own, the other observation critics seem obliged to include is the prevalence of alcohol and alcoholics in his stories; yet, surprisingly, despite or perhaps because of the attention lavished on alcohol and drinking, a disproportionately small amount has been written about the role of food and eating in his work. Many critics and reviewers do mention the sacramental tenor of the meal at the end of "A Small, Good Thing," and somewhat fewer note the conflation of Scotty-the-boy and Scotty-the-cake, but I found only one discussing how Carver uses earlier, less prominent images of food to develop this motif and prepare for the final meal (or "last supper") (Bugeja 75). Although Monroe Engel contrasts the table manners of Maurice Pervin and Robert in his essay comparing D. H. Lawrence's "The Blind Man" and "Cathedral," other sources writing prior to 1988 have tended to limit their observations concerning food and eating to "A Small Good Thing.”

After Carver died, leaving the seven new stories in Where I’m Calling From as his final non-posthumous work, a flurry of essays appeared “remembering Ray” and reviewing his literary output, some managing to bring food into the mix; in a piece for Esquire, where some of Carver’s stories first appeared, Tobias Wolff recalled his good friend’s continual appetite for eating and smoking, both during and after his drinking years, while those attending to the last seven stories naturally addressed the two with food right in the titles, “Menudo” and “Blackbird Pie.” But the people writing on these two stories — myself now included, I guess — have justifiably tended to concentrate not on food or eating, but on the stories’ heightened self-reflexivity and their uncharacteristically self-aware narrators preoccupied with memory, the process of constructing cogent narratives, and their acknowledged feelings of powerlessness. Wolff’s testimonial, "Raymond Carver Had His Cake and Ate It Too," comes closest to the point I’m trying to make here, when Wolff reminds the world that his comrade was not just the recovering alcoholic everyone referred to him as, but also a chain-smoking glutton who once humorously if unrepentantly ran off with and devoured a mutual friend’s birthday cake before the candles were even in place.

In short, like their author — and again, without overly conflating a real life and fiction — Carver’s stories pay great heed to food and eating. A healthy percentage have titles that allude to gastronomy and consumption; just within the stories selected for Where I’m Calling From are “Fat,” “Vitamins,” “Menudo,” “Chef’s House,” “Blackbird Pie,” and even “A Small, Good Thing” — “’Eating is a small, good thing in a time like this,’ he said” (WICF 404). Still more stories involve prominent meals or foods, such as the trout dinners that represent domestic stability in "Chef's House," the spilled waffles that temporarily defer marital discord in “Distance,” and the ambivalently connotative feast-athons in “Fat,” “What’s in Alaska?” “Feathers,” “Cathedral,” “A Small, Good Thing,” “Boxes,” and even “Errand” (interestingly, in stories from every collection except What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the book noted for having the leanest style of the bunch). I keep hoping to meet one day that magic person who will unwisely agree to bet money that I can’t find a direct reference to food and/or eating in every single story Carver ever published, for all his stories include some significant reference to food. For example, in “The Compartment,” Myers sees a one-armed man eating fried squid, an animal which may be seen as nothing but arms; the image of the squid-eating man reflects Myers' own alienation, spiritual autocannibalism, and semi-invertebrate nature — at the last minute, Myers has suddenly lost his nerve after travelling thousands of miles to Europe, opting out of the chance for a possibly therapeutic reconciliation with his son.

It may also not be accidental that Carver places the two largest and most complex meals in Cathedral, the multi-course dinners in "Feathers" and "Cathedral," in its first and last stories, so that the meals effectively contain between them all the characters and meals of "Cathedral country" . The meals eventually lead to two very different outcomes -- one narrator loses what marital harmony he has enjoyed and gains a bitter wife and a "conniving" offspring, while the other gains some measure of wonder and forges a bond with a man his wife cherishes, which might succeed in mitigating some of the bitterness and hostility she already feels toward him. Yet in both cases, the dinners themselves are substantial -- meat, potatoes, vegetables, bread, and dessert – each weighty enough to anchor one end of this collection of narratives. Similarly, the multiple narrative frames “Fat,” a story from the first collection, revolve around the gravity well created by the arrival of a stunningly obese man at a restaurant. After speaking with her customer as she serves his equally prodigious meal, in conversations with the other staff members about him, in retelling her experience to her friend Rita, and in private thoughts left available for the reader, the waitress narrator obliquely presents her customer’s appearance and appetite as symbols of a substantiality and gusto missing from her own life.

I agree with Kirk Nesset when he reasons “that in some curious way the fat man represents to her everything Rudy [a fellow employee to whom she is also unhappily married] lacks. Polite, articulate, and ‘well-dressed,’ the fat man is the token of a kind of opulence and gracious affability which makes the waitress’s own dull life seem lean and shabby by comparison” (14). He refers to himself in the plural, a verbal tic which, in combination with his nice clothes and graciousness, evokes a sort of magnificence as well as drawing attention to his singular magnitude. Because some of his usages of “we,” “us,” and “our” may be seen as either exclusive or inclusive, they represent the potential for the waitress to achieve union with something larger than herself, although they may also merely indicate a lack of unity, and thus of completeness, within the man himself. Altogether, this strangely alluring grotesque signifies nobility, ridiculousness, hypertrophy, and lack of fulfillment. Ewing Campbell borrows Bakhtin’s words and ideas to interpret the fat man and his meal solely in cheerful terms, seeing the customer’s triple-sized “long, thick, creamy fingers” and inclusive speech as “deeply positive . . . something universal, representing all the people,” and his ravenous appetite as indicative of “a festive perception of the world . . . zest” (WICF 48 qtd. in Campbell RC: Study 13; Bakhtin 19 in ibid.; ibid.). But the man says things that suggest his graciousness and his attitude about his weight mutually stem from weary resignation toward an uncomfortable, embarrassing personal excessiveness, not from a serene satisfaction or joyful affirmation of material abundance:

• Believe me, he says, we don’t eat like this all the time, he says. And puffs. You’ll have to excuse us, he says.

  Don’t think a thing about it, please, I say. I like to see a man eat and enjoy himself, I say.

  I don’t know, he says. I guess that’s what you’d call it. And puffs. He arranges the napkin. Then he picks up his spoon (WICF 66).

So I question whether the customer is really that much more well-off than the narrator. Although he may function well enough in her mind as a symbol of all the Rabelaisan virtues missing from her own small world, an attentive reader can see that neither are happy with their state of affairs. The waitress is disappointed that while she, too, eats and eats, she “can’t gain” (68); but fat or thin, both the waitress and the customer appear trapped in an ongoing process of consumption without satisfaction, a constant clawing at the skin that fails to scratch the bone-deep itch.

And what can one say about the huge home-cooked meals in "Feathers" and "Cathedral," or the long meal of fresh baked goods that concludes "A Small, Good Thing"? Despite the dissimilar outcomes of the stories, Carver clearly establishes that both meals themselves mark special occasions, special efforts taken to prepare a special dinner for special people. The meals and their common atmosphere of hospitality reach as far back as antiquity in recalling the almost sacrosanct obligations involved in guest-host relations, obligations which in turn have traditionally comprised part of a larger code of appropriate social conduct, an unchanging blueprint for creating and sustaining community. For all anyone knew, the stranger crossing the threshold might be Zeus, Odin, an angelic servant of Adonai ready to bless this humble abode and the wonderfully socialized people in it. The friendless, privately antipathetic "Bub" opens up first to his blind guest Robert and then to a sublime experience, "like nothing else in my life up to now, . . . . It's really something" (374-75); the Weisses eat in light and warmth with a former enemy turned remorseful host (404-05); even the future unhappy couple in "Feathers" are still happy enough when visiting Bud and Olla, the quartet's dinner overseen by a peacock, favorite bird of Juno, goddess of marriage and motherhood (346).

But Carver generally writes of times and places falling after and beyond tradition, his stories representing events in a world where unchanging things have changed, not for the better. The nature of any given network of relationships is transitory and contingent at best, each bit of social fabric unraveling as quickly as it was rewoven. Eventually, the groups who do succeed in eating together and affirming a sense of fellowship and common identity must also collapse back into their individual parts; although periodic eating is, of course, vital, leaving open the possibility of future fellowship and other implied epiphanies, no one meal can last forever. Howard, Anne and the baker “talked on into the early morning, . . . and they did not think of leaving” (405), but what Carver leaves unsaid is that Howard and Anne will inevitably have to leave the warm confines of the bakery and learn to lead lives without their son — “the Weisses avoid confronting a host of existential demons, including Scotty’s death and the resulting life-long grief and aloneness with which they have yet to spend a single night” (Powell 647ƒ). What at first appeared a redemptory Last Supper may in fact be the first of many meals commemorating the anti-Passover. In "Feathers," the harsh cry of the peacock repeatedly startles the dinner guests, making the hairs of the narrator's neck stand on end; his wife mentally rolls her eyes at Bud and Olla's coy coupling of love and orthodontics; the narrator himself refers to his hosts' beloved baby as "Bar none, . . . the ugliest baby I had ever seen. It was so ugly I couldn't say anything" (WICF 349). Yet for all the dubious current blessings of Juno, this evening will mark the last happy episode in the narrator's marriage and the last time the couples meet as one. In addition to offering the clearest, most positive moment of epiphany in the three stories, maybe in any Carver story, "Cathedral" avoids the downbeat ending of "Feathers" and the melodrama some have found in "A Small, Good Thing"; but even here, the moment will pass, Robert will leave, and the narrator's sense of grace and community will have skipped over his wife, the one person he really needs to get along with.

Besides hinting at the merely partial, fleeting extent to which feeding and sheltering one's guests nowadays can celebrate and manifest past cultural values, assets, and transformations, the big meals in these stories illustrate the excessive consumption that marks the behavior of many of Carver’s characters. Physical ingestion substitutes for interaction on a deeper level, a sort of triumph of the “I-it” relationship, when the narrator of “Cathedral,” severed from God and his fellow man, irreverently but sincerely prays before dinner for consumption and deliverance from outside communication, just before all three silently, individually plow through what is only literally the common meal:

• “Pray the phone won’t ring and the food doesn’t get cold,” I said.
  We dug in. We ate everything there was to eat on the table. We ate like there was no tomorrow. We didn’t talk. We ate. We scarfed. We grazed that table. We were into serious eating. [. . . .]
  We finished everything, including half a strawberry pie. For a few moments, we sat as if stunned. Sweat beaded on our faces. Finally, we got up from the table and left the dirty plates. We didn’t look back (364).

Like the skinny waitress and her obese customer, excessive physical consumption does not bring inner satisfaction or interpersonal harmony — the wife and Robert aren’t any better friends than before, she’s still irritated with her husband, and the narrator remains wary and resentful of the strange, loud blind man who gets along better with his wife than he. It would be too much to propose that in all cases, characters actively try to fill spiritual voids via material means — eating too much, drinking too much, buying too much — but it might be fair to notice how often Carver inserts images of material abundance and excessive consumption into the accounts of people somehow reeling from the absence of community or perhaps simply marveling at how wrong things have gone. For instance, at the end of “A Small, Good Thing,” despite their grief and exhaustion, the Weisses do listen to the baker as he “began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years,” and his own childlessness allows him to empathize with their anguish at losing their son; but he delivers his cheerless testimony amidst “all the rolls in the world,” the ghosts of thousands of wedding and birthday cakes, and memories of “[i]cing knuckle-deep” (405).

Nor do the Weisses eat an exorbitant amount, although days of no appetite as she watched her son die leaves Ann “suddenly hungry” in the baker’s kitchen (ibid.). The baker’s role as a community provider with a “necessary trade,” something of a culinary minister, categorically enables him to interpret their consumption as meaningful communication, as clear and encouraging proof that the work he has chosen in lieu of family does have a salutary effect on people outside the bakery. So while both grieving parents eat without talking, and eat quite a bit, the food they eat operates as one of the media through which human contact is established, their present hunger counterbalanced by several prior days of fasting. What I have been calling “excessive consumption” involves a certain amount of surplus, of consuming more than one needs. Sometimes it involves consuming more than one really wants, if the postprandial exertions in “Cathedral” are any indication — satiation to the point of stupefaction instead of satisfaction. Sometimes it involves consuming one thing to quench an appetite for something else, like filling the hole in a relationship with Belgian waffles, or whatever Fran has been eating to “get fat on” the narrator of “Feathers” while their marriage sours.

And since this is Carver, “excessive consumption” includes the alcoholism about which so many critics have written so much, and which so many characters have addressed so little. From the general avoidance of the word “alcoholism” in the stories, to Lloyd’s normalization of his champagne intake in “Careful,” to Duane and Holly discussing moderation over a six-pack or some whiskey in “Gazebo,” the people in the stories find it difficult to admit how much they drink, much less stop drinking to a harmful extent. The sober members of a dissolving family or relationship may have plenty to say about their loved one’s intake, but the usual Carverian miscommunication or deferral of the Big Point often gets in the way. Peter J. Donahue explains the excessiveness of the drinking, as well as the alcoholics’ common inability to recognize or articulate their problem, in “Alcoholism as Ideology in Raymond Carver’s ‘Careful’ and ‘Where I’m Calling From.’” His essay presents alcoholism as a Foucauldian ideology which, like any ideology, must repress any recognition of its function, concealing “the fact that it is an ideology while simultaneously creating within the alcoholic the illusion of a coherent and self-determining identity” (54). The need for a drink becomes a sort of predatorial signified towards which every signifier used by an alcoholic inevitably points, so that “the job that once represented money for rent and food now means money for a fifth of Night Train” (55). Or more frequently for Carver’s characters, the ideology of alcoholism naturalizes not only the alcoholic condition itself, but also the concomitant unemployment and dissolution of relationships accompanying the alcoholism, so that the loss of the job representing money for food, rent, and by extension, the preservation of the family seems less than noteworthy, at least to those located within the event horizon of alcoholism’s black hole of signification. Complicating the usual scenario in Carver is that alcoholism is only part of the drive to excessive consumption in stories other than “Careful,” “Chef’s House” and “Where I’m Calling From”; e.g., in “Preservation,” Sandy must cook an entire refrigerator’s worth of food, while her husband sits on the couch doing nothing but consuming coffee, television, and newspapers, primarily because of household breakdowns caused and complicated by his unemployment.

“Are These Actual Miles?” in Where I’m Calling From, an augmented version of “What Is It?” from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, offers one of the most salient examples of the third variety of pathological consumption, using material goods and the power to buy them as the bases of happiness and community. Toni and Leo are a couple who have gone bankrupt, having overextended themselves buying appliances that have since been repossessed, other “stuff that wore out or fell to pieces long ago[,] . . . some big parties back there, some fine travel,” and, of course, “Food, that was one of the big items. They gorged on food. he figures thousands on luxury items alone” (132). Now Toni gets dressed to kill in a new top, new suit, and new handbag, preparing to go to dinner with a car salesman to whom they hope to sell the convertible which is their last remaining luxury item. After an anxious night on Leo’s part, during which he contemplates suicide over his second of six large scotches and wonders why it’s so hard to contact his wife at the restaurant, Toni returns the next morning drunk, sleepless, and with the check in her purse, driven home by the salesman in the convertible. Leo looks at her and cocks his fist; she screams “Bankrupt! . . . You son of a bitch!” then passes out (136). At the bottom line, there has been too much eating, too much drinking, too much buying, and infidelity on both sides (Leo once brought a strange woman home when Toni and the kids were away). Leo falls asleep tracing Toni’s stretch marks and remembering when their sporty convertible was shiny and new. The juxtaposed final images of the departed car and the worn belly of his disaffected wife lead Vivian Gornick first to bow to the “remarkable pathos” of the naked moment as constructed by Carver’s powerful writing, but then Gornick turns away. As she puts it:

• I cannot be persuaded that life between Toni and Leo was good when the convertible stood gleaming in the driveway. What’s more, I don’t think Carver thinks life was good then, either. I think he yearns to believe that it should have been good, not that it actually was. This yearning is the force behind his writing (Gornick par. 6).

I see Gornick’s assessment touching on several issues with which I have also been occupied up to this point: that what Carver leaves out is as important as what he leaves in, in that it asks the reader to fill in the blanks and complete the picture; that his characters’ excessive consumption of food, drink, and consumer products stand as their failed material solutions to a nonmaterial problem, the absence of a sense of meaning in their lives; and that these absences — in the writing style, in the characters’ fictional lives, and in the society of those whose very real lives Carver glimpses and reports on in remade form — collectively do not represent some sublime quality laying beyond what scrotty little proles can hope for in this present vale of tears, are not the signs of an existential angst suffered by impoverished souls become hellishly aware of their personal shortcomings, although this might seem to come closer. Rather, what is missing is missing from this world, not another, not the next, and is something Carver’s white working-class characters have been led to expect they would receive if they worked hard enough, tried to get along, and didn’t freak out.

What is missing is the payoff from “the American dream [sic] they watch on the television screen every night, the American dream of which they expected to have a slice, but never got in more than a spoonful” (Henning 689-90). This American dream is more an explicit myth than a self-concealing ideology, for the characters have presumably seen it in action not only on television, but in the lives of their fathers and grandfathers since the Second World War. One might variously trace its origin or origins back to pre-Ecclesiastes Judaic theology, Calvinism, Enlightenment ideals, pioneer/Western virtues, and/or simple immigrant grit, but what persists in any case is the concept that a life of hard work, moral fiber, self-reliance, and self-denial will reap rewards in this world. In America, we figure good things are supposed to happen to good, industrious people who are humble enough to be grateful for success, yet when they hit a rough patch, proud enough to stand on their own two feet and eschew handouts. But Stephanie Coontz spends a chapter and change in her social history of the family, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, establishing that the two main family types that are usually held up as models of traditional American independence, “the frontier family, archetype of American self-reliance, and the 1950s suburban family, whose strong moral values and work ethic are thought to have enabled so many to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, . . . probably tie for the honor of being the most heavily subsidized in American history” (73). In short, Coontz exposes “American self-reliance” as a mythical conceit backed up in reality by the same types of government social programs and reinvestment in the citizenry that underwent steady erosion after 1974. Still conditioned by the same sink-or-swim rhetoric, though the lifeguards have recently been sent home, Carver’s characters alone are left to suffer guilt at their not being strong enough to make it to shore.

Coontz additionally points out another contradiction between two conceits themselves, one which places the excessive consumption in context. Starting in the late nineteenth century, after the ethic of hard work and self-restraint that had industrialized America gave most industries the capacity for mass production, political economists realized that if everyone deferred gratification, no one would buy the new products. And so the volume of advertising increased tenfold between 1870 and 1900, unquestionably becoming by the 1920’s a new and widespread ethos that both promised and compelled “a better way of life” for Americans. “As a newspaper in Muncie, Indiana, editorialized: ‘The American citizen’s first importance to his country is no longer that of citizen but that of consumer’” (170). Consumer culture really took off in the 1950’s, making patriotism, freedom and consumption interchangeable ideas; the marketplace extended into what had previously been private personal turf, “the 1950’s family, supposed the peak of tradition, . . . in many ways simply the ‘wrapper’ for an extension of commodity production to new areas of life” (174).

By the era Carver wrote about, the old dominant ethic of hard work and asceticism had been firmly overlaid, if not supplanted by what food sociologist Jukka Gronow calls “fun ethics,” a new ethics of pleasure (35). Gronow proceeds to cite Gerald McCracken’s version of hedonism, according to which goods become bridges to displaced meanings, and the pursuit of such displaced meaning, which is characteristic of the modern system of consumption, “‘commits us to consumption that exceeds physical and most ordinary cultural needs. It commits us to a consumer system in which the individual always achieves sufficiency as a temporary condition, no sooner established than repudiated’” (McCracken 115 qtd. in Gronow 48). Frustrated from realizing the American Dream through the route of patient industriousness, the lives of Carver’s characters are similarly blocked from finding any lasting sense of purpose via Plan B, the accelerating consumer treadmill available as a supplement to/of the old ethos.

Because their manufactured nature makes them more or less contemporary, and because they profess to address a sort of “hidden hunger” similar to the empty angst suffered by individuals in the fiction, vitamins may be seen as an ideal product of consumption for the world Carver simultaneously records and presents; because a vitamin’s effects are so hard to evaluate — possibly sublime, possibly negligible or absent — they recall both the lofty-by-default dream of satisfied, significant success in the “land of opportunity” and the absent realization of that promise, the ache and menace surrounding the characters. Michael Krasny has spoken in lecture of the status of vitamins as ideal commodity in “Vitamins,” a story whose narrator begins the first paragraph by remarking that he had a job, albeit a meaningless “nothing job,” but his partner Patti didn’t and felt less a person as a result: “After a while, she wanted a job. She said she needed one for her self-respect. So she started selling multiple vitamins door to door” (10/17/96; 4/3/97; WICF 245). Like the red-white-and-blue-labeled products of Amway, the vitamin business Patti enters valorizes the personal fulfillment through economic success and the entrepreneurial spirit that are parts of the “American Way.”

But the consumption of vitamins exists at a remove from the liturgical possibilities inherent to the meals prepared and eaten together in other Carver stories; vitamins have no cook but the impersonal mechanism of the factory to stand as quasi-eucharistic minister, and they tend to be eaten in a flash and on the go, within desacramentalized time and desanctified space. Patti soon discovers that there is nothing holy about the vitamins gig; nor can it help her realize any worldly desires, as she discovers after the market ironically dries up during the otherwise heavy commercial traffic of the Christmas season. She herself has a quick mind and “personality,” “[b]ut the girls who worked for her were always changing,” as abundant, disposable and devalued a commodity as the vitamins themselves (ibid.). Her boyfriend, the one character whose relationship to Patti is not primarily commercial, steps out on her with her one remaining subordinate, who is now planning to leave town like the rest after vitamins sales have gone south. Instead of fulfilling her dreams, her business infects them, so that she continuously dreams that she is selling vitamins. At the end of the story, she wakes up in a panic in the middle of the night, convinced she has overslept on a work day and desperate to find a vitamins sample case that isn’t there (263). Patti has also become her only customer, a fact that explicitly conflates the almost vampiric extent to which her failing enterprise has taken over her life and the more obvious forms of excessive consumption, notably her vitamin intake and the hard drinking of all the characters throughout the story. The accidents, adultery, misguided professions of lesbian love, hangovers, and hostility surrounding the alcohol consumption in “Vitamins” are reflected in the physically effects vitamin consumption has had on her in addition to their psychic toll: “I’m sick as hell myself . . . . I think taking all these vitamins is doing something to my skin. Does my skin look okay to you? Can a person get overdosed on vitamins? I’m getting to where I can’t even take a crap like a normal person” (252). In the flat voice that has revealed from the beginning his disbelief in the American Dream and the dignity of labor, and that has gradually made evident his detachment from both his partner and the emotional content of the story he tells, the narrator puts “Vitamins” to bed by telling Patti to go back to sleep, while he knocks stuff out of the medicine chest looking for aspirin (263). In the end, compared to her manic distress and the exhausted collapse of her personal business, perhaps his faithlessness, resignation and apparent apathy, hallmarks of a more typically Carverian character, are no less reasonable responses to the unstable meanings of the contemporary postindustrial landscape, when attempts to find things to lessen one’s pain result in everything falling down.