Thesis: Carver Selling And Consuming Communities in 1980’s America (Part 3)

As things fell apart for the working man, the disjunction between the promises of the American Dream and American reality for many threatened a certain suspension of disbelief that got people out of bed and off to work. So it made some sense to elect an ex-actor as President in order to keep folks off the streets and in their seats, watching the national drama unfold in the theaters of their imaginations. Likewise, at a time when the Catholic Church faced declining numbers and prestige, the College of Cardinals picked as Pope Karol Joseph Wojtyla, once an aspiring thespian himself, whose biographies note how he bravely, faithfully followed his priestly vocation at a clandestine seminary in Nazi-occupied Poland and how he later spoke out against the godless Communists. Throughout the 1980’s, together with Margaret Thatcher, they became perhaps the most prominent spokesmen and champions of The Way Things Used To Be, a black-and-white world where family values, a strong back, and an active hatred of the bad guys would exalt the virtuous and the strong. Hanging tough, being good, ostensibly returning to their respective canons, the United States and Great Britain could recreate the morality and courage displayed during World War Two, re-manifest the supposed material and moral Golden Age of the 1950’s Pax Americana, and keep the world safe from the twin menaces of fascism and communism. Led by a pontiff whose life story positioned him in opposition to these exact two political ideologies, right-wing hierarchical Christianity could similarly reclaim some of the influence and prestige it had been hemorrhaging since the Reformation. We could all skip over the changes, insecurities, and awareness of limitation that were introduced in the generation between now (1980’s) and Then. (Why shouldn’t such a glorious and Godly time be capitalized?) The fact that the representations of the historical moments summoned forth were very much a partial picture of those times themselves was left beside the point, at least in Republican and Tory speeches and in papal bulls.

Stephanie Coontz, of course, spends the whole of The Way We Never Were demonstrating that American history lacks any such moment in which society truly realized ideals like the American Dream or the comfortably universal and absolute “family values” people were talking so much about in 1992, when her book was published. But in focusing on the facts behind our inherited myths, she spends proportionately less time discussing the particular motivating factors behind 1980’s-style “illusioneering.” This is too bad, since she might have made the interesting observation that, oddly enough, the radical conservatism of Reagan, John Paul II, and Thatcher in part resulted from and capitalized upon the same postmodern condition they opposed (Appignanesi 153). According to the tentative three-phase historic model of postmodernism offered by Geoffrey Green (although without pulling in any of that post hoc, ergo propter hoc business that postmodernism supposedly does away with), the pioneers who broke conventional forms and blended genres in early postmodern moments were followed by those who gave voice to the marginalized (1/28/98). In politics as well as the arts, redefinitions of “politics” and “the arts” bred and multiplied, and the represented experiences of women, African-Americans, Chicanos, gays, and other Others edged closer to the mainstream. But as postmodernism assimilated into United States mainstream popular culture, as more and more voting consumers of the supposedly silent majority demonstrated that they grokked pomo, the political establishment and other conventional institutions began coopting postmodern strategies for their own purposes. Admittedly, one might interpret Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II’s common nostalgic evocation of the (fictional) past and their calls to canonical fundamentalism as rejections of postmodernism, as counterarguments to others’ claims that the weight of the past grand narratives of redemption were fatally pressing their vast bodies down into a post-Pleistocene tar pit of postmodernity while scads of verminous little narrative fragments happily skated along its gooey surface. But one could also read their collected texts as the right-wing retro pomo that would inspire Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (inferred from Appignanesi 165-167), a recontextualizing transformation from end (supercession) of grand narratives to eschatologically-charged end (culmination) of grand narratives; e.g., after the Bomb hits — soon — the good, the industrious, the rich and the mighty (if I may be Reaganomically redundant) will live with Jesus in a marvelous Mayberry of well-manicured lawns, beautiful wives and children, pleasant neighbors, well-aged Eucharistic scotch, and convenient freeway access to those gritty downtown districts where the kinky houris live (“How’d the Other women manage to get Up Here?”).

One may go on to ask where the life and fiction of Raymond Carver fit into all this. That is, where do he and his work fit in relation to the proposed three general phases of postmodernism? Or, leaving theory aside, why and how did Carver happen to sell so well during the 1980’s? While his characters may have run the socioeconomic gamut, most of them perched at the low end. But the stories themselves appeared either in small literary magazines like Antaeus and Tri-Quarterly or, more so once the 1980’s were underway, in glossy lifestyle magazines like Esquire and The New Yorker. One could argue whether both kinds of magazines signified upper middle-class status or merely higher education and fairly developed aesthetic sensibilities; suffice it to say that all such periodicals targeted a readership that had more schooling and made more money than the great majority of Carver’s characters. What prevented Raymond Carver from nobly dying of tuberculosis, penniless and unpublished, in a freezing artist’s garret? In a decade that touted winning at all costs, the power of positive thinking, why would society’s winners want to buy books about a bunch of losers?

For one thing, I think it helped that Carver’s own rampantly alcoholic past fed into myths largely inherited from the Romantics — still the current “old money” of cultural tropists — of art-as-excess and of the artist as self-destructive genius chasing the sublime. These attitudes had made their latest appearance amidst the social and artistic turbulence of the New Left in the 1960’s and 1970’s, during the last gasps of the welfare state as we almost knew it, while writers confabulated and wrote texts for a “literature of exhaustion” that pushed past the boundaries of old generic forms and incorporated the experiences of formerly marginalized populations. Although the legend of his alcoholic lifestyle during these earlier decades fit in neatly with thousands of other people’s wild memories and anecdotes of counter-cultural self-medication, Carver effectively rejected neo-Romantic modes of art and life through the leanness of his style and subjects and by his subsequent, equally legendary, sudden sobriety. Just as his style can be linked to the bleak cynicism of post-Vietnam recession years (cf. Tess Gallagher’s quote), his personal epiphany and newfound abstinence anticipate 1980’s phenomena: the increased distribution of twelve-step programs, the rise of “born-again” Christianity in culture and politics, and the widespread valuation of physically fit and “pure” bodies (which in literary terms might be understood as an eradication of the Other through an ascetic “trimming of fat”).

In terms of first-phase postmodernism, Carver’s style appeared to ignore the formal innovations of previous decades in favor of an easy-to-read, stripped-down realism whose “normal American” narrators and national brand names seemed disconcertingly accessible to lower common denominators. But as Frederick Barthelme attested, this brand of consumer-savvy, stripped-down prose was informed by the confabulists’ postmodern experimentation as much as it reacted to it. Carver’s work in particular reflects a world where conversations consist of partial utterances making sense only in context; where it is almost explicitly stated that such meaning only arises if the reader and listener succeed at the task of interpreting both what is said and what is not, and where interpretive success (especially for the listening character) is by no means guaranteed; where stories often are told by narrators speaking to unknown figures, only possibly the readers, telling stories about people who have stories about people talking to people, each narrative frame providing a fragment of what will remain an unfinished whole. I think that whether they do it consciously or not, people contiguous to Carver’s texts (both characters inside and readers outside) come to understand that everything we can apprehend is constructed by language, and that language is inadequate to transparently present any ultimate reality. These understandings find their material/thematic analogs in the tropes of consumption that run through the stories and the American world. The old grand narratives having fragmented, what looks to be one of the last universal truths — “we must consume certain things to live” — is tied to the economic health of a postindustrial society and filtered through ubiquitous advertisements, so that it becomes first simply “to consume is to live,” then hypertrophies into “the more you consume, the more you live.” The result is a state of affairs experienced by, or at least familiar to, both Carver’s characters and readers engaged in the conspicuous consumption of the 1980’s.

The stories may also call to mind reactionary postmodernism’s brand of nostalgia-as-cure, the positive-thinking promises of radical Republicanism that society could be cured of cancer if we all visualized a time before it metastasized. As if responding to motifs similar to those running through Reagan’s presidential scripts, Carver’s characters confirm an overall keen sense of loss at the current absence of the American Dream, valorize home cooking, at least theoretically value civic virtues like neighborliness and hospitality, and otherwise seem to aspire to humbly keep on keeping on like their parents and grandparents did. But the underlying nostalgic regret in a Carver story really bears only a surface similarity to the moral and economic anachronization pitched by Ronald Reagan. The core narratives in stories like “Sacks,” “Distance,” and “The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off” are set a generation ago, but raise the same Carverian specters of unemployment, infidelity, conversational miscommunication, and lack of community as his stories set in the present day. Paralleling Coontz’s thesis that we never were “the way we were,” Carver, unlike Reagan, is not asking readers to envision the 1980’s in terms of the 1950’s, but to more clearly see the 1950’s through the eyes of the 1980’s. Critics identifying with the public sector and the Left may have worried that Carver and his ilk were the slick, soulless underwriters of Reagan-era America — Robert Dunn referred to minimalism as “private interest fiction,” while Joe Don Bellamy labeled his critical essay “A Downpour of Literary Republicanism” (“Shrink” 24; Bellamy 31) — yet figures located elsewhere on the political continuum were decidedly less than sanguine about their supposed puppets. After interviewer David Applefield persisted past “push” into “shove,” causing the circumspect Carver finally to admit his deep disaffection with the private sector and with the people who offered it as a solution to the United States’ economic and cultural woes, the author went on to declare:

• Certain right-wing critics don’t like my writing, in particular, people associated with Hilton Kramer’s The New Criterion. They want me to put a happy face on America. They say that the stories of mine that are going out into the world are not showing America in the best light, and if there are people like this, the ones I depict, the dispossessed, well, they deserve what they get, and the implication is that I’m rather un-American for bringing these stories to public attention, including, and maybe especially, to foreigners (Applefield 14).

Raymond Carver: treacherously disobedient PR flack for Reaganomics? I doubt it. Instead, I propose that by setting stories with his downbeat themes both in the post-WWII era and in the current decade, Carver effectively established a two-front war of dis-disinformation jamming the ideological transmissions coming out of Washington, D.C., both those pitching a return to a burnished past and those trumpeting an ongoing “morning in America.”

Looking back at the second tentative movement in postmodernism, taking the “dispossessed” Carver says are occupying his stories to be socially, economically, and maybe chemically “marginalized,” one can indeed claim that Carver is representing the experiences of those who have been marginalized in the past. Sort of. As brought out in Chapter One’s examination of “minimalism,” the term as applied to contemporary literature points to a certain classism concealed in aesthetic terms, one more permutation of Joseph Addison’s construction of taste as the shibboleth to the haute bourgeoisie, allowing the educated critic to sniff at those who prefer Pabst Blue Ribbon to Heineken by bemoaning the artistic representation of unclever people drinking the cheaper brand. Yet Chapter One also initiates the observations that almost all the people in Carver’s stories were Gentile white heterosexuals like himself, and that all of the narrators and protagonists are. That is, I assume they are, which may have something to do with my buying into the biographical fallacy and something to do with the categorization of the ideal normal Self and the abnormal Other in American society. Assuming that Carver’s characters (and their real-world working-class referents) are indeed exposed to class and economic bias, and assuming that they are in fact all straight Euro-goys, my take is that he is, finally, performing the function of language towards myth described by Leslie Fiedler in “Pity and Fear: Images of the Disabled in Literature and the Popular Arts.” That is, Carver’s literary representations of ordinary people raise unconscious societal impulses — maybe, for example, ‘You’d be rich like us good Americans if you proles weren’t such mute boozy degenerates — up to the level of full (published) consciousness to serve as a grid through which to screen reality (Fiedler 34). Carver’s stories, in effect, bring the usual myths about the identity of the average American alongside darker understandings justifying the attempt to make economic Others out of those commonly supposed to stand at the hard-working mayonnaise heart of the American Self. In implicitly testifying to the plight of those who might be considered privileged in terms of race, religion, and sexual orientation, the stories claim “We have met the piss-boy, and he is related to us.”

Other factors outside the fiction itself contributed to Carver’s inclusion into the canon of the moment, like the fact that the buzz about him and his writing reached the ears of more publishers at a time when the major houses were swallowing up greater percentages of market share and operating in terms of finding the Next Big Thing. Looking at the contemporary state of American publishing, many have chosen as their usual suspect the Supreme Court’s 1979 ruling in Thor Power Tool Company v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue (O’Donnell par. 1). Prior to Thor Power, companies often would depreciate for tax purposes the value of slow-moving inventory, privately accounting for the eventual loss of profits through remaindering and pulping titles with a limited audience. By eliminating this tax dodge, Thor Power made it more expensive for publishers to carry inventory from year to year; e.g., a backstock of wonderfully imaginative novels written in Navajo and Old High Zemblan, originally determined to have a market value of $30,000,000 in 1973, would now be taxed as $30,000,000’s worth every year, regardless of how little the publisher could realistically sell the books for. The apparent result, once all the calculations were made, was for publishers to release larger print runs of fewer and less risky titles, to be sold like hotcakes, kept around a while longer, than destroyed. Smaller publishers, who relied more on their backstock and couldn’t manage huge print runs, died or were eaten by larger houses. On the other hand, John g1 calls into question the singular influence of Thor Power, noting that

• the “blockbuster complex,” which Thomas Whiteside describes as characteristic of the direction publishing has taken in the last decades of the 20th century, may in fact have been with us well before the advent of the cause (conglomerate ownership of publishing houses) to which he attributes it. As Gedin himself notes [whoever he is], in 1901 [my italics] “Publisher’s Weekly maintained that of the 1,900 titles published during the preceding year, a maximum of 100 had sold more than 10,000 copies. Profits, and in some cases they could be huge, were thus earned on vast printings of a very few books” (“Book Market II” par. 4).

Either way, it’s fair to say that Thor Power, at the very least, exacerbated existing trends in the publishing business. I believe that due to the “blockbuster complex,” whatever its cause, the titles that successfully hit the market also effectively received a probationary membership to the Canon Club. In Carver’s case, his timing was right, his buzz was strong, he had Gordon Lish on his side at a time when Lish’s power and authority better approximated his megalomania, his publisher was the giant Alfred A. Knopf, his examination of American consumption was both fresh and an old story (and made a nice thematic fit with the new consume-and-dispose cycle of publishing), and the fact that he wrote short stories increased his probability of getting a hit single with some legs.

American business paid more and closer attention to marketing techniques in the 1980’s (which I find another general example of postmodern strategies being coopted by mainstream institutions; e.g., the recontextualization of spin-doctoring; targeting marginal communities instead of selling to Everyman ), a shift reflected in the publishing world, at least over at Random House. David Kaufmann’s essay links Carver’s success back to his second editor, young up-and-comer Gary Fisketjon, who in 1984, Newsweek’s “Year of the Yuppie,” “launched a new line of trade paperbacks [including Carver’s Cathedral] devoted to contemporary fiction and called, somewhat paradoxically, Vintage Contemporaries” (95). This imprint was tailor-made for the young urban professionals who were remarkable for their youth, apparent sophistication — both qualities that would be attracted to the contemporary and the fictive — ”and their commitment to the pursuit and ostentatious display of wealth” (94). The target audience, already wielders of considerable financial capital, eagerly purchased these paperbacks that cost as much as a hardcover, equating the higher cover price with (and, collectively, succeeding in converting it into) a similarly large amount of cultural capital. Fisketjon had learned from an earlier fiasco, when he had unsuccessfully released a series of Don DeLillo’s books in mass-market “pocket book” format; he decided that people who buy books that look like trash want books that read like trash, re-released DeLillo’s novels as trade paperbacks, and fared very well (96).

The oxymoronic title of the new publishing line served a practical purpose by combining the idea of the “contemporary,” the fresh, the sexy, with a prefabricated notion of the particular past-ness traditionally marking the canonical (the “classic” or “vintage”). I think this seeming paradox was, in fact, well-established in American society at large during the 1980’s, as Reaganism peculiarly blended new, more amoral (“contemptuary” for “contemporary”?) forms of personal/corporate entrepreneurialism with faux-nostalgic representations of a Hollywoodized, 1950’s suburban America (which once more points us back toward the third movement of postmodernism). In addition, the six flagship Vintage Contemporary titles each contained blurbs from some of the other five authors on their back covers, creating a web of mutual citation that would eventually re-recommend the reader’s original selection to him, a testament to his good taste and erudition, as well as supply a centripetal force toward the creation of a canon of hip, smart literature. Kaufmann also implies that some of Fisketjon’s success may be traced back to a manifesto in the January 1984 issue of Publisher’s Weekly, in which financial guru (and publisher) John Dessauer urged the importance of marketing; Fisketjon’s maneuvers obviously at least echo Dessauer’s sentiment, but what was perhaps his most successful strategy diverged from Dessauer’s emphasis of advertising and direct sales. Instead, Fisketjon exclusively touted cover design — “All the titles in the fledgling series were going to share the same package: they would all have the same trim size, design and typography. Their cover art would be similar” (95).

This circumvented the usual lack of trademark identification in trade paperback publishing, allowing potential Vintage Contemporaries readers to develop a brand loyalty to the imprint, even to a specific author; I myself own all of Carver’s fiction (except Short Cuts, which hardly counts) in Vintage Contemporaries editions, for reasons both conscious and not. Still today, all the Vintage Contemporaries editions of Carver’s books bear the by-now familiar arrangement of elements on the spine: the Vintage logo; the author’s name printed in white sans-serif letters on a colored background; and the book title printed in the same font, in colored letters equally spaced against a white background. All the books have covers designed by Lorraine Louie, whom I’m guessing must have come up with the basic template for the whole imprint. Every illustration on a front cover is by Garnet Henderson, every author photograph (front or back cover) is by Marion Ettlinger.

It looks as though the first Vintage editions of Carver books published while he was alive (Fires, Cathedral, WWTAWWTAL) all have cover illustrations, while posthumous works and editions (WICF, No Heroics, Please, WYPBQ,P?) bear his dearly departed mug on their covers; after his fame, the articles, the essays, the photos, and his untimely death, Carver’s likeness seems to have become an integral part of the cover design. Putting an author’s face right there on the front cover of his or her book seems to indicate a sort of posthumousness and canonicity, since it’s usually the dead or the famous whose likenesses appear in that location. (There might be legal reasons for this, but I don’t know.) Seeing a writer’s face on his book’s front cover also reminds me of a comment made in a Williams College alumni profile of Fisketjon, in which the writer of the article likens Vintage Contemporaries titles to “snazzy” record albums, a reasonable enough comparison for me to make the “hit single” reference above (Rogovoy par. 9); such a fusion of the para-genres of paperback cover design and record album design further exemplifies the recontextualizations of corporate postmodernism. And, in addition to encouraging brand loyalty through a comfortingly recognizable uniformity, the slick, bright covers of Vintage Contemporaries titles solicited audience interest by being stylish and of the moment.

By introducing the newest crop of literary texts and figures, specifically Carver and Cathedral, into the calculus of cool that had long assessed the value of particular musical acts, Fisketjon, in effect, invested his line of “serious books” in two markets of cultural-capital valuation. The books could be considered worthy assets both in terms of high-brow snob appeal and according to the consciously lower-class-cum-countercultural sensibility informing “cool.” Both the men and the little girls could find something to know, understand, and like about this hot new imprint that almost seemed to have burst through the back door of the publishing world. The general cover design was slick, hip, as sleekly functional yet disposable as any warehouse lighting or synthesizer pop melody; on the other hand, the seemingly-inflated cover price of each book and the design’s uniformity spoke to the upscale spending habits of the line’s target market and attested to the consistently high value of each book. The downscale themes in Carver engaged Yuppies’ pseudo-bohemian instincts and nostalgia for their collective socially-conscientious past, but his characters’ typical poverty and spiritual malaise could help relieve any troubled or guilty feelings in a well-off reader by demonstrating that the lower orders weren’t any better off than he or she was.

Finally, it probably didn’t hurt Carver’s success that he played the game very well himself, only writing positive book reviews, mainly out of what seems to have been real nice-guy-ness and a strong desire to be charitable towards, if not unreservedly supportive of other writers. So one can assume he didn’t have to bend over backwards to come up with his share of the complimentary blurbs for the Vintage Contemporaries flagship titles. In his 1989 New York Times Book Review eulogy, Jay McInerney, Carver’s colleague and his former student at Syracuse University, mentions that Carver “couldn’t understand writers who wrote negative reviews . . . . Among the very few people that Ray vocally disliked were . . . two critics who had attacked his own work, and writers who had attacked any of his friends” (24). Because many of these writers were also academics, as was Carver, they were in a position to introduce his work to students (another group marked by youth, apparent sophistication, and, frequently, some first-hand experience with material comforts.) and to write scholarly essays on it, complementing commercial success with critical attention. By means of Carver’s backscratching, talent, and the timeliness of his concerns, his work was disseminated by many of the same institutions his stories elided or inherently critiqued.

This led to my feeling a little bit ungracious myself at not being convinced that the sincerity of the compassion and enthusiasm he demonstrated towards others’ writings was unadulterated by some amount of cold calculation. I found it interesting that in his review of Richard Ford’s The Ultimate Good Luck, Carver neglects to mention that Richard Ford is one of his two best friends (No Heroics, Please 192-4). At first I wrinkled my delicately ethical nose when reading Carver’s remarks on the back of Bright Lights, Big City, another Vintage Contemporaries flagship title, where he leaves out his past relationship with and influence on Jay McInerney. McInerney himself has seldom mentioned in interviews that Gary Fisketjon was his closest friend at Williams College. Then again, the reader doesn’t possess the inalienable right to total disclosure of all that is said to be true, or what good is fiction and what fun is pumping people for fascinating rumors? Without moralizing about how many conflicts of interest can fit on the head of a pin, a metaphysical question chiefly argued among those who don’t have to make a living, let me instead take the unqualified success of Vintage Contemporaries and the various successes of their varied flagship-title authors as a real-world (if tongue-in-cheek) example of the mythic nature of the American Dream. Capitalizing on one’s relationships to become successful, instead of relying strictly on oneself, won’t send anyone to hell; on the contrary, as Carver’s fiction amply demonstrates, the absence of viable connections and the lack of success are what poison the soul.

Using a prose style frequently pigeonholed as “minimalism” by his opponents, Raymond Carver charted the personal, moral, and socioeconomic inconsistencies of contemporary America. At first sight just one more realist in a long line of realists, he contravenes this simplistic assessment through his widespread use of parataxis, precisely-chosen (if often ambiguous) wording, brand names, and menacing absences in the language of his narratives. Once the reader, unlike certain more judgmentally belletristic critics, has penetrated this flat veil of apparently vacant inarticulateness, he or she is able to wonder what it is that Carver leaves out of his stories, to intuit the icebergs beneath the low-rent quotidian stumbling at the surface.

Part of looking into the larger masses and greater depths involves decoding Carver’s own interpretations, not only of the world constructed for his characters, but of the outside American lives from which he draws the material for his stories. The reader may notice in Carver’s fiction the vast number of characters attempting to sate abstract desires through very concrete consumption. Without presuming to know Carver’s exact intentions, one may still play connect-the-dots with the examples of misguided excessive consumption and thus derive a pattern, a fairly consistent stance toward aspects of contemporary American society. Without preaching, maybe without seeming to have a position on the matter at all, Carver shows the reader the fairly dystopian world that results when a theoretically-healthy, pragmatically-obsolescent American brand of self-sufficient Arbeit macht Freiheit-Fülle-und-Güte crossbreeds with the self-indulging consumerist hedonism encouraged by a postindustrial economy.

From looking at the state of the American Dream in Carver’s fiction, one can turn to examine how it was evolving at the time Carver achieved his greatest fame. Discussing Raymond Carver and his fiction may have started by raising the usual, arguably hoary questions concerning literary realism and representational art, but the appearance of Carverian phenomena in a particular recent era and local place also provokes some consideration of postmodernism re: his subject matter, his style, his view of American consumerist society, his audience, and even the pretty packages in which his books became wrapped. Given his considerable appeal, which is only incompletely explained by his skill as a craftsman — how many people would buy beautifully rendered vignettes about the residential sidewalks of Yakima, Washington? — what did Carver mean, and where did he finally stand?

In the end, I guess I could criticize Carver for the fatalism with which he portrayed the world in his stories and interviews, for apparently refusing to see that the people whose struggles and worries he championed were getting screwed over by the same type of people he owed his worldly success to; yes, the reader, fine, the reader, but also hip, smart, young urban professionals whose generational vibe, glibly speaking, progressed from 60’s collective action to 70’s self-empowerment and 80’s Looking Out For Number One. But maybe he did what he felt he could, a position which reemphasizes his deep empathy and identification with his characters, even as it simultaneously implies on some level that you can’t fight the way the world is; even as it implies more subtly than Bakhtin dancing around Stalin’s censors that much about this way of the world, including the American Dream, is a social and linguistic construct that has been unduly bought out and skewed by larger interests. Depending on who you ask, there’s enough evidence either to condemn him, blow him off, or raise him above reproach. In the end, who’s to say Carver doesn’t serve the same empathy he granted his characters and friends?

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