On Raymond Carver and The Mystery in Everyday American Things

I can understand why Harumi Murakami admired American short story author Raymond Carver. The Oregon native has a special ability to instill a mystery in everyday objects. Reading his collection Call If You Need Me, compiled by his widow Tess Gallagher and edited by William L. Stull, a collection of unpublished short stories and essays, and being thirty-years old will remind you of Carver’s gift to American culture and the genre. 

​His short stories are the best place to begin with his craftsmanship rather than his meditative essays. His essays muse about his favourite authors or influences in his life, but the cognizance of craftsmanship, however, lies in his work similar to how a sculptor who hews his hands against the stone. “What would you like to see” and “Dreams” are some of the short stories that demand the reader to examine the everyday nuances more carefully. It seems the plot teaches us how to identify the objects.
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“What would you like see” ends with the protagonist Phil and his wife Sarah, who are in the middle of separating and are about to move out of their boarding home, with a last supper and a slide show with their renters - Pete and Betty. The projector reveals Pete and Betty’s trip around the world from Syria to Egypt to Lebanon to Alaska. First, what makes this particular exchange mysterious is that the exotic nature of these places take place in a suburban small town in the United States. The juxtaposition is prominent. Second, the plot lends meaning to the slide show as the speaker and Sarah part ways on opposite sides of the United States - Phil moving to the east coast and Sarah moving to Eureka. Towards the end of the presentation, the slide introduce Pete’s former wife Evelyn at their trip to Alaska. Pete and Evelyn’s separation parallels to Phil and Sarah’s - although Evelyn died from a car accident. 

But, most importantly and lastly, Carver uses the slide show as a symbol of hope ending as the pictures evidences Pete and Betty’s healthy relationship, which Phil has described as “[…] happy and well suited to each other” (24). At one point in the story, before the slide show presentation, as Sarah finds solace in Pete and Betty’s love by saying that “[she’s] glad that [Betty] and Pete have each other” (25), Phil confesses some hope in salvaging their marriage by saying: “Things come around sometimes […] Things work out” (25). He further pronounces those hidden desires after the slid presentation when they return home, and Sarah asks Phil to hold her: “I’d like you to hold me until get off to sleep” (36). Pete’s adventures are a glint of hope for the separating couple.

Despite this bittersweet ending, Carver still embeds riddles in daily occurrences in his darker works as well. “Dreams” at first centres around the nameless protagonist’s wife who has eclectic dreams; and these dreams help the reader understand the tragedy in the death of Mary’s children who burn to death in a fire incident. The humanity in this symbol is the fear of accepting the truth. Before the fire accident the speaker’s wife has a violent premonition of fragmented objects which include, “somebody began to rattle glasses, hundreds of glasses, all of them rattling at once” (42), and “I was hungry, you see, but when I touched the cupcake it burned the tips of my fingers” (42). The vision links directly to the accident that happens in the end. The truth scares the speaker so vehemently that he retaliates:“Put it in your book” (43). In this story dreams operate similar to prophets’ visions in ancient literature. In one of Carver’s essays he admits that most of his college courses focused on classical literature, and the stylistic choices could be seen here. 
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Seventeen years ago I first discovered his short stories when my community college instructor Nils Michals in his English 2 course assigned his students to read Carver’s “Cathedral.” By the end of the short story I couldn’t glean any meaning from the story unlike the other literary works we had deconstructed in our class - this was my second time taking Michal’s course just as a sit-in student. I came in early in his evening class to ask him how he would analyze the story: “What would be your point of attack?” With a calm voice, and staring intensely with his smokey blue eyes, he advised me to look at the cathedral: “You have a blind man who smokes weed with the protagonist, and together they go through a spiritual journey. The last image of the story is a cathedral. Can you see the dots connect?” His voice was more convincing than his logic. However, as I enter the middle ages of my adulthood, the volume of quiet of things - in the Rilkean sense - speak most deeply. Carver imbues this poetic spirit in American objects.

References
Carver, Raymond. (2000). Call If You Need Me. Vintage. 

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