Mullen , Bill. “A subtle spectacle: Televisual culture in the short stories of Raymond

Carver.” Critique.Washington, Winter 1998.

Full Text:

Copyright Heldref Publications Winter 1998

Criticism of Raymond Carver's short stories tends to take one of two tracks. The first assigns Carver to the "minimalist" school of fiction that came of age in the United States in the 1970s. It stresses Carver's affiliations with writers like Anne Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, and Mary Robison, whose work is characterized by several commonly agreed upon characteristics: spare prose, parataxis, and monotone; compression of detail and incident; a doggedly present-tense sense of reality; "open" narratives that eschew the "beginning-middle-end" convention for elision, ellipsis, and indeterminacy;

and a fixation on consumer habits and the surface details of consumer lifestyle (hence the pejorative "brand name" or "freeze dried" label often applied to the minimalist style). I

The second school emphasizes the social and economic milieu of Carver's stories. These critics-who include Morris Dickstein, the novelist of working-class life, Russell Banks, and Barbara Henning-argue that the spare emotional and material texture of Carver's stories (its formal minimalism, in other words) is a kind of objective correlative of the dreary

working-class lives his characters lead. They point out that most of Carver's characters are employed in either traditionally low-paying occupations like logging, mill, or factory work, or in neo-bluecollar, service-industry equivalents like mini-mart operator or apartment manager. The quiet economic sufferings of Carver's socially immobile characters,

rendered in skeletal, affectless prose, reminds those critics of Carver's own distinctly blue-collar roots in the logging town of Yakima, Washington, and of his testimonials in interviews to the working class as "my people:' Thus critics of this school echo the characterization of Carver's stories as "low-rent tragedies," a phrase used by a character in Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love to describe her dull but poignant domestic woe.2

That those divergent evaluations of Carver rarely intersect suggests a larger critical and political problem that this essay will seek indirectly to resolve. The appreciation of "two Carvers," one prized primarily as a formal innovator, the other as a social-realist, suggests a false but ongoing separation in criticism of form and content. Narrowly fixated on

minimalism's impressive innovations in style and manner, many critics have tended either to divorce them from social influences or to define the innovations as a flight from social engagement. In Carver criticism, for example, the minimalist camp critics tend to stress the monotone flatness of voice and the spartan style and substance of Carver's fiction as a

narrowly formalist response to both the "maximalist" excesses of high modernism (Joyce, Pound, Eliot) and the "high" postmodern style of American writers such as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Robert Coover that are characterized by linguistic and conceptual excesses and vast epistemological and narrative high jinks. Too often one result of that

rigidly formalist view has been the mistaking of minimalist style for absent content; lean, formal innovation for social disengagement; textual scarcity for mindless pleasure. For James Atlas, Carver's characters have virtually no distinguishing characteristics of temperament, personality, gender, race, or class but are mere "anhedonic," cookie-cutter

products of a clinical imagination. "One is left with a hunger for richness, texture, excess," Atlas writes of Carver's stories, "just as the cubed glass high-rises of Manhattan frustrate the eye's longing for nuance" (97). Although Atlas is probably describing buildings that are in fact modernist, his suggestion of texts that are "all surface," pure architectonics,

recalls obliquely Fredric Jameson's now famous appropriation of the mirroring squares of the Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles as a quintessential example of postmodern art's refusal of traditional (i.e., modernist) "depth." Atlas's formalist reading straitjackets Carver into a narrow but familiar definition of a monolithic contemporary culture in which identity

and ontology are mere reflections or simulations of each other, and in which the artist is reductively viewed as the detached, ironic chronicler of a banal nihilism in which content is absent: nothing happens. Atlas thus makes no mention of the most obvious and painful social fact of Carver's fiction, namely that the vast majority of his characters are primarily economically burdened members of the lower-middle or working classes whose dull lives have much to do with

this fact.

By contrast, the social-realist critics downplay the impressive formal innovation of Carver's work to recover a literary tradition that they sense is threatened by the often myopic and apolitical nature of formalist criticism. Russell Banks notes in passing the "post-modern loneliness and alienation" of Carver's characters but reaches for another example with

which to compare Carver, namely Stephen Crane. The work of both writers, he argues, is powered by "a ferocious, inescapable determinism that, when at last it overpowers their characters, approaches tragedy" (101). In a different manifestation of a similar critical problem, Morris Dickstein's essay "The Pursuit for the Ordinary," observes that

although Carver's fiction belongs to "a definite region, a class, even a certain landscape," his minimalism is at bottom "a post-Beckett realism that has been through the forge of modernist skepticism and despair" (508). Yet Dickstein fails to acknowledge that Carver's characters are never exposed to the extremities of circumstance or self-consciousness one

identifies with the modernist traditions he invokes. Indeed Carver's particular brand of "skepticism" has more to do with a numb acculturation to commercial ennui, the postmodernist skepticism of deadpan response to omnipresent quotidian details-fast food, television, brand names-than with anything as high minded as Beckettian existentialism or Craneian Social Darwinism. Put another way, what is finally terrifying and moving about Carver's characters is not their consciousness of either existential contingency or of social determinism, but the routinized impossibility of their ever sensing or understanding what Carver called, describing his own characters, the "lives they see breaking down" (Fires

201).

Using that last observation as a starting point, I want to suggest that a bridge may be built between the two prevailing critical views of Carver by concentrating on the ways television may be read as both a subject of and an influence on his stories. I want to be very general in this claim without offering something like a "key" to Carver's fiction. I want to explore a variety of ways that Carver's short stories either "feel like" or formally resemble aspects of television and the televisual culture but to avoid an overdetermined reading that sweeps everything that happens in Carver's stories under the rubric of "television influence." The latter strategy would likely reproduce the overreactions of antimedia, "blame"

critics on the Left and Right and oversimplify a complex body of work. My argument is more narrow: that television may be read as a polyvalent sign in Carver's fiction that is important to its being readable as both formal minimalism and a variety of social realism in the tradition of working-class or proletariat writing. I hope to show how Carver's fiction,

particularly in its structure and tone, may be read in part as a critique of televisual culture, yet one grounded primarily in observation of television's capacity to dull or to eliminate awareness of both class consciousness and class inequities in contemporary American culture.

Criticism of Carver's fiction generally has ignored the specific influence and place of television, discussing it, if at all, only in broad, generalizing strokes typical of the antimedia bias in western cultural criticism.3 One of the few and better attempts to locate television's effect on Carver's writing and minimalism generally is Philip E. Simmons's "Minimalism as 'Low' Postmodernism: Mass Culture and the Search for History." Simmons argues that television's presence in Carver's stories signals two things: a moral vacuity and historical superficiality in the lives of characters attributable in part to television's evisceration of historical "depth" in their lives, and a moral condemnation of television's formulaic

lack of "honest engagement with the real" (52). That argument is in part a rare critical attempt to anchor Carver's minimalism "in the world" by showing how it critiques television and consumer culture. Although making claims for minimalism as a form of "populist" or low postmodernism, Simmons is vague about how television or mass media specifically interact with the working-class status of most of Carver's characters. In complement to Simmons's essay, I would contend that, as in much postmodern fiction, television in Carver's work, stands as a general sign of the superficial, homogeneous nature of consumer or "brand name" culture; yet it is also a specific symbol of the constricted

lives of the American working and lower-middle classes. Often it signals both aspects simultaneously and jointly. It is at once a marker of the random and arbitrary meanings of freefloating commercial signs in consumer culture and an index of

the material, spiritual, and intellectual limitations of lower and working-class life within that larger culture. Those meanings converge in the aimless indirection, the social and economic randomness of the lives of Carver's working-class characters. People in his stories watch television because they have nothing more productive to do, lack the intelligence

or motivation to do otherwise, or wish to repress or deflect the ennui and alienation of their class-bound lives.

Indeed, Carver's fiction subtly dramatizes (without in any way literally reproducing) sociological research that suggests the powerful allure of television and its impact on the working classes of the United States and other industrial nations. Those studies indicate that working-class people tend to watch much more television than those of the middle or upper classes and that television watching itself is "an especially powerful deterrent to working class consciousness" (Aronowitz 4). In False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness, Stanley Aronowitz diagnoses that deterrent as the response of post-World War II working-class Americans to a media-driven culture in which television has become the primary socializer of individual lives, replacing church, school, and even family as the shaper of consciousness. He finds that some of the effects of that response are feelings of emotional distance from events in one's own life, absence of critical reflection or thinking fostered by television's static immediacy, and a general feeling of powerlessness (95). Those characteristics translate into an absence of both self-awareness and class

consciousness, induced and compounded by a longing to merge into the generic (middle class) needs and desires that television targets as its demographically broad-based "audience."

In Carver's fiction, those phenomena are most conspicuously evident in the eerily resonant absence of actual work. Carver's characters may be the first in American working-class literature who are never shown on the job. Instead, they usually are recognizable as working-class not out of any specific affinity for or alienation from work but in gestures and mannerisms that indicate a hangover from the displacement or actual abandonment of working-class consciousness.

Semiotically speaking, "work" is an absence or "trace" of personal and class value obscured by the avalanche of nonspecific material signs surrounding it. Significantly, television provides many of those. Carver's stories routinely take place at home-before, after, or in the place of work-where the dull, omnipresent hum of television serves as a soporific cocoon against the intrusion or consideration of social discontent. The dissatisfactions and emotional fallout of working-class life are exposed against the backdrop of TV's white noise, or in the faint afterglow of a television experience. The famous loneliness and transience of Carver's characters reflect what Lawrence Grossberg calls the

"nomadic subjectivity" of television viewers (3). That is evident in the atomistic nature of domestic life in Carver's fiction, the repeated dramatization of voyeuristic or vicarious desire within family and romantic relationships, and the deadpan or affectless spirituality, seemingly unmoved even by tremendous personal tragedies. Indeed plot, structure,

and narrative strategy in Carver's stories suggest constantly that people are paralyzed by their personal dilemmas as if they were seeing them happen to someone else. Carver's characters stand in an ironic relationship to their own means of existence (including their labor) that can be best compared not to Marx's alienation from work itself but to the "glazed

stare of the total ironist" that Todd Gitlin describes as the psychological condition produced by excessive television watching and media acculturation (350).

Perhaps as a result of the extension of individual psychology, traditional class markings are themselves murky in Carver's fiction. Televisual culture in his stories produces a kind of mass or generic longing that seems to sweep across lowermiddle-class and blue-collar culture. Carver's characters live in a fragmentary experiential world where shards of

mass culture stand in for various socializing experiences, including class identification. Socialization here connotes among other things awareness of financial hardship, or at least the longing for a better economic standing, but Carver's characters are so removed from class sentience that these longings are merely flickering impulses seemingly turned on

and off by the occasional flashing stimuli of postmodern commercial culture. Thus a seemingly comfortable "middle-class" character can be subject to the same kind of anomie and drift as an unemployed mill worker, as if their different economic standing could only connote the same incompleteness or frustration of lackof the attainment of a

more perfect, more idyllic "better" life signaled primarily by the images or subconscious impulses of social achievement fed through television and other distinctly postmodern sources. Although it is possible and necessary to use "working-class" and "middle-class" as descriptive terms in discussing Carver's work, the stories as cultural artifacts

bespeak the famous "slippage" of meaning among terms and social constructs in a postmodern age beset by massively powerful redefining and reshaping technologies like mass media.

That slippage may be measured in part in the notorious linguistic retardation in Carver's fiction. Carver's minimalist literary idiom easily may be contextualized by both Fredric Jameson's description (by way of Lacan) of postmodern media-age "discourse" and Claus Mueller's characterization of working-class address. Jameson states that a breakdown

of the relationship between words (signifiers) is characteristic of the postmodern "subject" bombarded with an endless barrage of mass-media stimulants. Paraphrasing Lacan, he notes that the experience of human temporality-past, present, and memory-is "an effect of language. It is because language has a past and a future, because the sentences move in time,

that we can have what seems to us a concrete or lived experience of time." The postmodern subject, however, is "schizophrenic" in Lacanian terms; "he or she does not have our experience of temporal continuity . . . but is condemned to live a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there

is no conceivable future on the horizon. In other words, schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence" (119). For Mueller, in comparison, working-class speech is "a mode of speech . . . marked by grammatical simplicity, a uniform vocabulary,

short and often redundant sentences, a scarcity of adjectives and adverbs, repetitive use of conjunctions and comparatively little verbal differentiation of symbolism" (433).

Combining these two linguistic notions, we should expect a discourse with the following features: fragmented speech patterns, atemporal or nonlinear communication, difficulty of articulation, failure of ideas, and a bluntly reductive speech characterized by repetition and simplicity. We should expect, in other words, some combination of fractured or

fragmented discursive interaction, and deadpan. That is precisely the linguistic nature of both television discourse and Raymond Carver's "brand name" realism. The flavorless monotone of television language (one often cited by TV critics as "common speech") reverberates in both the numb monosyllables Carver's working-class characters speak in and the flat, deadpan expository authorial voice. Both seem literally infected by an antiliteracy that echoes the one-dimensional linguistic atmosphere in which the stories take place. The narrative strategies of Carver's blue-collar storytellers mimic the fragmented, pastiche quality characteristic of the production and reception of television, a pastiche that is strikingly

similar to Jameson's notion of postmodern "schizophrenic" communication. Neil Postman has identified the primary features of that televisual pastiche as a hostility to "conceptual, segmented, linear modes of expression"; a sense of constant "present-tenseness"; an absence of purposefulness (a thesis, in Postman's terms), and narrative closure (424).

He cites the radically brief attention span of the television viewer catered to by vignette-like episodes, and the sound-bite nature of television discourse as indicative of both the medium's obsession with the living "moment" and its restlessness with duration.

Carver's stories, in apt comparison, are as transient and fleeting as commercials; they seem to click on and off with the abruptness of a channel change and gain power and force through accretion and repetition, in the manner of television's

serial format. The stories seem consciously to pare down the reader's interaction time with characters as if to mimic the fragmentary experiences of people in his fiction or to mock the effect of consuming sound-bit-sized narratives. Indeed Carver's stories almost always eschew "cause and effect" exposition in favor of an arbitrary, jump-cut style reminiscent

of channel-surfing with a remote control. The stories rarely provide "history" (background) or conclusions (a past or future sense); characters emerge like television beings-full-blown, past-less, without last names. Finally, Carver's characters constantly express the verbal impotence and exhaustion characteristic of the image-literate. Their words are as

blunt as pictures, oversimplified and stripped of any vestige of personally resonant originality. Conversation is not only a lost art in Carver's fiction but a personal trauma; his characters seemingly suffer from a kind of mental or linguistic dyslexia in which sentences are incompletable, the right words never come to mind, or conversation takes place at

cross-purposes, as if real communication were impossible. Indeed as many critics have noted, the very titles of Carver's stories suggest the desperate but awkward urgency of words (and lives) that circle around but never achieve full meaning, of experiences lived in the uncertain mode of rhetorical questions: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"; "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"; "One More Thing"; "Are You a Doctor?"; "What's in Alaska?"; "Why, Honey?"; "How About This?"; "What Is It?"

Carver's focus on blue-collar life was sharpest at the start of his career. Gradually, for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this essay, that focus broadened to include less-restrictive subject matter and a more expansive and blatantly optimistic authorial tone. However, between Will You Please Be Quiet Please?, his first book, published in 1976, and

Cathedral, published in 1984, Carver relentlessly documented the conditions of life in America's lower-middle- and working-class subcultures. I will focus on his most representative book, What We Talk About When We Talk About

Love ( 1981), where the predominant theme and vision are of socially immobile, lower-middle- and working-class characters permanently deadened to their own condition by the dull hum and flicker of the tube, and where submission to an epistemology of failure-symbolized largely by television and its cousin technologies-is the distinctly postmodern

fate of contemporary working-class Americans. II

What We Talk About is Carver's most radically "minimalist" book. Its 17 stories are packed into 159 pages, about 9 pages per story (compared to an average story length of about 12 pages in his other books). "Popular Mechanics," the shortest, is only three pages. Others, like "The Bath," are ruthlessly pared down tales that Carver later, in a more giving

and expansive mood, expanded to almost twice their length. Carver's prose is at its most bare bones here. Simple sentences devoid of adjectives and adverbs predominate; as a rule, characters speak in stunted or aborted sentences; virtually every story ends inconclusively, on the precipice of some major revelation or character change denied to readers

at the last minute. Not coincidentally, the book is also Carver's most doggedly pessimistic and haunting. The majority of the stories feature working-class characters on the brink of economic or psychological collapse, rendered, as the book's title suggests, through a painstaking examination of shockwave effects on marriage and romance. Not coincidentally,

televisions run constantly throughout the stories, providing a dramatic echo or counterpoint to the "real life" action.

In the first story in the collection, "Why Don't You Dance?" a middle-aged man responds to the collapse of his marriage by arranging his indoor furniture on his lawn exactly as it had been inside the house. The meager furnishingsportable heater, rattan chair with decorator pillow, and various barely used wedding gifts-deceive a young couple into thinking the

man is having a yard sale. Out of the owner's sight they survey the furnishings, the girl immediately interested in the bed, the boy in the TV. As they browse, the girl suddenly kicks off her shoes and tests the bed, then invites the boy to join her. Lying on the bed, the girl suddenly demands a kiss, which prompts the boy to "see if anybody's home": But he just sat up and stayed where he was, making believe he was watching the television.

Lights came on in houses up and down the street. "Wouldn't it be funny if," the girl said and grinned and didn't finish. The boy laughed, but for no good reason. For no good reason, he switched the reading lamp on.

The girl brushed away a mosquito, whereupon the boy stood up and tucked in his shirt. (5)

Moments later the owner of the house arrives, bearing a bag of sandwiches, beer, and whiskey, complementary markers to the jettisoned lawn junk of his strained economic circumstance. Immediately, the couple begin haggling for the TV and

bed, convincing the man to lower prices he had never set. The dealing done, the three sit down to drink on the lawn. In the simulated living room they are like a simulated family, together but disconnected: "The man gazed at the television. He finished his drink and started another" (7).

That scene of spectatorship suggests various levels of emotional displacement and financial loss. No reasons are given for the man's marital break-up, but his heavy drinking, reckless diffidence, and emotional inattentiveness are all suggested by his mindless interest in the television. Its mute objectness becomes a metaphor for the staid indifference that likely characterized his marriage, as suggested in a deadpan rendering of the house as it was arranged when his wife was still around: "things looked much the way they had in the bedroom-nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side.

His side, her side."

The implied emotional distance also characterizes the relationship of the young couple. The boy's response to the girl's sudden arousal-pretending to watch television-suggests a domestic dysfunction that subtly echoes the potential cause of the failure of the man's marriage. The remainder of the story teases out this parallel. As they get drunker, the man puts on a record and encourages the couple to dance on the lawn. The girl first asks the boy to dance, but then goes to the man. They talk as they turn on the darkened lawn:

"Those people over there, they're watching," she said. "It's okay," the man said. "It's my place," he said. "Let them watch," the girl said.

"That's right," the man said. "They thought they'd seen everything over here. But they haven't seen this, have they?" he said. The conversation here echoes the moment earlier in the story when the girl and boy lie on the bed together, and "Lights came on in houses up and down the street." The continuous self-consciousness about being watched, brought on

by the sudden public display of private acts (and furnishings) exposes voyeurism and exhibitionism-watching and being seen-as perversely thrilling moments in the lives of downtrodden people. Framed in the windows of neighbors like actors in a television drama, the pair feebly act out a vaguely adulterous romance on the lawn. The scene subtly suggests

role-playing and pretense as acculturated responses to tedium, providing a kind of externalization of the interior response to excessive exposure to television. Lying with her lover on another person's bed, in public, arouses the girl, and dancing with another man's younger woman in public is stirring for the man. That these scenes are mere charades

becomes clear in the story's brief aftermath, when the girl, now sober, retells the story shorn of any illusionary glow:

We got real pissed and danced.... Look at this record player. The old guy gave it to us. And all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit? Recontextualized in the sobering light of daily routine, the worth of the emotional and material exchange on the lawn in reduced to "shit." That is the unspeakable and then unutterable lesson of the encounter, a

foreboding and foreshadowing of future emotional and economic failures that the girl cannot name as she later tells the story. "She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying" (10).

The exhaustion of comprehension and language in "Why Don't You Dance?" is the ultimate sign of an endlessly deferred self- and class consciousness displaced by television, booze, and other artifacts of popular culture (like old songs). They are the mass devices of a cultural drift towards homogeneity, arbitrary encounter, and random decision most aptly

symbolized by the ironic attention, even outside the home, to a television set whose content is unimportant and unnamed but whose presence creates a mock solidarity, a vapid communion of blighted lives. The titles of characters are generic: "the man," "the boy," and "the girl"; their gestures and dialogue are similarly generic. Passion and routine are as

interchangeable as second-hand furnishings are exchangeable in the emotional economy of the story. Finally, there is the narrative impotence itself, the fizzling out of uncertain passions and ideas in the final paragraph cited above, the commercially interrupted intimacy and self-awareness that will likely bring them to a place much like that of the man whose dismal "fortunes" they literally and figuratively inherit.

The confluence of economic woe, emotional crack-up, and addictive distraction is more explicitly demonstrated in "Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit," the book's third story. The narrator, a middle-aged man in a failing marriage, alternately describes his wife's adultery with an unemployed alcoholic space engineer named Ross and his memories of his parents' romantic troubles. The events merge in oddly dissonant passages joined by the skewed emotional resonance of television in each. The story begins with the narrator describing his arrival at his mother's house "to stay a few nights" and his being greeted at the top of the stairs by a vision of her kissing a stranger. In retelling the event, he twice notes that "The TV

was going" (17). The narrator recalls that in those days when "my mother was putting out, I was out of work. My kids were crazy, and my wife was crazy. She was putting out too" (17). We shortly learn that the man for whom his wife is "putting out" is much like the narrator. Like him, Ross is an alcoholic. Both share the same woman. Both have had

trouble keeping work. The narrator leans to sympathizing with Ross based on their mutually frustrated fortunes. Yet in the narrator's mind the dominant metaphor for their common destiny is not economic but technological failure:

But we had things in common, Ross and me, which was more than just the same woman. For example, he couldn't fix the TV when it went crazy and we lost the picture. I couldn't fix it either. We had volume, but no picture. If we wanted the news, we had to sit around the screen and listen. (19) In conjunction with the confluence of TV consumption and

Oedipal unease in the story's opening, that metaphor for the narrator's failure may be read as a kind of cognitive and emotional retardation specific to his social class. His failure to comprehend television's simple technology is a metonymy for his failure from his unskilled position in life to comprehend the workings of the world at large, including the institutions of work, love, and family. All are broken in his life; none can be fixed. That those are the psychic hand-me-downs of his workingclass lineage is conveyed in a jolting memory of blue-collar entrapment that interjects abruptly at the end of the story: The narrator remembers that eight years earlier his father died in his sleep, after

returning from work at the sawmill:

He came home . . . took some sausage out of the freezer for his breakfast, and popped a quart of Four Roses.

My mother was there at the same kitchen table. She was trying to write a letter to her sister in Little Rock. Finally, my dad got up and went to bed. My mother said he never said good night. But it was morning, of course.

"Honey," I said to Myrna the night she came home. "Let's hug awhile and then you fix us a real nice supper."

Myrna said, "Wash your hands."

The brute silence and inarticulation of the father reverberating in the crosspurpose dialogue of his son and daughter-in-law is best summed up in the image of disjunction provided by the faulty television: "we had volume, but no picture." As in "Why Don't You Dance?" the story makes TV an objective correlative not just for working-class loss and

dispossession but for cognitive failure or inability to articulate what that failure might mean.

Other stories in What We Talk About enact variations on that theme, each one deepening the suggestive influence of television on Carver's view of class determinants. In "After the Denim," James, a retired accountant, and his chronically ill wife Edith prepare for a ritual night of Bingo. Edith's disease, never given a name in the story, is the unspeakable

misery of their spartan lives, again displaced and deferred by a cornucopia of commercial distractions. As the story opens, Edith sits with a "tape cassette plugged into her," smoking a cigarette. Carver writes, "The TV played without any volume as she sat on the sofa with her legs tucked under her and turned the pages of a magazine" (67). The material

detritus of a sickly woman's cocoon becomes, retrospectively through the story, a poignant image of American dreams deferred. At Bingo, the upstanding James is appalled by a ragtag young couple who win repeatedly by cheating. On the way home, Edith begins "spotting," the unnamed disease reappearing to make them even more disconsolate. At home,

James sits alone in front of the TV. While gazing at the screen, "He understood that it took only one lunatic and a torch to bring everything to ruin" (77).

Here, the generic orderliness of "decent" lives touched by tragedy is rendered emotionally disinfected by James and Edith's anesthetized habits of consumption. "Why not someone else? . . Why not them instead of Edith?" (77) thinks James as he sits dully in front of the set. That a nameless and faceless television program ("one lunatic and a torch") sparks his epiphany-brings home the recognition of their fate-is, as in the previous stories, a sign of how affectless and ironic any potential consciousness of social or personal injustice is in Carver's fiction. It registers as an impulse or chance association, no more deeply felt than a temporary urge to buy an advertised product:

He sat in front of the TV again. But he did not turn it on. He smoked and thought of that sauntering, arrogant gait as the two of them moved just ahead. If only they know. if only someone would tell them. Just once! (77) The conflation of Bingo, a game of chance, and television as symbols of misfortune is a masterly example of Carver's "postmodern" social

determinism. James and Edith are archetypal victims of a social and physical injustice as cruel as any rendered by Dreiser or Norris, yet their suffering response has the dull pathos of the couch potato. Latter-day Hurstwoods and McTeagues, they are comfortably numb casualties of economic and cosmic injustice, losing contestants on modern life's

Wheel of Fortune.

III

Where many of the stories in What We Talk About make overt use of television as a clear symbol of class malaise, others adhering to an even more stringent minimalist aesthetic present the subtle and even subliminal effects of televisual culture (what is commonly called, after Guy Debord, "spectacle society") through more radical indirection. Often, this

indirection is suggested through strategies of detachment, voyeurism, and dissociation that suggest personal distancing or detachment from economic or psychological dislocation. David Boxer and Cassandra Phillips have described the "thorough but subtle manipulation of the metaphor of the voyeur at every level of his [Carver's] writing" (133), noting

the frequent appearance in Will You Please Be Quiet Please? of windows and mirrors as images of seeing and being seen and Carver's "eaves-dropping" narrative strategies, in which bits of conversation seem recorded and reported objectively, as if taped by the author. In What We Talk About, the "eavesdropping" strategy and voyeurism motif are apparent in

various ways. In "Viewfinder," a handicapped man moves randomly from city to city photographing a stranger whose marriage has collapsed. In "Gazebo," the young, first-person narrator, Duane, prefaces a difficult conversation between his girlfriend and himself with the words, "I go . . . She goes," lending the impression of dissociation even from

first-person events. Those distancing devices, as Boxer and Phillips note, create a paradoxical sense of remote intimacy between reader and story in Carver's work. The direct and unadorned reality of the stories is both de- and re-familiarized by the "quotation mark" or second-hand quality of experience in the stories. The effect is like that of the photo realistic paintings of Richard Estes, in which a precisely rendered New York street scene looks from a distance like a photograph, but up close is a subtle exercise in parodic mimesis: the painting is not a picture of a street, but a picture of a picture of a street, a street at double remove or arm's length, hence inviting but forbidding.

Clearly photo-realism owes its disturbing postmodern wit to image-making representations and simulations of the real world, like those commonly provided by photography and television. Similarly, in Carver's fiction, the skewed sense of dissociation and detachment from "real" experience reverberates with the latent or subconscious apprehension of life as a

cliche, seen before or lived twice, once in the world of simulated events (movies, photographs, television) and once in the here and now. In "The Bath" (What We Talk About), a young boy is struck by a car on his way to school on his birthday. In the hospital his parents stand worriedly by as the boy slips into a coma, and a doctor assesses his

condition:

This doctor was a handsome man. His skin was moist and tan. He wore a three-piece suit, a vivid tie, and on his shirt were cufflinks.

The mother was talking to herself like this. He has just come from somewhere with an audience. They gave him a special medal. (51-52) The doctor here is a faint outline of a world-class physician, as perhaps suggested by television or film. A clue that he embodies some stereotype of character is the sudden self-reflexivity that overtakes the woman and the

narrator as she reacts to him: "The mother was talking to herself like this." The sudden self-consciousness of character and narrator bespeaks the intrusion of other stories. Here, the intruding story could be labeled the "family tragedy type." The mother suddenly "sees herself" in a third-person role, we can surmise, because she has seen her current situation

represented elsewhere, perhaps in TV dramas or soap operas, where well-groomed doctors indeed function like knights in shining armor. Later, the self-reflexivity becomes an intense longing for self-separation as a way out of crisis. As she waits for word on her son, she stands at a window staring at a parking lot, "talking to herself like this. We're into

something now, something hard." A moment later a car stops in the lot. Carver writes, "She made believe she was that woman. She made believe she was driving away from here to someplace else" (54).

That passage can be compared to a scene from Don DeLillo's Libra, in which Lee Harvey Oswald, dying in an ambulance having been shot after shooting at Kennedy, sees himself in a television screen, dying. It is the archetypal moment of self-reflexivity about which Don DeLillo always writes in his media-age novels, the articulation of an unconscious wish

to be some glamorized image of oneself or someone famous teased out by television and movie culture. Carver provides what might be called the mass culture version of this longing: the mundane desire to be another ordinary person out of harm's way-to be, in other words, "normal," as generic as a consumer product. In "I Could See the Smallest Things," a

woman leaves the bed of her troubled, drunken mate and walks out under the stars, contemplating her fate. "A plane passed overhead," Carver writes. "I imaged the people on it sitting belted in their seats, some of them reading, some of them staring down at the ground" (34).

Safety in numbers, anonymity in conformity, to be purged of the loneliness of financial and emotional struggle: these thoughts come to Carver's characters as conditioned reactions to seeing safety in images of conformity. To jump from the world of economic and emotional hardship to that cozy homogeneous one that Aronowitz describes as the

demographer's portrait of middle-class conformity (a conformity symbolized in the story above by air travel as an institution) is literally an act of "projection," that term from photography and psychology that differently invokes seeing our lives otherwise, through a different lens, in a different setting. It is a quiet and haunting compulsion in Carver's

stories that marks the lower-middle- and working-class unconscious as touched by a burden of dreams spectacular society is capable of injecting into the dullest moments of life.

IV

My study of a sampling of Raymond Carver's fiction suggests that contemporary media-age culture is a rather hostile environment both for the American working class and for the formation of traditional Marxist "class consciousness." Indeed televisual culture, as it exists in Raymond Carver's fiction, is most tangible as an inhibitor of critical

self-examination and reflection of any kind of consciousness. Carver's identification and representation of this inhibition seem to confirm what both Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson have alternately called late capitalist culture's "interpolation" or "mapping" of subject consciousness. Yet there are clear signposts in his fiction of Carver's own

measured resistance to at least the kind of affectlessness of political response with which much contemporary literature and art, as noted earlier, have so often been charged. Read in the most beneficent and optimistic light, Carver's unflinching anecdotal rendering of working-class life-its subtle "photorealism"-may be viewed as akin to Michael

Moore's Roger and Me, a deadpan but bitingly satiric documentary about the collapse of General Motors in Flint, Michigan. As in that film, Carver's brute verite, what some have called his "dirty realism," suggests a parodic miming of the distancing and distorting effects that contemporary technologies like film and television have on our perceptions of

the working class. Assuming an authorial stance something like the neutral interlocutor pose adopted by Moore in directing his ironic expose, Carver's laserlike focus, his stoic "objectivity" in rendering working class tragedies, may be read as a satiric comment on the voyeuristic restraint with which contemporary American society-including its own

diminishing traditional working-class ranks-has observed the diminution of its human resources at the expense of its cultural capital; trading jobs in steel and rubber for ones in cable television, union clout for Entertainment Tonight, solidarity for Super Bowls. By reversing-indeed eliminating-the overt didacticism and attendant sentimentality of earlier

proletarian realism, Carver calls his own stories and techniques "post modern"; at the same time he alludes by omission, in another version of minimalist evasion, to the important but now complicated project of earlier forms of social protest fiction.

Carter himself has perhaps best encapsulated that rhetorical indirection toward the function of literature as social protest. In a rare moment of political comment, he remarked to an interviewer, "I write oftentimes about working-class people, and the dark side of Reagan's America. So in that respect I suppose the stories can be read as criticism, as an

indictment. But that has to come from outside. I don't feel I'm consciously trying to do that" (Gentry 201; emphasis mine). Carver's sense of the limited or accidental nature of authorial political agency may be the last word on the influence of external discourses like television on his working-class people. It points to a special necessity for reading his stories against the grain of the apolitical malaise his stories so beautifully render of reading, as he says, "from outside." It is as if Carver sensed that a latent strategy for interpretation existed in his work, which, if realized, might prick the critical consciousness of readers themselves numbed or blissed out by the uncritical, unsympathetic nature of commercial life in hard times. Like Brecht's stylized political allegories, perhaps, or Luis Bunuel's mock-documentaries of Third World despair Land Without Bread, Carver's unflinching deadpan is ultimately a disconcerting, alienating effect whose very subversion of traditional forms of authorial and political intentionality may rouse us beyond "the glazed stare of the total ironist" into some reader response to the conditions of the oppressed in our time. Pitched headlong into the indeterminacy of social black comedy, readers are left with no choice but to observe Carver's own disjunctive commercial interruption of the spectacular prime-time spectacle of modern progress. Perhaps that is Carver's greatest contribution to our understanding of televisual culture and to the tradition of working-class people and literature in America, one that gives us a chance to re-think how the two intersect and complement each other.

YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY

[Footnote]

NOTES

1. See Simmons for a discussion of how the minimalist commentary on this brand-name culture may be read as political criticism.

2. Atlas's review is an example of Carver criticism that stereotypes its postmodern qualities and ignores its working-class content. The essays of Banks, Dickstein, and Henning stress class elements in Carver's fiction.

3. One of the fist efforts I know of to track television's influence in Carver's stories is Kelly Loney's unpublished essay "Television in Raymond Carver."

[Reference]

WORKS CITED

Aronowitz, Stanley. False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness. New

York: McGraw-Hill, 1973.

Atlas, James. "Less is Less." Rev. of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, by Raymond Carter, The

Atlantic 247.6 (June 1991): 96-98.

Banks, Russell. "Raymond Carver: Our Stephen Crane." Rev. of. . When We Talk About Raymond Can,er. The

Atlantic 268.2 (August 1991): 99-103.

Boxer, David and Cassandra Phillips. "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Voyeurism, Dissociation, and the Art of

Raymond Carver." Iowa Review 10.3 (1979): 75-90. Carver, Raymond. "A Conversation." Conversation."

Conversations with Raymond Carver Eds. Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull. Jackson: U of Mississippi P,

1990. 197-203. Fires. New York: Vintage, 1984.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. New York: Vintage, 1981. Crispin Miller, Mark. Boxed In: The

Culture of TV Evanston: Northwestern UP,1988. Dickstein, Morris. "The Pursuit for the Ordinary." Partisan Review

58.3(1991): 506-513. Gitlin, Todd. "Postmodemism and Politics." Cultural Politics in Contemporary America. Ed.

Ian Angus and Sut Jhally. New York: Routledge, 1989. 347-360. Grossberg, Lawrence. "MTV: Swinging on the

(Postmodern) Star." Cultural Politics in Contemporaw America. Ed. Ian Angus and Sut Jhally. New York: Routledge,

1989. 254-268.

[Reference]

Henning, Barbara. "Minimalism and the American Dream: 'Shiloh' by Bobbie Ann Mason and 'Preservation' by

Raymond Carver. Modern Fiction Studies 35.4 (1989): 689-698. Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism and Consumer

Society." The Anti-Aesthetic. Ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983.111-125.

Mueller, Claus. "Class as the Determinant of Political Communication." Left Perspectives on Mass Media. Ed.

Donald Lazere. Berkeley: U of California P, 1987. 431-440. Postman, Neil. "The Teachings of the Media

Curriculum." Left Perspectives on Mass Media. Ed. Donald Lazere. 42140.

Simmons, Philip E. "Minimalist Fiction as 'Low' Postmodernism: Mass Culture and the Search for History." Genre

34 (1991): 45-42.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.