Ricardo Sobreira[1]
To win?
To lose?
What for, if the
world will forget us anyway.
The aim of
this essay is to discuss and analyze some strategies used by the late American
writer Raymond Carver in his short story “A Small, Good Thing”, as an
innovatory manner of expanding the suspense of the story. What contributes to
this achievement is the minimalist structure of the narrative, the usage of
several elements and images and also the unusual focalization as a kind of
aesthetic dialog with the cinematographic language.
I will begin
by briefly examining some information about the author’s biography as well as
some aspects of his work and its aesthetic procedures:
Raymond Carver
is acknowledged by the literary critics as one of the most inventive postmodern
writers. His writing is straightforward, stark and destitute of sentimentality.
Basically, he did not concede any space to language ornamentation or figures of
speech. His characters are antiheroic, emblematic and depressed people. They
take part in quick and almost abrupt stories, in which a little conflict is
“fought” and, then, they unpredictably end, as in his famous short stories “So
Much Water So Close To Home”, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”,
“Tell The Women We’re Going”, “Where I’m Calling From”, just to cite a few.
Talking about A Small, Good
Thing
In one of his
most important short stories, “A Small, Good Thing”, Raymond Carver was able to
create psychologically rich characters in a very accurate way. This story deals
with subject matters intrinsically related to our human condition and our
contingencies like, for instance, the fear of the death, the sensation of
powerlessness before the violence, the cruelty and the incommunicability of the
human being, as well as dwells on the importance and the meaning of affection,
of communion among the people in these chaotic days we have been living.
The version of
the short story “A Small, Good Thing” encompassed in the collections “Where I’m
Calling From” and “Short Cuts” is a revision of two previous attempts. One of
these previous versions, “The Bath”, was awarded a few prizes, but in it, the
author did not seem to explore all the dramatic potentialities of the narrative.
Therefore, “A Small Good Thing” represents a phase of aesthetic maturity in the
style of the writer. If in “The Bath”, Raymond Carver creates characters and
situations that are almost schematic, generating, thus, a lurid and gloomy
atmosphere, in “A Small Good Thing”, on the other hand, he intensifies his
humanist realism, producing a more complex portrayal of his characters. But
before turning to a closer examination of that, we must remember some of the
facts and tensions present in the story:
Ann Weiss, a
young and joyful mother, drives to a bakery and orders a cake. Then the baker,
a very impolite man, writes down her order and her phone number. But before the
party can be celebrated, Scotty, the birthday boy, is knocked down by a car.
His parents, Ann and Howard Weiss, go immediately to the hospital and
powerlessly watch him die. Meanwhile, the baker, as he is an evil entity, makes
phone calls to the Weiss, reproaching them because they did not pick the cake.
As the baker
does not tell them who he really is, the parents get really scared and even
think that the man who keeps phoning them is the same “psychopath” who knocked
over Scotty. Only after Scotty’s death, Ann comes to know that the phone calls
had being made by the rude baker. So the angry and frightened parents stop by
the bakery and tell the baker they could not pick the cake because Scotty had
died. Then they rebuke him so fiercely that he realizes how cruel his acts
were. He feels so sorry that he asks them to forgive him and says that he used
to be a different kind of human being years ago, but now he was just a baker.
After that, he serves them some of his delicious rolls, and says, “Eating is a
small, good thing in a time like this” (404).
It is interesting the fact
that, according to what I have already pointed out, another version of this
story had been published in the book “What We Talk About When We Talk About
Love” and it is entitled “The Bath”. Nevertheless, it focalizes more
intensively the human brutality and uncertainty. The characters of “The Bath”
are unnamed. Except for the mother, Ann, the other characters are just referred
to as the boy, the father, the dog, etc. These characters seem to be undefined,
permanently locked in individual spheres, what turns the narrative into
something sketchy and impersonal. “The Bath” is shorter because, as it dwells
on the anguished feelings, it ends when Ann gets home for the first time after
Scotty’s accident, the telephone is ringing and when she answers it, she hears
a voice say: “It’s ready”. Though the language used in “The Bath” is more
straightforward, even laconic and filled with symbolic images, “A Small, Good
Thing”, the expanded version, deals more deeply with the question of the human
situation, absolving the baker from his nonfigurative condition of “evil force”
and transforming him into a man devastated by his personal flop.
The characters of “A Small,
Good Thing” represent the so-called North-American working class. A good
example of it being Ann Weiss, the housewife; her husband, Howard, the
businessman, and, above all, the baker, who at the ending of the story reveals
all his bitterness because of his frustration in a country like the United
States, where the progress and the triumph seem to be the only acceptable parameter.
Although Carver was not an effusively politicized writer, it is clear that this
specific character, the baker, symbolizes in an almost Kafkaesque manner, the
submission of a man to the capitalist system, and depicts an almost palpable
drama played by the blue-collar class.
The predominant feeling among
the characters of “A Small, Good Thing”, as well as among the people of the
real world nowadays, is a considerable incommunicability: In the beginning of
the story, the mother tries to be gentle to the baker, but she gives up soon in
face of his extreme rudeness. It can be exemplified by the following fragment,
which also serves as a concept to the minimalist aesthetic:
The baker was not jolly.
There were no pleasantries between them, just the minimum exchange of words,
the necessary information. (376)
After the moment when Scotty
is run over, the despair of his parents increases because the boy does not come
to consciousness and the doctors and nurses seem to be incapable or unwilling
to talk to Ann and Howard about the real situation of the kid. In an
institution that is supposed to protect lives, what they find is the total
disregard for human beings. Dr.
Francis, for example, in opposition to his patient, looks healthier and
healthier every day, and he gives laconic answers every time he is asked about
the child’s condition:
Howard waited. He looked at
the doctor.
“No, I don’t want to call it
a coma,” the doctor said and glanced over at the boy once more. “He’s just in a
very deep sleep (...) He’s out of any real danger, I’d say that for certain,
yes”. (383)
Therefore, all the conflicts
in “A Small, Good Thing” are a result of the extreme incommunicability the
characters experience. The fragmentation of the reality and, consequently, the
failures during the communication process are the main factors that trigger the
hostility depicted in the story: right after the moment Scotty is hit by a car,
he stands up, feeling a little dizzy, and hears his friend ask “what it felt
like to be hit by a car” (378). Thus, the resentment triggered by such unsociability
is also implicit in the attitude of a nurse who enters Scotty’s room and,
without even saying a word to the parents, starts to draw off blood from the
child’s arm. When asked by the parents, the woman precariously explains:
“Doctor’s orders,” the young
woman said. “I do what I’m told. They say draw that one, I draw” (386)
The usage of the demonstrative
pronoun “that” by the nurse in her statement promote the disembodiment of the
human being. “That” is a word that is syntactically used to refer to something
or someone that is away from the speaker. By doing so, she implies that Scotty
is just another patient, just another meaningless thing to the structure of the
health system.
Ironically, the baker, though
in an atrocious manner, is the only one who interrogates the problem of
Scotty’s existence because he sets off the process of reification of the
characters and their relationships. Metonymically through the birthday cake, he
calls the other characters’ (and, subsequently, the reader’s) attention to the
subject of the personality of the boy. But while he seems to be trying to
humanize and “revitalize” Scotty, the life of the child is slowly fading away.
This hypothesis becomes evident in the following fragment of the narrative in
which Ann leaves the hospital and, feeling so guilty in an “obscure way” for
what happened to her son, she hears the phone ring and, when she answers it,
the voice says:
“Scotty,” the man’s voice
said. “It’s about Scotty, yes. It has to do with Scotty, that problem. Have you
forgotten about Scotty?” the man said. Then he hung up. (392)
Given the happenings of the text and the
tension experienced by the characters, the baker acts like a destabilizing
entity in the story. As Ann and Howard are too perturbed by their child’s
condition and the fact that they do not know who is making the phone calls
contributes to a sort of disembodiment of the mysterious man who keeps
tormenting them on the other side of the line. Therefore, the baker proceeds as
an evil force, a wicked being that intrudes on the most unexpected moments of
the story to stir up their panic and, indirectly, make them blame themselves
for having neglected the boy.
Such moments of tenseness appear randomly in
the text through the utilization of some strategies to expand the suspense
like, for instance, the insertion of narrative “ramifications” parallel to the
main plot. This narrative device is known as anticlimax because it delays the
ending of the central story. Thus, the narrator, in cuts that recall the
cinematographic language, dislocate the reader’s attention to additional
narrative elements, postponing and causing a greater expectation for the
conclusion of the short story.
What contributes to the generation of the
anticlimax in “A Small, Good Thing” is the inclusion of the drama experienced
by a Negro family that is waiting for their son who is in the operation table.
Ann realizes that those people were “in the same kind of waiting she was in” (391) because Franklin, the black boy in the
operation table, though innocent, was hurt by an external agent, just like
Scotty was; that is, their stories had gone through similar ruptures:
He
said, “Our Franklin, he’s on the operation table. Somebody cut him. Tried to
kill him. There was a fight where he was at. At this party. They say he was
just standing and watching. Not bothering nobody. But that don’t mean nothing
these days”. (390-391)
And besides this little
parallel drama be rather analogous to the central story line, it is interesting
to mention the fact that Franklin does not survive the surgery and dies — what
can be interpreted as an anticipation of Scotty’s tragedy.
The narrator also uses another
narrative procedure: the focalization of unusual elements that are very useful
in order to compose the scenes. His detailed descriptions of locations,
objects, characters, and, above all, their actions, help the reader to develop
clearer notions of temporality, spatiality, and to form a monstrous image of
the baker:
He looked
at them and rolled his tongue behind his teeth. (402)
Another expedient that
contributes to the increasing sensation of anguish and uncertainty in the text
is related to the author’s capacity of condensing words, of precisely removing
the excessive elements of the dialogs so that what is left is just the minimum,
just the essential amount of information that is needed to the
(in)comprehension of the message.
Whenever the doctor comes and
examines the comatose boy, Ann tries really hard to get answers from him, but
the words he uses to explain Scotty’s condition are so limited that make her
feel even more frightened and confused. When asked about the boy’s recovery,
the nurses also provide minimal answers like “stable” or “his signs are good”,
what really worries the parents instead of comforting them.
The conciseness of Carver when
dealing with words and sentiments detectable in “A Small, Good Thing”, as well
as in the whole minimalist artistic production, from the sober work of Sol
LeWitt to the succinct music of Suzanne Vega, requires that the
reader/observer/listener of this kind of art develop a high level of
understanding and also a vast capacity of interaction and reconfiguration of
the symbolic and aesthetic elements provided by the artist along his or her
work. Although these artistic artifacts are conceptually simple, they have an
enormous perceptive density.
In “A Small, Good Thing” and
in other stories written by Raymond Carver, the ordinary themes of quotidian
life are stylistically structured, and that is why they suggest much wider
human dimensions. Therefore, the simple act of answering the phone and not
hearing a voice on the other side of the line sounds like an overwhelming
catastrophe. The violence is repressed in the silence, the crisis and the fatal
human collapse is implicit between the lines of the carefully constructed
discourse of the author. Michael Wood once wrote in “The New York Times” that
“in Mr. Carver's silences, a good deal of the unsayable gets said”.[2]
Analyzing the characters is
also something crucial in order to understand the text. Ann Weiss, for example,
symbolizes a stereotypical woman, a young mother whose actions are somewhat
automatic. She shows all her motherly sweetness, her uncertainty, her fear, but
nevertheless, she seems incapable of fighting against her own alienation. Only
after her son’s death, which represents the sacrifice, she starts to get rid of
her behavioral automatism and then she demonstrates her anger:
She
clenched her fists. She stared at him fiercely. There was a deep burning inside
her, an anger that made her feel larger than herself, larger than either of
these men. (402)
The automatism of the social
roles and the sensation of powerlessness of the character reach such a dramatic
level that Ann does not seem to be able to stand her current situation and then
she escapes totally from her reality, foreshadowing herself and Scotty running
away to a safer territory. Her incapacity of dealing with the situation is so
palpable that she even mentally advises a girl she met in the hospital not to
have children in order to avoid such suffering:
“Don’t
have children,” she told the girl’s image as she entered the front door of the
hospital. “For God’s sake, don’t.” (393-394)
The father also goes through
similar alienation, but given the circumstances, Howard tries an inverse kind
of flight: by means of his flashbacks, he searches for some relief in the
memories of his serene and successful past. His life had been apparently full
of satisfaction until the day that brusque rupture happened and forced him to
face a completely new reality:
Until
now, his life had gone smoothly and to his satisfaction (...) He was happy and,
so far, lucky — he knew that (...) So far, he had kept away from any real harm,
from those forces he knew existed and that could cripple or bring down a man if
the luck went bad, if things suddenly turned. (379)
However, what is surprising in
“A Small, Good Thing”, if we compare it to “The Bath” are the conversational
rhythms of the baker. As he talks, he makes clear that he acted according to
his survival instinct, choosing the violence and the cruelty as a form of
expression, as a way of manifesting all his unhappiness:
“It
cost me time and money to make that cake. If you want it, okay, if you don’t,
that’s okay, too. I have to get back to work.” He looked at them and rolled his
tongue behind his teeth (...) “Lady, I work sixteen hours a day in this place
to earn a living, (...) I work night and day in here, trying to make ends meet”
(402)
“God
alone knows how sorry [I am]. Listen to me. I’m just a baker. I don’t claim to
be anything else. Maybe once, maybe years ago, I was a different kind of human
being (...) But I’m not any longer, if I ever was (...) I’m not an evil man, I
don’t think (...) You got to understand what it comes down to is I don’t know
how to act anymore, it would seem”. (404)
When the baker becomes
conscious of the perverse acts he practiced, he recovers the sense of humanity
he said he had lost a long time ago because of his overwhelming routine of
work. All his cruelty is due to his exaggerated materialism. We live in a
material world where the commercial relations are favored in detriment of
feelings like fraternity, forgiveness, and love. From this moment on, Carver’s
prose, exactly because it suggests a critique of the social and economical
system, reminds the discourse of other great writers who preceded him and
highly influenced his work, like Czech author Franz Kafka and, above all,
Russian writer Anton Chekhov (whom Carver once confessed he was very fond of).
The exhausting schedule of work causes a person to become “robotized”. This
winds up by leading them to isolation and making them lose their affection.
Other problem that contributes to the baker’s hostility seems to be his
childlessness:
Although
they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say.
They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of
doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years. He told them
what it was like to be childless all these years. To repeat the days with the
ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty. (405)
Carver also
displayed his accuracy when he created an unexpected ending to his short story:
the sensations of incommunicability and reification are transformed into
something positive. The three characters (Ann, Howard and the baker), after
pulling up a fierce argument, start to articulate those feelings that were
petrified until then. And finally, after Scotty’s sacrifice, there is a brief
communion among them, in which the food and the dawn of a new day reaches a
great symbolism, and, for a little while, we believe that communication and
understanding are the key to bind again those abysses that tear the people apart.
“You
probably need to eat something,” the baker said. “I hope you’ll eat some of my
hot rolls. You have to eat and keep going. Eating is a small, good thing in a
time like this.” (404)
[Howard
and Ann] listened to him. They ate what they could (...) They talked on into
the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did
not think of leaving. (405)
“A Small, Good Thing” by
Raymond Carver follows the narrative structural scheme below:
|
Initial
situation |
Rupture |
Suspense |
Ending |
||
|
Sacrifice
|
Association |
||||
|
A
happy couple (Howard and Ann) plans to celebrate their eight-year-old child’s
birthday. |
Scotty,
the birthday boy, is knocked over. The birthday party is canceled. |
Scotty
does not wake up; The parents are afflicted by the baker’s phone calls. |
Scotty
dies too. |
After
the argument, the parents forgive the baker. The three of them sit around the
table and eat. (communion) |
|
|
Anticlimax |
Anticipation |
||||
|
Ann
meets an Afro-American family whose son was hurt in a party and he is undergoing
a surgery |
Franklin,
the black boy, dies. |
||||
|
INCOMMUNICABILITY
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>COMMUNION |
|||||
Due to his
development as a writer represented by his stories such as “A Small, Good
Thing” and “Cathedral”, Raymond Carver began to be compared since then to
important writers like Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemmingway. However, Mr.
Carver and his work were misinterpreted since the beginning. Some critics who
classified his art as depressive and freezing attacked him. Many people doubted
the existence of Minimalism, even Carver himself, who refused this label
because he thought it was too simple to define his work.
But, whatever
it is, every time we talk about Raymond Carver we talk about a tragic,
challenging, astoundingly beautiful mosaic — the life.
Bibliography:
CARVER, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
Random House. New York, 1989.
CARVER, Raymond. Where I’m Calling From – New And Selected Stories.
Random House. New York, 1989.
HASHIMOTO, Hiromi. Trying To Understand Carver’s Revisions. In:
Tokai English Review, N.º 5, Tokio, Japan, 1995, pp. 113-147.
CRIADO,
Francisco J. Rodriguez. El realismo pesimista de Raymond Carver. <http://maruska.soria.org/carver.htm>
09/09/2002.
SOBREIRA, Ricardo. Sobre o que falamos quando falamos de Raymond Carver. <http://www.faijales.com.br/collii/main.php?path=comunicacoes/raymond.htm&frame=false&image=true> 10/01/2002.
[1] Ricardo Sobreira is a Brazilian student and an
EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teacher at CCAA – Centro de Cultura
Anglo-americana, one of the most important English schools in Brazil.
[2] WOOD, Michael. Stories Full Of Edges And
Silences, The New York Times, Books, 26/04/1981. <http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/01/21/specials/carver-wood.html>