![]() ![]() Perhaps only in the late story "Cathedral" is an accommodation made between masculine frontier instincts and domestic social convention. Speculative, mythic questioning and transcendental connections (however rare, in the case of the latter) are products in Carver of intensive drinking and eating social-primarily male homosocial-activities and aggressive talk-all, generally, fostering and taking place in the context of violent remaking of one sort or another. ![]() As is the case for Ernest Hemingway, the short story provides Carver with a form suited to a brusque, mythic American masculinity. We are always "going," to use a key Carver word, Carver as "participle-loving" as Ezra Greenspan (expanding on an insight of Randall Jarrell's) has written of Walt Whitman (92) being, and as characteristically American, I would argue. His method is experiential and empirical the epistemology derives from common physical and social activities. The repeated if often hidden bathroom allusions (bordering at times on the potty talk of little boys) serve an important function in those stories: we are ever reminded of the power of necessity, of elemental existence, whether excretory, sexual, medical, or broadly practical. But the bathroom incident, memorable in itself, has acquired an additional, random, and serendipitous meaning for me since then as a result of something I've come to notice in Carver's stories: bathroom references. I also recognized immediately that they were laughing at having shared a coed bathroom, on that most liberal of college campuses. Carver had one-year of sobriety, was newly separated, and had just published his first major story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? I recognized him from the dust jacket of his book. My first sight of Raymond Carver was of him and Tess Gallagher, his girlfriend and future wife, emerging together-laughing-from the UC Santa Cruz coed bathroom, in the dorm where we conferees were staying. ![]()
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