BOOKS
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beginning of "Sacks," explicitly: "I want to pass along to you a
story my father told me when I stopped over in Sacramento last
year." In the stories told in third-person narrative the text is simi–
larly contaminated by the colloquial style: "Two orderlies came in.
They wheeled a thing like a bed. They unhooked the boy from the
tube and slid him onto the thing with wheels." The story, "The
Bath," is about a child interned in a hospital in a coma and the emo–
tional foundering of his parents. The author, wholly internalized in
the voice of the narrator, is also "unconscious." This absent narra–
tor will be seen to be a model for his characters. The fiction, satu–
rated with the coll oquial voice, has no other resources left (imagery,
metaphor) except as they pertain to this voice. The unbroken voice,
its closure, the unself-conscious speech, this narrative purity is bot–
tled up like some rare life form in a vacuum, no longer viable in the
corrupt atmosphere of self-conscious fiction. The void in language
circumscribed here is the doubling back of the novel upon its voice.
These stories are not simply the texture of talk but
about
talk.
What
We
Talk About When
We
Talk About Love.
As the title says,
about
talk.
Carver has
not
given a voice to his characters; he has
given his characters to a voice. The
voix blanche
turned inside out like
a glove. Like the absent narrator, they are not included in the text
but their traces are clearly perceivable in its rhythms, diction, gram–
mar. The characters are the pronouns and the proper names given
existence by the verb" said." They have been sucked into the vac–
uum of their speech. So obsessive is the speech rhythm that the char–
acters are lonely, lost, trapped in it. The author himself, emptied
into the absent narrator, cannot reflect on his text, be conscious of
his language, illuminate his fiction from the "outside."
Irresistible pressures build within this vacuum chamber of the
voice to produce paradoxical fictional solutions. In "So Much Water
So Close to Home," the narrator and her husband, still incommuni–
cado, go for a drive and drink beer in the picnic grounds just outside
town. Observing men fishing in the pond there, she thinks: "So
much water so close to home." She sees herself, "I'm right in it,
eyes open, face down, staring at the moss on the bottom, dead." She
goes alone to the murdered girl's funeral, and when she gets back:
"First things first," he says as he unbuttons her blouse. "He says
something else. But I don't need to listen. I can't hear a thing with
so much water going." End of story. There is no psychological
movement in the paralysis of the couple, their impotence to breach
