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PARTISAN REVIEW
the silent wall behind the talk. The only shaping is obtained through
the sparse water/death-sex images and the "solution" of the final
sentence. This metaphor is achieved with so deft a touch that at first
it slips by unnoticed. Its intensity is so alien to the ordinary flow of
the voice-stripped of metaphor or image-that the reader checks
back to see if the faucet has been left running in the kitchen. A meta–
phorical identity has been astonishingly realized. In "What We Talk
About When We Talk About Love," the conversation of two couples
drinking and talking meanders about two conceptions of love, nega–
tive and positive. The talk is marked as if by a luminou s marker.
"The afternoon sun was like a presence in this room, the spacious
light of ease and generosity." And the final, most moving image of
the book: "I could hear everyone's heart. I could hear the human
noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the
room went dark." The metaphor collects, condenses the story into a
powerful complex of love, fear, loneliness, death. The imagery is
incompatible with the rhetoric of banality that dominates the story.
It shines through-or darkens-the ordinariness of the talk. In
Carver's stories the operative element is literary in the specific
sense, a solution
of
language, not
in
it; all the more notable as it
wrenches us out of a quasi-naturalistic environment. The metaphor
of the story does not accompany, elucidate a psychological, dramatic
progression as in the realistic novel. At a point of anguish in the
enclosed lives, of frustration with the unspeaking language, the met–
aphor operates a
passage through
to an apQcalyptic moment, an unsus–
pected transcendence of the text. So heteronomous is this poetic lan–
guage that one may detect a third voice behind narrator and
author-the poet in Carver, like us unable to tolerate a muted,
incommunicable universe, intrudes on, breaks with, the textual
voices. When the iron-clad ordinariness of the speech of the stories is
invulnerable or the revelatory image insufficiently sharp-its gleam–
ing edge blunted by the molecular cohesiveness, the sheer gravity of
the talk-then the image appears irrelevant and the story fails.
When it is fully achieved as in the above stories and others, when it
appears as the inevitable if unpredictable precipitate of the fiction–
solution-then it so jars us out of our received patterns of reading
that we perceive a remarkably novel fictional experience.
ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON
