Raymond carver's "epiphanic moments"

Style, Fall, 2001 by Gunter Leypoldt

1. Carver and the Realist Epiphany

Carver's interest in the rhetoric of the sudden illumination is well-known. In his autobiographical sketch "On Writing," he emphasized his indebtedness to a line from a story by Chekhov he reportedly liked so much that he pinned it on the wall beside his writing desk: it reads, "'... and suddenly everything became clear to him."' Carver was intrigued, he said, by the "hint of revelation that's implied" (Fires 23). If the notion of a "hint of revelation" is understood in the romanticist or modernist terms on which recent aesthetics (Beja, Langbaum, Nichols), phenomenologies (Bidney, Patterns), and typologies (Tigges) of literary epiphany tend to focus, it refers to the charging of external reality with a sense of transcendental significance that, on the one hand, makes a text's narrative agent see matters in a radically new light, but that, on the other, cannot be translated into a logical proposition or concept. This "revelation," then, remains at the level of a non-semantic sense of the "whatness of things" and at best branches into multiple meanings. Thus Morris Beja, in his landmark study Epiphany in the Modern Novel, cautions that the epiphanic moment should not be confused with the "classical sense of recognition, or anagnorisis," in which discoveries tend to be "rational" rather than "spiritual" (15-16). (1) Yet both Carver's and Chekhov's use of epiphanic rhetoric is related, however tenuously, to a literary paradigm of nineteenth-century realism that differs from romantic or modernist paradigms in that it frequently allows the "sudden illumination" to converge with rational recognition, so that the differences between epiphany and anagnorisis indeed become blurred, with the one potentially entailing or at least implying the other. That is to say, realist texts often employ the character's revelatory experience to achieve a more world-oriented than metaphysical reference, with the result that the Wordsworthian "moment"--where one suddenly sees or feels a spiritual truth that resists reason--slides into a m ore positivist sense of revelation--where one also suddenly understands the mechanics of a complex external world. (2) As a result, in the realist poetics the "hints of revelation" that the protagonist experiences may not only arrive with a spiritual aura, but also lead to a gaining of self-awareness that can be put into words, and that can therefore be presented to the reader as a certified window on reality revealing a more or less tangible "truth" behind the "appearances." The sudden illumination, then, becomes a seminal narrative device with which not only to structure plot but also to provide it with a narrative climax (marked by the pathos of sudden illumination) and a logical resolution.

Perhaps the paradigmatic example of the blurring of the distinction between epiphany and anagnorisis is Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych" (1886), one of the most influential texts of classic realism. It tells the story of a spiritually empty law-court official, who in the face of his approaching death suddenly realizes, in a vivid flash of perception, that his outwardly successful life was in reality defined by shallow conventions and a hypocritical morality. His shock of recognition is prompted by a logically insignificant observation revolving around the demeanor and appearance of his wife: