Raymond carver's "epiphanic moments"

Style, Fall, 2001 by Gunter Leypoldt

Carver's work includes a few isolated stories in which the epiphany equals recognition and leads to the solid plot closure of classic or neorealism, particularly those stories such as "A Small, Good Thing" or "Jerry, Molly, and Sam" that tend to be favored by a school of critics arguing for Carver's "development" towards realism. (6) Perhaps the most thorough example of Carver's flirtation with orthodox realism occurs in "Fever," a story about a man's painful coming to terms with having been left by his wife. After the protagonist has spent several pages drifting and suffering from his loss, unsuccessfully trying to regain his moorings and secretly hoping that his marriage can be restored, a friendly gesture from his housekeeper causes a cathartic shock of recognition in which he realizes that he must face the reality of his wife's departure and make a new start:

It was then, as he stood at the window [and saw his maid waving at him], that he felt something come to an end. It had to do with Eileen [i.e., his ex-wife] and the life before this. Had he ever waved at her? He must have, of course, he knew he had, yet he could not remember just now. But he understood it was over, and he felt able to let her go. He was sure their life together [...] was something that had passed. And that passing--though it had seemed impossible and he'd fought against it--would become a part of him now, too, as surely as anything else he'd left behind. (Cathedral 186)

In this case-study of realist epiphany, because the sudden illumination stems from the observation of a gesture logically unrelated to the experience it causes, it therefore seems out of proportion, very much in line with current definitions of the literary epiphany. (7) Yet, at the same time, the defamiliarizing quality of the epiphanic vision leads to a "truth" that is spelled out, that makes the protagonist's self-awareness tangible, and that thus finally guides readers to a plot they can probe for its implicit "deep knowledge."

2. Carver's "Arrested" Epiphany

Most of Carver's work, however, evades this unrefracted type of resolution and instead features a variation that I would like to call an "arrested epiphany." The arrested epiphany still functions as a focal point within the narrative's progression, but at the same time it is defined by a distinct disparity between the character's feeling of revelation and his or her lack of understanding of what sort of insight the revelation is supposed to provide. That is to say, the centers of consciousness realize, with an often disquieting sense of menace, that there is something out of joint in their world, that at some level they are on the brink of making a tremendous discovery, but they remain far from grasping what exactly it could be. (8) The structural significance of Carver's arrested epiphany depends on its functional location within a story's narrative framework. In Carver's most experimental work, which can be said to be a quasi-representationalist variant of a pronounced anti-realism, the protagonist's epipha nic vision emerges as a sudden climax at a point when the reader expects the loose narrative threads to be synthesized into at least partial closure; yet it typically remains an anti-climax, for it leaves the plot so unresolved that the text almost appears to mock the very notion of anagnorisis. In such cases, the reader, whose sense-making is arrested along with the character's helpless groping, concludes the story with a feeling that it fails to accrue coherent meaning, that the "deep knowledge" below the narrated events is at best ambiguous and fluctuating. The uncompromising silence that such arrested epiphanies emit is to be found throughout Carver's work, and one of its most illustrative examples occurs in the early, minimalist story "The Student's Wife" (in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please). Lying awake in her bedroom and faced with the approach of dawn after a gruelingly sleepless night, the young woman Nan suddenly experiences her environment with the clarity of epiphanic vision: she perceives the su nrise to be "terrible," her husband seems "desperate in his sleep," and the sheets of her bed become pale and "white[n] grossly before her eyes," as if they were funeral shrouds. Her eerily vivid impressions make her "wet her lips with a sticking sound," go "down on her knees," and "put her hands out on the bed," as if in prayer; the text closes with the following laconic line: "'God,' she said. 'God, will you help us, God?' she said" (131). As her arrested epiphany prevents her from understanding any of the reasons for her sense of menace, the reader is left as puzzled as Nan: as Saltzman aptly puts it, "Carver exits at the moment the [menacing] footsteps are heard" (Saltzman, "Looking" 43), 50 that not only the plot's essential contour and meaning, but even its central conflicts remain blurred (this led various commentators to a great deal of conjecture: for an overview, see Person 69n.38).