Raymond carver's "epiphanic moments"

Style, Fall, 2001 by Gunter Leypoldt

Carver's "A Serious Talk"--one of the highlights of his Cheshire-grinning treatment of the traditional moment of insight--is one of the most intriguing examples of how the ironized epiphany turns into a comic one and is reduced to a mere satirical flourish entirely irrelevant to the text's overall plot closure. The story revolves around a deserted husband-cum-alcoholic, Burt, who cannot bring himself to come to terms with the fact that his ex-wife Vera has a new lover. That the tragic aspects of Burt's suffering are counterpointed by the comic effect provided by his lack of theoretical awareness leads him to engage in a series of unwitting symptomatic acts (in the Freudian sense) whose underlying motivations are patently obvious to the reader. (9) The story's showdown begins with Burt's discovery that Vera's new lover left cigarette butts in a stoneware dish that was bought during the happier days of their marriage. Unable to cope with the symbolized presence of his rival, Burt disturbs Vera's dinner preparat ions with a number of provocative pranks until, asking him to leave, she threatens to call the police. Before he starts for the exit, he grabs the dish/ashtray, and, as Vera demands that he put "the ashtray" down, he assumes the histrionic posture of an athlete ready to hurl a discus and walks proudly through the patio door, as if he had made a significant point. Sitting in his car, he congratulates himself that "he had proved something" and "made something clear" (What We Talk About 112-13), and he makes a mental note that he and Vera have to have "a serious talk soon." The ironization of Burt's "epiphany" emerges clearly in his inability to express exactly what he wants to discuss with Vera, for his conceptualization stops at the abstract notions of "something" or "things" that will have to be dealt with:

There were things he wanted to say, grieving things, consoling things, things like that [...]. The thing was, they had to have a serious talk soon. There were things that needed talking about, important things that had to be discussed. They'd talk again [after] things got back to normal. (111, 113)

The final blow to his credibility--and the story's ultimate lapse into farce, or at least tragicomedy--comes with Burt's failed attempt to translate his epiphanic illumination into words: trying to grasp what exactly he feels he needs to discuss with his wife, he concludes that he will "tell her the goddamn ashtray was a goddamn dish, for example" (113). In this case, Carver undercuts the epiphany with an ironic lack of self-awareness in the character that is comical rather than detrimental to the stability of plot because readers will have already arrived at the interpretive stage Burt fails to reach.

Particularly in his later work, Carver's tongue-in-cheek ironization of his protagonists' attempts at understanding reality occasionally turns into a mannerism that is but a step away from the tricks of 1960s metafictionists. (10) the only difference being that his blue-collar heroes express their epistemological or linguistic skepticism with the groping colloquial language of their sociolects rather than with modernist pathos or postmodernist stylization. Typical examples of Carver at his most mannerist ironization of the epiphanic moment of insight are the helpless "babbling" of the narrator-protagonist of "Whoever Was Using This Bed" (faced with his wife's question of whether he would stop the life support system if she lay in an indefinite coma)-