In the same essay, Carver notes, “I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories. This suggests that critics who respond solely to the characters’ consumption of alcohol to blunt or evade emotion on the “surface of things” miss much of the emotional tension created or revealed by alcohol underneath the “visible action” of the story. But it’s also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things” (17). is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. In “On Writing,” Carver insists that in a short story, “what creates tension. Do Carver’s inebriated and/or alcoholic characters drink to evade emotional connections? Is his fictional world superficial and devoid of tension?Ĭarver’s critical essays suggest a radically alternative approach to these issues.
A self-avowed “fan of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories” (“Fires” 19), Carver also saturates his stories with alcohol his characters often consume inordinate amounts of alcohol and generally struggle with emotional expression. As Charles May notes in “‘Do You See What I’m Saying?’: The Inadequacy of Explanation and the Uses of Story in the Short Fiction of Raymond Carver,” literary “critics often complain that there is no depth in Carver, that his stories are all surface detail” (49). If Edel fails to recognize the deep emotional tension in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” where one of the characters reflects critically, “that’s all we do isn’t it-look at things and try new drinks” (211), then one can only imagine the qualms he would have with Raymond Carver’s stories. it is a world of superficial action and almost wholly without reflection” (Edel 170). In “The Art of Evasion,” Leon Edel complains that Ernest Hemingway’s fiction evades emotion by featuring superficial characters who drink: “In Hemingway’s novels people order drinks-they are always ordering drinks-then they drink, then they order some more.
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