5/31/2023 0 Comments Fires by Raymond Carver![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Whether talking about physical matter or the "material" of his stories, the real in both remains fissured rather than whole, discontinuous rather than homogeneous, pulverized into the quanta or particles of a relentless combinatory process rather than fixed or monolithic. ![]() Then it curled and straightened out." It is that infra-zone below the surface that solicits Carver's gaze as it simultaneously makes him steer clear of nineteenth-century realism-with its eye on reality as it appeared.ĢSuch shifting of narrative territory points to the very direct link between Carver's penetration into the hypo-mimetic forces in narrative and the physicist's "penetration into the world of atoms, hitherto closed to the eyes of man." (Bohr 24). The hypogean slugs which the narrator's neighbor digs up at night and which disfigure the lawn are no less metonymic of a sub-liminal life that "twists this way and that" before it is brought to the mimetic order of his stories: "The slug was twisting this way and that. She thus echoes a self-reflexive Carver who could fix his own "regard" on the sub-mimetic activity, the infiniment petit of the sub-conscious forces he glimpsed under the "smooth (but sometimes broken) surface of things" ( Fires 17). 1"I could see the smallest things," says the female narrator in the story of the same title, "the clothespins on the line, for instance" ( What We Talk About When We Talk About Love). ![]()
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