Whether conscious or unconscious, his appropriation of that vision turns the physicist into one among the plethora of 'influences forces' which Carver is compelled to acknowledge as unknown even to himself in the opening lines of 'Fires': (104)ģUnlike Tess Gallagher, however, we did not see the connection between the two men in the analogous impact each had in his respective field, clean of any contagion from the space of one to the other, but rather in the impact of the physicist on the writer, the fact that Carver had been 'infected' by the vision of reality Einstein's discovery had revealed to all-but which all do not always integrate in the same space of time. Their suffering was made emotionally palpable, for Carver was first of all a poet. We couldn't quite fathom how it worked, but it changed the way we regarded the lives of middle-class working people.

Inextricable from an Einsteinian universe as the singularity of Carver's voice and vision appeared to us, we could not but be drawn to the following statement made by one with no less insight into his fiction than the poet Tess Gallagher, Carver's wife:Ĭarver's stories had the kind of impact on American fiction that Einstein's theory of relativity had on science. 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).

Fires by Raymond Carver