Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Bookmarked. Брайан К. Эвенсон

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СКАЧАТЬ When nobody volunteered, she began to go around the circle, asking us one by one what we thought of the story.

      I don’t remember specifically what anybody said, but I do remember growing more and more agitated, partly because my turn was coming, and partly because the measured responses that the more advanced students were giving seemed to me to have very little to do with what the story was or what it was trying to do—what, anyway, it had done to me. I felt dully angry, but resentful too that I would soon have to speak.

      When my turn came, I don’t remember what I said either. Something offhand and semi-sarcastic, just a sentence or two, a vague lashing out partly at Carver’s story for ambushing me, partly at the other students for not having a more visceral response. I was young and fairly naïve, and probably a bit of an asshole. Looking back at the story now, just having reread it, I have a hard time seeing why it shocked me so much. But it still strikes me as a great story, and a painfully honest one.

      I remember Bell listening and then asking if I could clarify what I meant. I struggled, offered something equally vague, tried again, failed, and then shrugged, hoping perhaps she’d be able to give me a way to phrase what I’d failed to express. Instead, she simply looked at me for a moment without expression and then moved on to the student sitting beside me.

      As it would turn out, this was for me the best possible response.

      •

      I was looking for a box to put the story in. It had made me uncomfortable, and if I’d had an easy way to dismiss it, I would have. I was groping for that in the few words I was forced to say after just having listened to it. But my response was complex in that I was objecting to the other students’ approach for that very reason—they had readymade boxes they could put the story in, but they didn’t strike me as boxes that could actually, if properly considered, contain the story.

      If I’d read the story on the page, rather than hearing someone say “beat off” and “goddamn” aloud, I would have been able to metabolize it easier. One of the shocking things about the story, in retrospect, was that I first heard it on BYU’s campus. Mormons were not supposed to take the name of God in vain, and that was particularly true of BYU students. Indeed, we had a strict code of conduct that concerned not only the language we were allowed to use but every aspect of our lives. To attend BYU you had to remain worthy members of the Mormon church and have your worthiness periodically affirmed by your ecclesiastical leaders. You could not drink alcohol, drink coffee, or smoke. You could not have sex (or, well, you could as long as both you and the person you were having sex with kept it a secret). Boys were supposed to report if they masturbated to their Bishop and had to strive to stop, and could in fact be suspended from the university if the practice continued. You were not allowed to take the name of the Lord in vain—if I’d said the word “goddamn” in front of the wrong person (I said this and more, of course, but always with great awareness of who was in earshot) I would have been reported for a conduct violation.

      In addition, you had to live in BYU-approved housing. The dormitories, where I lived as a freshman, were strictly divided by gender. You were not allowed to visit the room of someone from the opposite gender except for a few hours on Sunday, when visits were strictly monitored and doors always left wide open. If you snuck into the room of someone of the opposite gender at another time, you could be suspended.

      There was more. Men’s hair had to be cut short, off the back of their collar with the ears not covered by hair. If you violated this, or had what was judged an extreme hairstyle, you could get reported. There was a strict dress code you would get reported for violating as well—no tank tops for either men or women, no shirts that would reveal the belly, and all shorts had to fall at least to the middle of the knee. This had to do with the particulars of the Mormon garment, the sacred underwear that Mormons who had been on a mission wore underneath their clothing.

      Mormonism is a strangely bifurcated religion. On the surface, it seems largely protestant: a secular ministry with weekly church services at a local meeting house that are open to anyone. But there’s a second, ritualized layer to Mormonism, consisting of what goes on in the Mormon temple. In 1984–85, when I was a freshman at BYU, this involved a sacred (and consequently secret) Masonic-style passion play made up of watching movies, putting on and rearranging ritual clothing, engaging in promises and handshakes, and exchanging ritual phrases. You made promises not to reveal the secrets, and then mimed how you would kill yourself if you did.³ To participate in the Mormon temple ceremonies, you have to receive your “temple endowment,” a particular ceremony where you are first introduced to the mysteries of the temple and are given a new name that you are told you must keep secret.⁴ To receive your endowment, you have to be a member in exceptionally good standing, and I’d guess well over half the people on the active rolls of the Mormon church have never gone, so it’s as if there’s a secret society hidden within the Mormon church.

      In 1985, as a freshman, I hadn’t been endowed yet—I would be endowed a year or so later as I prepared to go on a Mormon mission to Switzerland. But I’d been raised Mormon all my life. I knew there were disjunctions between how Mormons acted in private and public. I wasn’t averse to swearing or privately violating boundaries that I publically seemed to affirm. But despite that, I was stunned to see it being done in class at a Mormon-controlled university. One part of me felt it was deeply inappropriate. Another part of me was simply amazed and eager for more.

      •

      Looking back, I can’t help but be impressed by the risk Professor Bell took. If any student had chosen to report the story as “inappropriate”—code for a range of things objectionable to Mormon culture—she would have had a lot to answer for. At the very least, she would have had her hands slapped. When I returned to teach at BYU almost a decade later, I discovered that there was a committee that quietly looked over the books you assigned to your class. If one of your books had been the subject of past controversy or complaint, the committee chair would “helpfully” call you and let you know. If a book you were planning to teach was unfamiliar to the committee, the chair would call—as, indeed, he did with me—and ask you to “vouch for it.” “We’re not telling you you can’t teach it,” I was told about one of the books I was teaching, “that would be censorship.” But my guess is that that feeling of being monitored alone was enough to encourage most BYU professors to self-censor.

      •

      Unsettled by “Nobody Said Anything,” I felt I had two choices: either to reject the story wholesale or to scrutinize it and try to crack the code of how it did what it did to me. I don’t know why I chose to opt for the latter. Perhaps it was partly because I was ashamed of not having been able to articulate a response to the story. Perhaps it went back to something I remembered Mormon prophet Brigham Young saying: “I mean to learn all that is in heaven, earth, and hell.”⁵ I wanted to know more than I wanted to be comfortable. Or perhaps it was just sheer cussedness.

      In any case, after class I went to check the book that contained “Nobody Said Anything” out of the BYU library. There was only one copy and it was already checked out. So I went to the bookstore and bought it, and then, instead of studying for the following day’s classes, read it straight through. On the page, “Nobody Said Anything” felt more poignant and painful than shocking, but there were other stories that had a similar effect for me. “Fat,” the second story I ever read by Carver, struck me nearly as hard, and “Neighbors” had a kind of oddness to it that appealed to me very much—not the same emotional impact, but there was something damaged about it that was nonetheless profoundly human. “They’re Not Your Husband” reminded me of how one of my high school friends used to act when he was drunk and had lost all of his filters. “Why, Honey?”—a story about a politician with a vicious hidden past, told by his mother after she’s been tracked down by a reporter, worked away at me long after I had finished it. Critic Adam Meyer rightly calls it “one of the most technically dazzling СКАЧАТЬ