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Special section: Short crime fiction

The Criminal Labyrinth of Raymond Carver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home”

Ineke Jolink
p. 115-124

Résumés

Cette contribution envisage la nouvelle de Raymond Carver “So Much Water So Close to Home” à travers l’image du labyrinthe. Le récit se présente d’abord comme une histoire à suspense avant de se transformer en intrigue policière et finalement, peut-être, d’assumer à nouveau son genre initial. L’accent est mis sur la façon dont la narratrice et personnage principal entraîne les lecteurs dans son labyrinthe, jusqu’à ce qu’ils soient obligés de se séparer d’elle – la route qu’elle suit ne peut pas être la bonne – tout en restant néanmoins aussi désemparés qu’elle, sans même la moindre certitude quant à la nature exacte du crime dont il est question dans la nouvelle.

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Texte intégral

1What would you think, if you didn’t find out until after people started calling the house—because they read it in the newspaper—that three days before, your partner had found and handled a dead woman without telling you about it?

  • 1 Carver published the story five times: a longer version appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology of (...)
  • 2 In connection with the shortness of his stories, Carver, in “On Writing,” remarks: “There has to b (...)

2When Carver first published the story “So Much Water so Close to Home,” it was much longer, but his editor (Gordon Lish) worked on it to make it shorter and shorter1 until only a bare minimum was left: the first-person narration of a clueless woman ironically called Claire, left in the dark by an incident that involves her husband Stuart.2

3This Stuart and three of his friends had gone on a three-day fishing trip to a remote area on the Naches river. The title of the story raises a question that Claire thinks of only later in the story: why did Stuart and his friends have to go all the way to this remote area to fish to begin with when there is, she thinks, “so much water so close to home.” This question, indeed, seems like the culmination of her “cluelessness,” her not having a “clue” about what is going on. Yet the clues scattered around the text are actually what stimulated the linkage of adjective and noun in the title of the present contribution—The Criminal Labyrinth.

4First of all, as far as the labyrinth is concerned, Greek mythology has it that the first one was built by the artist/architect Daedalus3 for King Minos of Crete at Knossos, this to control the Minotaur,4 a mythical creature—half man, half bull—who was finally killed by the hero Theseus of Athens. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, suggests that Daedalus had created the labyrinth so ingeniously that he only barely succeeded in escaping it himself after he built it.5 Theseus of Athens could only do so by using a “skein of thread” tied to the entrance door, provided by his beloved Ariadne: a clew (in old English cliwen or cleowen). Indeed, this “skein of thread”—or “clew”—is as essential as the breadcrumbs of Hansel and Gretel in the Grimm Brothers’ tale.6

  • 7 In the late fifteenth century, in the Spanish poet Juan de Mena’s “El Laberinto” and in the French (...)
  • 8 Actually, the verb to amaze and the adjective amazed seem to be derived from the noun maze. In Midd (...)

5In fact, a labyrinth can traditionally have two different forms, the first a single-path—or unicursal—one, with an unambiguous route to the middle and back, and the second a complex, branching—or multicursal—one, in which it is difficult to find one’s way without this skein of thread or yarn, this “clew.” Throughout the ages, many examples of usages of labyrinths for romantic, poetic, and entertainment purposes,7 as well as metaphors for intellectual endeavour, exist. Indeed, while the unicursal one has been used for meditating, or stimulating what we would now call a sort of “mindfulness,” with its corners making it impossible to see either the way back or the way forward—the past or the future, so to say—and thus forcing one to focus on the here-and-now, the multicursal one, often referred to as a maze,8 has been used as a metaphor for complex intellectual arguments. In such cases the “clew” can easily be lost, as in Plato’s report of Socrates’ use of the labyrinth as a metaphor of such an argument:

Then it seemed like falling into a labyrinth… we thought we were at the finish, but our way bent round and we found ourselves as it were back at the beginning, and just as far from that which we were seeking at first.9

6Labyrinths that represent such a “sense of verbal or mental entanglements,” to use W.H. Matthew’s terms, abound. In his 1920s book Mazes and Labyrinths, Matthews discusses at length the seemingly unending variety of usages made of the labyrinth or the maze, including those with secret chambers, where strange things happen and the yarn on the clew may be tangled, broken, displaced, replaced or simply lost altogether, and those with mirrored rooms, by which, he writes, “the perplexity of the visitor is very greatly increased” (201).

7One could go on and on about the treasures of the labyrinth, but I hasten to turn to the adjective in my title—criminal—and the specific subject of the crime story. Research has shown that by the seventeenth century, writers admiring the work of Chaucer were at the forefront of the figurative use of the clew of thread, to refer to whatever guidance that could lead to a solution for a puzzle, problem, or difficulty. And so the clew of yarn or thread—with “ew”—became clue—with “ue”—coming to mean quite literally “that which points the way” and specifically a piece of evidence or information used in the detection of a crime, where the clew of yarn may also give birth to multiple, tangled, messy, false, or obsolete sets of clues.

  • 10 All references in the text are to Carver’s story, unless indicated otherwise.
  • 11 As the focus of this article centers on a critical analysis of what “we” as general readers—or, alt (...)

8Indeed, clues are the essential thing, both in the traditional “whodunit” and the more modern “why-dunnit”—and we may well add mystery stories, where we have to find out what in the world is going on. I say this because at the beginning, Carver’s story presents itself more as a mystery story than as a crime story, when the narrator’s first remark is: “My husband eats with a good appetite. But I don’t think he’s really hungry” (235).10 As readers we may think: OK, so you can eat with an appetite that you do not have. And where are we going with this?11

9Next this nameless “husband” gets very angry when the telephone rings, and Claire reaches to answer it. And when she then says to him that it might be his mother, he mysteriously answers: “Watch and see” (235). One may well ask, what is there to “watch and see” when one answers a telephone call. And we never find out who Claire talks to on the phone or what is communicated. Already the reader seems to be in some kind of labyrinth; indeed, where are we coming from and where are we going?

10Claire then quotes her husband starting to explain what makes him so angry, shouting:

“Goddamn it, why can’t people mind their own business? Tell me what I did wrong and I’ll listen! I wasn’t the only man there. We talked it over and we all decided. We couldn’t just turn around. We were five miles from the car. I won’t have you passing judgment. Do you hear?” (235)

11For the reader, the mystery grows with the unknown references to “there” and “it” in the husband’s remark: where is there, and what is it? Indeed, even if apparently Claire understands these references, the reader does not. So we seem deeper into the maze than she is, and questions that were just under the surface of Claire’s observations until now start to gather importance, appearing like some secret path.

12Yet, just as we cannot make sense of the husband’s “‘Watch and see,’” we cannot make sense of Claire’s answer “‘You know’” to her husband’s “‘Do you hear?’” But with his subsequent response—“‘What do I know, Claire? Tell me what I’m supposed to know. I don’t know anything except one thing. . . . She was dead. . . . And I’m so sorry as anyone else. But she was dead’” (235)—it seems that we have moved from a mystery story to a crime story. Indeed, with the repetition of the very short concluding sentence “‘she was dead,’” and so with the knowledge that the “husband” has become a character in a crime story, we have reached a secret chamber of the labyrinth—a place, in this case, where one type of clue is exchanged for another, and we are forced to return on our steps, as a totally different path in the maze seems to impose itself.

  • 12 This is the main difference with the longer versions of the story. Carver warns us, though, that t (...)

13Meanwhile, as the narration of the story is entirely with the protagonist Claire, an internal narrator, but with completely externalized focalization—in that we receive no additional information, or any information actually, as to how things affect her12—the reader is limited to this limited perspective as well. The present tense with which the story is told—this claustrophobic interspace between past and future, which goes so well with the idea of a labyrinth—only adds to this effect.

14The “husband” now goes outside with the newspaper, and Claire vents her anger or frustration—or whatever it is—on the dishes, which she rakes off the sink onto the floor. As Sandra Lee Kleppe puts it, “like the women who perform such gestures in Carver’s other stories, Claire’s act is clearly communicative, coming as it does when words between the husband and wife fail” (121). Yet, this violent action gives rise to her elaboration in the past tense—a “historic overview,” as it were—allowing us to gain some altitude. The result of this for the reader is, as Penelope Doob explains, a moment not of confusion but of amazement at the labyrinth’s complexity (24-25): the amazement that the maze inspires when seen from above, even if only briefly and partially.

15From Claire’s summary of what happened before, we now learn that the four men drove to this remote area on the Naches river to fish, but even before they can make their camp there, they found a naked young woman “wedged into some branches that stuck out over the water,” obviously dead (236). They decided then that it was not necessary or worth it, or simply convenient enough, to go back and report the situation, as the woman was dead anyway. And just here, curiously enough, Claire, for the first time, refers to her husband by his name, no longer as “my husband,” but as “my Stuart.” Is the term of endearment ironic at this point, or does it lead to another secret chamber in the maze the story seems to build up as the plot develops?

16To make sure that the body did not drift away, one of them, perhaps Stuart, Claire thinks, “took her by the fingers and pulled her into shore” (236). He then tied her down with rope, and they made camp just as they had planned, fished a little, cooked what they caught, and washed up right next to where the poor young woman was attached. Claire’s voice is strangely objective and restrained, but we can understand that she is quite upset about this bad taste, this negligence, and the utterly macabre experience of understanding that her husband is involved in a crime.

17Claire also remembers—and this struck me as chilling—Stuart telling her about his mate’s remark that the trout they caught were “hard because of the terrible coldness of the water” (236). What kind of secret chamber in the labyrinth are we in here; what kind of clue does this remark give us? Indeed, why does Stuart tell his wife this—and, for that matter, why does she include it in her report of what happened? Why mention the coldness and consequently the hardness of a fish when he is next to the corpse of a young woman? Was the corpse of the girl as cold as the water—as hard as the trout—or was she, in contrast, warm… still warm? Is this a sign of Stuart’s deeper involvement? A projection of the state of the woman onto a dead fish? These rhetorical questions—all potential paths through the maze that cannot be seen to lead anywhere—function as one extended metaphor of the hopeless confusion that the labyrinth puts us in; indeed, what kind of clue is this “hardness”?; what change of path in the maze should we effectuate here?

18In addition, reading on, it becomes clear that Stuart did not say anything about all this to Claire when he first got home—instead there were his abrupt sexual advances, which she accepts matter-of-factly—and he might well have kept silent about the whole thing had it not been for his name in the paper the next day, and on the front page at that, followed by the telephone calls. Meanwhile, it seems that we have come full circle in the labyrinth, as with these upsetting calls, with which Claire rounds off her story in the past tense, we are—after some roundabout wanderings—like Socrates, back to the beginning, with Claire voicing what is also my thought: “What is going on?” (237). Yes, what is going on? With Claire, the reader wonders what path in the maze to choose this time around.

  • 13 A hairshirt is a cilice, an uncomfortable shirt of horse or goat’s hair, sometimes worn by Catholi (...)

19And, as if she were aware of me, or us, as a reader, Claire continues: “It was then that he told me what I just told you” (237; italics are mine). You? Is there an audience in the text? We can check but with no sign of any audience within the story, we are effectively pulled further into Claire’s labyrinth. And I am reminded of Edna Longley’s comment, in the London Review of Books, that “all Carver’s writing tends toward dramatic monologue, present-tense soliloquy that wears the past like a hairshirt.”13

  • 14 As a matter of fact, this river is close to the Yakima river, where Carver grew up.

20And, as if the devil were playing with us, to increase the drama, when Claire asks Stuart to go for a drive together—we may imagine she wants to have some distance, let things cool off a bit—where does he take her?… to Everson Creek and the large pond that it runs into, where men are out fishing.14 What a dumb thing to do if Stuart wants to bring down the tension between them! And indeed, Claire’s remark, here, is also what forms the title of the story: “So much water so close to home. I say, ‘Why did you have to go miles away?’” (237), the repetition of so finally conveying some of Claire’s emotion.

  • 15 See <https://cityofcleelum.com>.
  • 16 Sandra Lee Kleppe—whose article focuses on the longer version of the story—mentions that “[t]he mur (...)

21At this point, the series of Stuart’s overreactions—encountered in Claire’s report from the beginning—starts building itself up more and more, this time with his “Don’t rile me”; “You’re going to get me riled”; “You’re getting me more riled by the minute” (237, 238). Although to rile means to irritate and the sentence don’t rile me may sound relatively innocent, to rile also means “to muddy the water,” a sensitive choice of words here, both figuratively and literally. As we may well imagine, this does nothing to stop Claire’s dark imagination flowing helplessly through the labyrinth inside her, from one river to the next, from the Naches river to Everson Creek and now to the Cle Elum River—with the term cle elum meaning “swift water” in the language of the Indigenous tribe of the Kittitas.15 Here, indeed, swift-flowing water was riled by scandal, in the way of the Naches river. In the Cle Elum River, as Claire remembers it now, it was the body of a girl named Arlene Hubly, from her hometown, whose head was cut off before she was thrown into the water.16

22Meanwhile, Haruki Murakami’s remark about the labyrinth, in Kafka on the Shore, imposes itself more and more:

Things outside you are projections of what’s inside you, and what’s inside you is a projection of what’s outside. So when you step into the labyrinth outside you, at the same time you’re stepping into the labyrinth inside. (366)

23Indeed, this may be a first clear indication that Claire’s labyrinth has moved inside, and it is here, also, that we feel our path and Claire’s starting to part company.

24We now seem to have come to the mirrored chamber of Claire’s internal labyrinth. We are definitely no longer on the same path with Claire when she looks at the creek and sees her own distorted image face down in the water, “right in it, eyes open, face down, staring at the moss on the bottom, dead” (238). From the distance between us, we now ponder the question of why Claire took this particular path down the river of her internal maze, internalized waters that are therefore so much closer still to home. Is she sympathizing with the beheaded girl of her youth, with the naked one in the Naches river that her husband got involved with, or both, or is it some personal memory, a premonition or a hallucination?

25In any case, Claire finds nothing to say to Stuart, and as they drive home, she notices him looking in the rear-view window constantly, and thinks to herself, as in the beginning: “he knows” (238). But the meaning of this remark, because it is not revealed, opens yet another confusing path in the maze of Claire’s mind. Once at home—instead of passively opening her legs for him as she did when he first came back from the fishing trip and she did not know yet what had happened—she now lies “on the far side of the bed away from his hairy legs” (238), as if she were lying with a beast.

  • 17 Still, Kleppe remarks here that “luckily for Claire he leaves, but the man in this scene could easi (...)

26When the news comes that the body Stuart and his fishing friends have found in the Naches river “has been identified” and “claimed” (238), Claire, curiously enough, decides to get her hair done and her nails, to prepare herself for attending the funeral the next day, as if she had some relationship with the dead woman. She makes her bed on the sofa that night and refuses to look at Stuart the next morning. Also, she panics as “a crewcut man in a blue workshirt” (239) offers his help when later he sees her driving erratically to the funeral service while she is hearing, all the time, “the river down below the trees” (239), confirming what we may call the water path of her internal labyrinth.17

27Claire then hears from a woman leaving the service with her: “Well, they got him. . . . If that’s any consolation. They arrested him this morning. I heard it on the radio before I come. A boy right here in town” (240). But this does nothing to quiet her peculiar anxiety. Indeed, she is in no way ready to change paths, answering the lady: “They have friends, these killers. You can’t tell” (240), reviving the image of Stuart and his fishing friends by supposing that the murderer must have acted with unknown partners in crime.

28But, on her return from the funeral, surprisingly Claire does not refuse her husband’s advances, but clearly helps him by opening the buttons on her blouse for him, with the words “That’s right. . . . Hurry” (240). And as she enters the swift-flowing rivers of her internal labyrinth, her final words are: “He says something else. But I don’t need to listen. I can’t hear a thing with so much water going” (240). At the same time we, as readers—our path having diverged from hers for some time already—are still uncertain as to what actually is the crime that the story is about. Indeed, in the end, the story seems to refigure itself back from a crime story to a mystery story. Although a crime was most likely committed—and Stuart may or may not be more involved in it—this, finally, does not seem to be what the story is about, and we perhaps have to conclude that the mental confusion of the protagonist is the real clue of the labyrinth.

29Kleppe calls the story one of Carver’s “most complex stories about gender and violence” (119), and “particularly interesting in light of the concept of communicative violence as an expression of or wish for change” (108). But, she adds, “when he moved to his more idiomatic style in the 1970s, we see frustrated women performing violent gestures that seem to produce no changes in their lives” (109). Indeed, the violence Claire performs when she rakes the dishes off the sink, which can perhaps still be seen as a gesture performed to bring change, finally turns into violence against herself, when she not only accepts, but actually pretends to welcome, the sexual act she does not want. In doing so, she effectuates for herself a symbolic death by rape and drowning, which, for now at least, seems the only way to stop her endless wandering—without a clue—on the paths of her internal labyrinth.

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Bibliographie

Carver, Raymond. Collected Stories. Eds. William L. Stull and Maureen P. Carroll. New York: Library of America, 2009. Print.

---. “Matters of Life and Death.” 1986. Interview with William L. Stull. Conversations with Raymond Carver. Eds. Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1990. 177-91. Print.

---. “On Writing.” Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. 1984. New York: Vintage, 1989. 22-27. Print.

---. “So Much Water so Close to Home.” The Stories of Raymond Carver. London: Picador, 1985. 235-40. Print.

Cox, Katharine. “Postmodern Literary Labyrinths: Spaces of Horror Reimagined.” The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Eds. Kevin Corstorphine and Laura R. Kremmel. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 339-52. Print.

Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. Print.

Gentry, Marshall Bruce. “Women’s Voices in Stories by Raymond Carver.” The CEA Critic 56.1 (Fall 1993): 86-95. Print.

Kleppe, Sandra Lee. “Women and Violence in the Stories of Raymond Carver.” Journal of the Short Story in English 46 (Spring 2006): 107-27. Print.

Leypoldt, Günter. “Reconsidering Raymond Carver’s ‘Development’: The Revisions of ‘So Much Water So Close to Home.’” Contemporary Literature 43.2 (Summer 2002): 317-41. Print.

Longley, Edna. “What the doctor said.” London Review of Books 12.6 (1990): 22-23. Print.

Matthews, W. H. Mazes and Labyrinths. 1922. Minneola: Dover Publications, 1970. Print.

Murakami, Haruki. Kafka on the Shore. 2002. Trans. Philip Gabriel. New York: Vintage, 2005. Print.

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Notes

1 Carver published the story five times: a longer version appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology of 1976 and was reprinted in his second collection, Furious Seasons of 1977. A shortened version was published in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in 1981. The present contribution uses this version, as reprinted in The Stories of Raymond Carver. A somewhat revised longer version appeared in Fires in 1984 and in Where I’m Calling From in 1989. See “Reconsidering Raymond Carver’s ‘Development’: The Revisions of ‘So Much Water so Close to Home’” by Günter Leypoldt and the note on the story in Carver’s Collected Stories (1001): it appears that Lish cut “the 27-page manuscript . . . by 70% for inclusion [in the 1985 collection].”

2 In connection with the shortness of his stories, Carver, in “On Writing,” remarks: “There has to be tension, a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion. . . . What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly a way the concrete words are linked together to make up 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” (26).

3 Daedalus is first mentioned in roughly 1400 BC on the Knossian Linear B tablets.

4 The minotaur is actually a child born out of Minos’s blasphemy and the coupling of his mother Pasiphaë with a sacred bull.

5 See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Daedalus_escapes_(iuvat_evasisse).jpg>.

6 The fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel,” by the German brothers Jacob Ludwig Carl and Wilhelm Grimm, was published in 1812 in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Unfortunately, Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs are eaten by birds.

7 In the late fifteenth century, in the Spanish poet Juan de Mena’s “El Laberinto” and in the French bard Jean Bouchet’s “Le Labyrinthe de Fortune,” for instance, the guide is not a “clew” provided by a woman, as in Ariadne’s case, but the woman herself (Matthews 193).

8 Actually, the verb to amaze and the adjective amazed seem to be derived from the noun maze. In Middle English one finds amasen (“to bewilder, perplex”), in Old English āmasian (“to confuse, astonish”), from ā- (perfective prefix) + masian (“to confound”), equivalent to a- + maze.

9 See <www.labyrinthpark.gr>.

10 All references in the text are to Carver’s story, unless indicated otherwise.

11 As the focus of this article centers on a critical analysis of what “we” as general readers—or, alternatively, “the reader”—are confronted with during the actual reading of Carver’s story, I have at times opted for a more non-academic tone, such as is the case here, including the use of rhetorical questions to emphasize the “a-maze-ment” that the story engenders.

12 This is the main difference with the longer versions of the story. Carver warns us, though, that this is not the same Claire, and knowledge gathered from previous or later versions should not enter into the picture here. Indeed, Carver points out that the various versions are actually “different stories, and they have to be judged differently” (“Matters of Life and Death” 187).

13 A hairshirt is a cilice, an uncomfortable shirt of horse or goat’s hair, sometimes worn by Catholics and Jews as a sign of self-imposed punishment or penance.

14 As a matter of fact, this river is close to the Yakima river, where Carver grew up.

15 See <https://cityofcleelum.com>.

16 Sandra Lee Kleppe—whose article focuses on the longer version of the story—mentions that “[t]he murder of women in the great Northwest outdoors was an ominous phenomenon in Carver’s day, having reached its most horrific dimensions by the time of the Green River case.” Carver’s story, she writes is “therefore a fictional recording of the contemporary trauma of the pervasive threat of the rape/murder of young American women in non-urban settings” (120). She mentions the Green River killings, which actually happened after Carver wrote the story, but also the killing spree of Ted Bundy, in Lake Sammamish State Park, which is located south of Seattle, and remarks that “Lake Sammamish, Green River, and the north tip of the Naches River are all within a fifty-mile radius” (119). More specifically, she shows that the Cle Elum river, portrayed here, was to play a role in reality, as “one of the Green River Killer’s escaped victims ‘told police Ridgway (the criminal) took her to a campground near Cle Elum, where he tied her to wooden stakes driven into the ground while he used a nylon rope to tie her wrists and ankles to the stakes. She later was released’” (121, n.8).

17 Still, Kleppe remarks here that “luckily for Claire he leaves, but the man in this scene could easily have been a Ted Bundy or the Green River Killer, could easily have broken the car window, raped, murdered and abandoned Claire without being discovered” (122).

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Ineke Jolink, « The Criminal Labyrinth of Raymond Carver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home” »Journal of the Short Story in English, 79 | 2022, 115-124.

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Ineke Jolink, « The Criminal Labyrinth of Raymond Carver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home” »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 79 | Autumn 2022, mis en ligne le 02 avril 2024, consulté le 16 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3929

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Auteur

Ineke Jolink

Catholic University of Paris. Ineke Jolink is Emeritus Professor of the Catholic University of Paris. She holds a doctoral degree from the University of Amsterdam and a post-doctoral degree (“Habilitation à diriger des recherches”) from the University of Montpellier, France. She has taught at different Universities in the Netherlands, Norway, France, Spain and Iceland. Her publications include works on various aspects of the American South, William Faulkner, ethnic literatures, travel-narrative, immigration studies, autobiography, narratology, literary stylistics and pragmatics, and cognitive science and literature. 

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