American Fat: Obesity and the Short Story.

Abstract

A discussion of the representation of obesity in American short stories using examples by Eudora Welty, Jean Stafford, Andre Dubus and Raymond Carver, with Russell Edson's speculations on fatness, writing, and the prose poem. These stories reveal a persistent preoccupation with obesity and sexuality, and reflect aspects of the pervasive social discrimination against obesity. These issues are placed in the context of the medical establishment's view of obesity as epidemic in the United States, and the answering claims for social justice from what is called the 'fat lobby'.

According to recent statistics provided by the World Health Organization and the United States National Institutes of Health, obesity is a widespread phenomenon in the United States. The WHO puts the figure at thirty per cent of the population, whilst the NIH, which uses an adjusted reading of the Body Mass Index, the standard measure of the relationship between weight and height to determine obesity, calculates an astonishing fifty-five per cent of the population, some ninety-seven million people officially designated as overweight. The view of the medical establishment is that obesity is reaching epidemic proportions, and whilst the clinical distinction between obesity and being overweight may be a matter of subtle differences on the Body Mass Index, obesity is now a serious health issue in the United States, and a politically contentious subject as the 'fat lobby' challenges the institutional and social injustices they claim to suffer. Here I am concerned with the representation of obesity in the short story, an interest developed in response to Raymond Carver's story 'Fat' from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, a story remarkable for its brevity and stylistic ingenuity, and the way it charts a characteristic social fascination with and recoil from the obese. In addition to Carver's 'Fat' I shall look at Eudora Welty's 'A Memory', Jean Stafford's 'The Echo and the Nemesis', and Andre Dubus's 'The Fat Girl'. If there is one common preoccupation in these four very different stories it is in the relationship between obesity and sexuality, a relationship poignantly registered in a different idiom by the folk-singer John Prine in his haunting ballad of dysfunctional lovers 'Donald and Lydia'.

   They made love in the mountains, they made love in the streams.
   They made love in the valleys, they made love in their dreams.
   But when they were finished there was nothing to say,
   Because mostly they made love ten miles away.

Of the short story as a narrative form it may be said that in terms of volume or space it represents the counter-image to the figure of obesity, yet across a time-span of some fifty years obesity recurs as a topos of the short story both as subject and in some examples as a manifestation of style. In the view of the medical establishment, the common cause of obesity in contemporary America is that the population is sedentary and eats too much and that food is cheap, palatable, and easily available. At the same time, obesity is a condition that may signify either wealth or poverty in any individual case. Despite the density of obese people, on the evidence of statistics I have cited, and bearing in mind the norms of physical well-being as these are socially construed, the obese figure, like its alter ego the anorexic, is commonly represented as the abnormal and aberrant. A good example of this is in Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'[1] where Bailey, his wife, children, and mother are slain by the emaciated escaped convict, the so-called 'Misfit' and his two companions, one of whom is described simply as 'a fat boy' who stares at the family 'his mouth partly open in a kind of loose grin'. In O'Connor's story the conjunction between the physically abhorrent and the morally aberrant is made explicit, as is the irony of the title, an expression spoken in the story by the obese cafe owner Red Sammy, whose stomach hangs over his khaki trousers 'like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt'.

Eudora Welty's 'A Memory'[2] is a Joycean narrative of epiphany in which an unnamed narrator recalls the moment in childhood of first love, a 'state of exaltation' that heightens her responses to other bodies. When these fail to affirm her opinions or expectations she is 'terrified by a vision of abandonment and wildness which tore my heart with a kind of sorrow', yet she is urged by a grimly possessive 'need' to 'watch everything about me' and responds to the visual scene before her at a lakeside like a painter or photographer with 'my hands squared over my eyes, finger-tips touching, looking out by this device to see everything: which appeared as a kind of projection'. The word projection here is telling, both in its cinematic and painterly resonance and in its psychological significance as a term signifying the extension outward from the self to the other. The effect of this framing gesture is to concentrate the eyes' focus on the chosen scene whilst occluding that which lies beyond the frame, and this differentiation between the focused and the occluded is crucial to the story when the occluded breaks in upon the chosen frame. From this simple mechanics of perception she believes that whatever is revealed to her is 'a secret of life', obsessed as she is 'with notions about concealment, and from the smallest gesture of a stranger I would wrest what was to me a communication or a presentiment'. Welty's story turns on the opposition between the presentiment of love registered through the merest touch between the narrator and the object of her love and the physicality of a family of bathers sprawled before her. The oppositional drama between self and other is intensified by the narrator's recognition that love has made her 'doubly austere in my observations of what went on about me', has come into a 'dual life, as observer and dreamer', so that when actual events fail to conform to her ideas, her distress is both physical and mental. In a Latin class at school the boy she loves has a nose-bleed and this 'small happening' is a tremendous shock to her because of its unforeseen nature but also because it was 'dreaded'. 'Dreaded' here registers anxiety about the body's vulnerability, and in response to the boy's nose-bleed 'suddenly I leaned heavily on my arm and fainted. Does this explain why, ever since that day, I have been unable to bear the sight of blood?' It is as though love and the dreams it engenders in her require in the other a wholeness invulnerable to the body's mechanisms, while the implied connection between nose-bleeding and the sudden flow of menstrual blood is provoked by the way 'several of the older girls laughed at the confusion and distraction'. Her ignorance of the boy's family circumstances and their mode of life, the 'look of unconcern and even stupidity on his face' the next day, increase her fears for him through his unconsciousness of them. However, if her sense of him is compelled by her dreams, her awareness of him is resolutely tactile:

I could reproduce for you now the clumsy weave, the exact shade of faded blue in his sweater. I remember how he used to swing his foot as he sat at his desk -- softly, barely not touching the floor. Even now it does not seem trivial. (p. 115)

These carefully observed details express the physical reality of the boy but that swinging foot 'softly, barely not touching the floor' connects him to her dream world of the imagination even as the delicacy and precision of the image affirms the actuality upon which this memory is built. The touch that signals her love for him, which she tells us he 'pretended not to notice' is recalled 'unadulteratedly', a mere brushing of her hand against his wrist as they pass on the stairs in school. The event is remembered again in 'a retarded, dilated, timeless fashion' on the beach 'that sunny morning' and makes what the narrator calls 'a very long story'. If the dual life of 'observer and dreamer' meet in the memory of the boy and the brushed touch of hand and wrist, her reverie is penetrated by children running on the sand before her 'like a needle going in and out among my thoughts', a painful image of penetration. The children are part of 'a group of loud, squirming, ill-assorted people who seemed thrown together only by the most confused accident', are 'common', with 'old and faded bathing-suits which did not hide either the energy or the fatigue of their bodes, but showed it exactly'. The older boy was 'greatly overgrown -- he protruded from his costume at every turn. His cheeks were ballooned outward and hid his eyes', while the smaller boy was 'thin and defiant'. The mother

was unnaturally white and fatly aware, in a bathing-suit which had no relation to the shape of her body. Fat hung upon her upper arms like an arrested earthslide on a hill. With the first motion she might make, I was afraid that she would slide down upon herself into a terrifying heap. Her breasts hung heavy and widening like pears into her bathing-suit. Her legs lay prone one on the other like shadowed bulwarks, uneven and deserted, (p. 116)

and from her 'motionless open-pouched mouth' comes a continuous laugh. This horrified response to the body of the mother and the anxiety about self-immolation goes with a repudiation of the whole family scene before her, for their rough play, their 'daring and ugliness,' and she 'wished they were all dead'. Despite this there is a residual identification with one of them, first called a woman then later 'the younger girl' in whose 'narrowed figure' she senses 'a rage of churning smoke', a 'genie-like rage [. . .] as she seemed both to crawl and to lie still', as though the young girl is, like the narrator, revolted by the play of intimacy between husband and wife as he pours sand over her legs. Later the man pours sand inside the mother's bathing-suit 'between her bulbous descending breasts. There it hung, brown and shapeless, making them all laugh. Even the angry girl laughed, with an insistent hilarity', and the scene culminates when the 'fat woman' stands in front of the 'smiling man', bends over, and

in a condescending way pulled down the front of her bathing-suit, turning it outward, so that the lumps of mashed and folded sand came emptying out. I felt a peak of horror, as though her breasts themselves had turned to sand, as though they were of no importance at all and she did not care. (p. 119)

Blood, breasts, children, an obese representative of the maternal, the playful intimacy of adult male and female, these elements variously constitute the ingredients of the actual in this poetic narrative of a girl for whom the passion of first love remained 'so hopelesslessly unexpressed within me or appeared so grotesquely altered in the outward world', who is repelled by the intrusion of the real into the world of dream. The tactile play between husband and wife, like the touching, pinching, and cavorting play of the children compose the texture of a family scene of which the narrator's brushing of hand on wrist is a faint but potent presentiment of these other expressions of intimacy and what they entail. If the touch of hand on wrist is sufficient to maintain her dream through to the present, the final paragraph tells us, 'That was my last morning on the beach', and that her 'recovered dream' of the boy is now accompanied by this 'hour on the beach', and she forsees a future meeting with him in which he would 'stare back, speechless and innocent, a medium-sized boy with blond hair, his unconscious eyes looking beyond me and out the window, solitary and unprotected'. It is notable here that her vision of him sees him as 'medium-sized', neither thin nor fat but, as it were, normative, but equally, 'unprotected', and unprotectable from time and its consequences suggested by the play with sand by the family. This is a fine story from Welty's first collection where the representation of youthful consciousness and its horror of the maternal and familial is brought into focus through the figure of obesity. Katherine Anne Porter, in her introduction to A Curtain of Green, writes sympathetically of her 'deeply personal preference for this particular kind of story, where external act and the internal voiceless life of the human imagination almost meet and mingle on the mysterious threshold between dream and waking' (p. 12).

To move from Welty's story to Jean Stafford's 'The Echo and the Nemesis'[3] is to turn from the poetic to the comedic in the representation of obesity, though Stafford shares Welty's presentation of self and other through the opposition between the actual and the imaginary. In this story self and other are versions of the same person, the obese Ramona Dunn whose fictive twin sister is the idealized 'echo' of herself, whilst her obesity is her 'nemesis'. Ramona and her casual friend Sue Ledbetter are American students at Heidelberg University who meet in philosophy lectures and share their afternoon coffee together. Sue, who is self-conscious and introverted, is little more than a foil for the wealthy Ramona whose intellectual and social imaginings include a plan to take Sue for a Christmas skiing holiday at San Bernadino where they will meet Ramona's brothers. The crucial point about Ramona is her obesity and the way her condition seems to compel her to a wildly improbable version of family history, the reality of which remains elusive throughout. Ramona

was fat to the point of parody. Her obesity fitted her badly, like extra clothing put on in the wintertime, for her embedded bones were very small and she was very short, and she had a foolish gait, which, however, was swift, as if she were a mechanical doll whose engine raced. Her face was rather pretty, but its features were so small that it was all but lost in its billowing surroundings, and it was covered by a thin, fair skin that was subject to disfiguring affections, now hives, now eczema, now impetigo, and the whole was framed by fine, pale hair that was abused once a week by a Friseur who baked it with an iron into dozens of horrid little snails. (p. 36)

Obesity 'to the point of parody' is perversely reductive, for a parody of the obese assumes the notion of an acceptable obesity. None the less, parody is significant here, because Stafford's procedure in the presentation of Ramona is persistently parodic, as though the condition itself is risible. Thus Ramona has a 'highfalutin' way of talking and speaks of the need to take a rest 'from the exercitation of my intellect'. Her interests are in philology rather than philosophy, and she has an 'ardent plan to write a monograph on the word "ahoy" '. On the evidence of the etymology of 'ahoy' in the OED, which includes a root with the German 'Ahtliche', this would be a brief monograph, but it is symptomatic of her practice as 'an invincible expositor' who is given to tracing words like '"rope" and "calf" through dozens of languages back to their Indo-Germanic source'. There is an implied parallel here between the roots of words and their gargantuan proliferation in variant forms through different languages and Ramona's own history, from the roots of which she has grown into her present swollen condition. Furthermore, 'rope' and 'calf' seem less than casually chosen by Stafford, because 'calf' invokes the span from young to mature cow as a parallel with the physical change from youth to maturity in the female, and 'rope' has an inconographic association with the mythological figure of Nemesis who holds a bridle or rope to bind human pride. Naturally, Ramona has a rope hung over her shoulder, 'a plaited strap of rawhide' which holds her field-glasses in a brassbound leather case. The other attribute of Nemesis is a terrestrial globe for a footstool, and there is the shadow of this globe in Ramona's account of the migrant life of her socially elevated family. These associations serve to flesh out the mythological and iconographic implications entailed in the title of the story with its call on the myth of Narcissus and Echo, and are further consolidated in that reductive image of Ramona's abused pale hair baked into 'dozens of horrid little snails', a parodic version of the snake hair of the Gorgon sisters. Ramona's version of her dead twin blends mythology with an unintentionally pastiche version of Sleeping Beauty: 'Of all this charming, carefree brood, Martha, five years dead, had been the most splendid [. . .] a creature so slight and delicate that one wanted to put her under a glass bell to protect her.' The bedroom where she is said to have died becomes a shrine to her, and 'in one garden there grew nothing but anemones, Martha's favourite flower', an allusion to the depiction of Narcissus and Echo in millefleurs tapestries, whilst the status of the narcissus flower as a symbol of youthful death is drawn in through Ramona's despair 'because the death of a twin is a foretaste of one's own death'.

What is striking in Stafford's handling of the story, and contributes substantially to its comedy, is the blending of Ramona's narrative style with the impersonal narrative idiom of the story as a whole, as though one is an echo of the other. Thus in anecdote, description, example, exemplification, characterization, and so on, sentences develop in a riot of double and triple clauses and phrases, a rhetorical extravagance mimetic of Ramona's indulgent (and frequently surreptitious) feasting and obesity. For example, in Ramona's account of her twin's final illness we read:

If she was very unwell, she simply lay smiling while her parents and her sister and her brothers attended her, trying to seduce her back to health with their futile offerings of plums and tangerines and gilt-stemmed glasses of Rhine wine and nosegays bought from the urchins who bargained on the carriage roads. (p. 40) This inventive catalogue of appetitive temptations proferred to the wilting Martha follows a description of her repose as a 'touching invalid, on a balcony overlooking the Bay of Naples':

She lay on a blond satin chaise longue, in a quaint peignoir made of leaf-green velvet, and sometimes, as she regarded her prospect of sloops and valiant skiffs on the turbulent waves, the cypress tree, white villas in the midst of olive groves, and the intransigent smoldering of Vesuvius, she sang old English airs and Irish songs as she accompanied herself on a lute. (p. 40)

Despite the 'old English airs and Irish songs' and the lute, this passage invokes the the drama of opera buffo, rather than the 'Minuet in G' which moves Ramona and Sue to melancholic reflections on childhood dreams 'of the grown-up ball to come'. But my real point is that these profuse, spiralling, residually comic evocations of the wraith-like Echo (known for these purposes as Martha), the alter ego of Ramona, are symptomatic of Stafford's own narrative idiom, as in this earlier account of Ramona:

For so determined a bluestocking, her eccentric and extensive wardrobe was a surprise; nothing was ever completely clean or completely whole, and nothing ever matched anything else, but it was apparent that all these odd and often ugly clothes had been expensive. She had a long, fur-lined cape, and men's tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows, and flannel shirts designed for hunters in the state of Maine, and high-necked jerseys, and a waistcoat made of unborn gazelle, dyed Kelly green. (p. 37)

The breathless sequentiality of this last sentence, where clauses are yoked by the simplest iterative conjunction, underwrites the grotesquerie of Ramona's appearance, but the waistcoat of 'unborn gazelle' gives the game away as an item at once unimaginable and repellent. It is a part of the linguistic jocularity of the text, as in the name of Ramona's doctor here in Heidelberg which is, predictably, Dr Augustus Freudenburg. Similarly, Ramona's field-glasses are used not to bring distant objects into clearer focus but to 'diminish the world she surveyed' since she looks through the wrong end of them. A later reference to these field-glasses comes at the end of the story when Sue, finally admitted to Ramona's rooms, sees a photograph of the dead twin Martha in whose image there is 'a look of lovely wonder and remoteness, as if she were all disconnected spirit, and it was the same as a look that sometimes came to Ramona's eyes and lips just as she lifted her binoculars to contemplate the world through the belittling lenses'. Sue's 'fugitive feeling' that 'this was really Ramona's face' is confirmed as she reads the inscription on the back, 'Martha Ramona Dunn at sixteen, Sorrento', and acknowledges the 'death' of the Martha side of Ramona, 'dead, dead and buried under layers and layers of fat'.

Once her secret is revealed to Sue, Ramona ends the relationship and dismisses her friend. But at this point there is a suggestion of the cause of Ramona's illness, an implication of incest:

Of course you could never know the divine joy of being twins, provincial one! Do you know what he said the last night when my name was Martha? The night he came into that room where the anemones were? He pretended that he was looking for a sheet of music. Specifically for a sonata for the harpsichord by Wilhelm Friedrich Bach. (p. 52)

This reference to Wilhelm Friedrich Bach and his harpsichord sonata seems indicative of the 'flight into fantasies and daydreams' which Hilde Bruch suggests is characteristic of the compensations sought by the obese in response to 'a conviction of inadequacy and inner ugliness'[4] and is on a par with Ramona's general inclination towards intellectual fantasizing in relation to language and the glamorous version she gives of her parents and siblings to Sue. The 'he' who enters the room where the anemones were remains unspecified in this text, but the mention of him would be meaningless unless connected, however implicitly, to Ramona's change from slender Martha into obese Ramona, marked by the temporal severance of 'the last night when my name was Martha'. Hilde Bruch makes no specific mention of a causal relationship between incest and obesity, but she notes that the 'increase in weight to massive proportions' had been found in a British study of sexuality and obese women to follow from 'a crisis in their personal relationships in which their sexual activity had been involved and had evoked considerable guilt' (p. 118). In Stafford's story we are left to conjecture whether her father or one of her brothers was the incestuous originator of Ramona's transformation, but that its origins were familial seems irrefutable, and is in marked contrast to Sue's version of her family life with parents who are 'upright' and beyond any impurity. 'The Echo and the Nemesis' is a grave topic treated with comic relish, but for all its comedy it is congruous with Stafford's other stories about the violence done to women's bodies.[5]

As I indicated earlier, there is an argument that to be obese in the United States is to suffer violations of civil rights, from the denial of access to buses, trains, and aeroplanes, to unfair treatment in education, employment, and healthcare, and the Sacramento-based National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance functions as an organization for the fight against 'weight-based prejudice'.[6] Andre Dubus's story 'The Fat Girl'[7] fits perfectly into this context of political activism on behalf of the obese whilst seeming to give substance to the socially inscribed view of obesity as an impediment to sexual appeal. Louise, the fat girl of this story, begins to grow fat from the age of nine to the despair of her weight-conscious mother. Her indulgent father cherishes her, but looks on her with 'the lights of love and pity' in his eyes. After high school she is sent to a girls' college in Massachusetts to avoid the humiliation of the male gaze in the context of campus life. Here she forms a close friendship with Carrie, 'who was thin and wore thick glasses and often at night she cried in Louise's room'. Carrie's unhappiness is an undefined existential or spiritual malaise which occasionally overwhelms her. When she falls in love with a young musician and experiences sex, she wants Louise to be similarly loved and takes the fat girl's diet in hand. From the October of their senior year to the following May, Louise's weight drops from 184 lbs to 113 lbs under Carrie's dietary care, to the joy of Louise's mother. Now admired by her relatives and acquaintances she feels like a citizen of a new country, gives her virginity to Richard, a young lawyer in her father's firm, a surrender she reads as initiated with the onset of her diet thirteen months earlier, and soon marries him. Richard is 'a lean, tall, energetic man with the metabolism of a pencil sharpener' and they live the life of the successful professional classes with a lake-side house, a boat for water-skiing, and expensive vacations in exotic places. In a mood of triumph she 'thought of the accumulated warmth and pelf of her marriage, and how by slimming her body she had bought into the pleasures of the nation'. Yet all is not well with Louise and the euphoria of her triumph evaporates. Her new slim condition provokes a dislocation of personal, social, and even national identity. She is assailed by the feeling that 'she had taken the wrong train and arrived at a place where no one knew her, and where she ought not to be'. When she tries to talk to Richard about being fat she 'felt as though she were trying to tell a foreign lover about her life in the United States, and if only she could command the language he would know and love all of her and she would feel complete'. The politics of this narrative are unmistakable. The real Louise is the 'fat girl', of which the slim version is a simulacrum, rendered down to fit the stereotypical image of a desirable mate for a successful man in corporate America. She becomes pregnant and returns to 'her world of secret gratification', concealing candy in her underwear drawer and eating it at night while her husband sleeps. After the child is born she continues this secret guzzling, swells in size, and endures Richard's anger at her condition because she felt excluded from his rage and 'remained calm within layers of flesh and spirit, and watched his frustration, his impotence'. Against his conviction that they are arguing about her weight, she knows better, and that 'beneath the argument lay the question of who Richard was'. The implicit argument here is that Richard is merely a composite of images whose identity is defined by his profession, social status, and material goods, of which slim Louise was one. As the story ends Louise knows he will leave her and 'feels his departure happily', and is mildly surprised when she comes downstairs, candy bar in hand, to find him still in the house. She repudiates the image she has dieted to achieve and finds peace with herself as she is, a fat girl again, content with her child pressed against her large breasts whose 'sleeping body touches her soul. With a surge of vindication and relief she holds him'.

If the story of Louise and her transformations from fat to slim and back to fat again sits comfortably within a politically correct agenda against the disempowerment of the obese, there is a subtext in Dubus's story which argues that sexual success is a fusion of the accidents of circumstance and confidence in one's self, irrespective of physique or size, surely an irreproachable argument. At high school Louise has two friends, Joan who 'was thin, gangling, and flat-chested', and Marjorie who was also thin, 'an intense, heavy-smoking girl with brittle laughter', whose later histories are briefly sketched. Clever Marjorie suffers a nervous breakdown before earning a doctorate in philosophy at the University of California where she meets and marries a physicist 'and discovered within herself an untrammelled passion', and the sexual freedom to make love anywhere in the house. Similarly, Joan achieves 'grace and confidence' when she stops growing and after a series of casual lovers settles down with a middle-aged editor who is 'boyishly grateful for her love'. In both these cases a shedding of the teenage neuroses of physical self-consciousness leads to sexual pleasure and self-content in the adult, and the function of these inset histories is to point us towards Louise's own salvation as she recovers her sense of self-identity as a 'fat girl' against the social prejudices which obesity customarily engenders.

In Raymond Carver's story 'Fat', from Will You Please be Quiet, Please,[8] we are told of the obese client in the diner that he is 'neat-appearing and well dressed enough'. 'Enough' in this case is a vague modifier, difficult to register socially, for what is enough in one place may well be insufficient in another, depending on where you are dining. But his neat appearance is a way of denoting his self-presentation as something worthy of note, as though there is nothing about his formal appearance to give offence. His neatness contrasts with the emphasis on his obesity, which is striking, and initially marked by the waitress's noticing his fingers 'three times the size of a normal person's fingers -- long, thick, creamy fingers'. The other notable feature is his use of the pronoun 'we' instead of the singular 'I': 'Yes, he says. I think we're ready to order now, he says.' 'We' implies plurality and in this story intimates the doubleness of the 'we' in sexual union, and the implications of pregnancy, what we may call the subcutaneous material of 'Fat' invoked as the story nears its conclusion. As the waitress narrator tells us, 'I put my hand on my middle and wonder what would happen if I had children and one of them turned out to look like that, so fat', followed by the pregnant pause of the unrevealed revelation at the story's end, 'My life is going to change. I feel it', which may be an intimation of pregnancy even as it is also a register of sexual and social changes to come in her life, implied by the information that Margo, the other waitress 'chases Rudy'. The obese client's use of the royal 'we' is indicative of what the waitress describes as 'this way of speaking -- strange, don't you know', as though she cannot name what she hears. And it fits with his neat appearance, and what it delivers, a disconcerting formality imposing its own social order on the world of the diner, a formality that reflects back favourably on the obese man, and is used to mollify the visible evidence of his greed. He is obese, but he is not crude. The waitress also notes that 'he makes a little puffing sound every so often', a sound that signifies breathlessness, one of the conditions medically, and popularly, associated with obesity, since obesity imposes stern demands on the heart and lungs. This 'puffing' or involuntary exhalation of breath is the aural register of obesity, a slight sound to signify bulk. Part of the brilliance of this story lies in the way Carver presents these details to us through his focalizer, and her companions, Margo and Rudy, and in this sense the word 'puffing' may stand as a synecdoche for the whole story, which is after all, a slight affair of not quite four and half pages, a mere lexical puff, one might say, yet it articulates a range of topics from obesity to fidelity and pregnancy as issues of social and individual well-being. Carver's 'thin' story exploits the condition of obesity to wonderful effect, and perfectly illustrates Geoffrey Wolff's belief that Carver's stories 'live by their sound, and syntax, his bravura abbreviation, the speed and indirection of the narrative. And in all these things, he is a great master of grammar'.[9]

'Fat' ends by returning to the implications of the lines which open the second section: 'Now that's part of it. I think that is really part of it', as the waitress submits to Rudy's sexual demands against her will. She then repudiates him by diminishing him in the space of her body as she takes on an imaginary obesity, associating herself with the despised obese who now include the boys Rudy recalls from his youth, 'Fat' and 'Wobbly', a symbiosis she reads as a sign of the changes to come in her life: 'When he gets on me, I suddenly feel I am fat. I feel I am terrifically fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all.' 'Fat' is characteristically unresolved in its conclusion, its chief voice poised on the cusp of change with a sense of triumph that takes its impetus from the figure of obesity.

I conclude with an oddity, Russell Edson's 'Portrait of the Writer as a Fat Man',[10] a meditation on obesity and writing which argues for a space between literary kinds, a search for 'a prose free of the self-consciousness of poetry; a prose more compact than the storytellers; a prose removed from the formalities of literature'. Edson is writing about the prose poem which he argues is an 'approach, but certainly not a form; it is art, but more general than most of the other arts', and its virtue for Edson seems to be in its instantaneity, the sense that it is an 'experience' rather than a product, especially a 'literary' product. Edson is concerned with writing which 'isolates its writer from worldly acceptance' and 'easy publishing', a 'terrible privacy' in which the writer looks at his own means in order that he may get past them, for 'it is through ourselves we get to that place that is not ourselves; that is, in fact, all of us'. I think the fact of obesity is perhaps incidental to Edson's meditation, a sort of jesting play with the figure of the self as writer, for much of the animus in this piece is against the notion of the writer as important because a writer. Edson, whose work is likened to the surrealist prose poems of Henri Michaux and the experimental fabulism of American fiction in the 1970s,[11] wants the democratization of writing where the product has greater value than its maker. If there is a connection between obesity and writing in this sometimes Steinian meditation it exists in the implied conjunction between fatness and the creative abundance of all things in the world; as Edson puts it: 'Prose poems cannot be perfected, they are not literary constructions [. . .] prose poems have no place to go. Abundance and spontaneity; spontaneous abundance in imitation of the joy and energy of general creation and substance.' This seems a good place to reside with the figure of obesity.

[1] The Complete Stories (London: Faber, 1990), pp. 117-33.

[2] A Curtain of Green (London: John Lane, Bodley Head, 1943), pp. 112-19.

[3] The Collected Stories (London: Hogarth Press, 1970), pp. 35-53.

[4] Eating Disorders: Obesity, Anorexia Nervosa, and the Person Within (London: Routledge, 1974), p. 177.

[5] See Clare Hanson's essay in this volume, 'Dis/figuration in the Stories of Jean Stafford'.

[6] Oliver Burkeman, 'We're here and we're spheres!', Guardian, 25 August 1998, p.7.

[7] 'The Fat Girl', in The Picador Book of Contemporary American Stories, ed. by Tobias Wolff (London: Picador, 1993), pp. 147-62.

[8] Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (London: Harvill Press, 1999), pp. 1-5.

[9] Interview with Sam Halpert, in Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), p. 125.

[10] 'Portrait of the Writer As A Fat Man: Some Subjective Ideas or Notions on the Care & Feeding of Prose Poems', in A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Stuart Friedbert, David Walker, and David Young, (Oberlin, OH: Oberlin College Press, 1997) pp. 35-43.

[11] Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, ed. by Paul Hoover, (New York and London: Norton, 1994), p. 322.