… now ledges that she ‘hadn’t let Howard into it, though he was there and needed all along. She felt glad to be his wife.’ If in a sense the disruptive force of calamity clarifies, it also causes both Ann and her husband, hemmed in now by fear and dread, to project outward as they seek respite from confinement. Worry insulating them as security had before, they stand staring ‘out at the parking lot.’ They don’t ‘say anything. But they seem… to feel each other’s insides now, as though the worry had made them transparent in a perfectly natural way’ (71).
Their interior state of affairs is ‘natural,’ of course, because it is nature — and their powerlessness in the face of it — that makes them transparent, that prompts them, fire-distilled now by mutual concern, to gaze out the window the way. P. and his friend stare from the porch. After Scotty’s death, however, they will have to ‘get used to… being alone’ (82); soon they will have to readjust tensions in the marital bond that have been for years filtered by their son’s presence. What was once a common refuge is suddenly no longer available to them.
As in ‘Where I’m Calling From,’ the act of exchanging stories is also a kind of refuge, though here it becomes an even more compensatory one. Ann and Howard end up in a bakery, giving up the oppressive environment of the hospital — and a house full of painful momentous — for a warmer, more spacious setting. The narrative transaction occurring in the bakery is for husband and wife the ‘restorative measure’ the doctor mistakenly diagnoses in discussing Scotty’s ‘very deep sleep’; at the hands of the baker the Weisses are doctored as their son could not be. Contrary to the situation of J.
P. and his friend, recovery is administered to them by a speaker who cannot empathize with his listeners, a man as ironically unlike them as anybody could be. ‘I don’t have any children myself,’ the baker tells Ann and Howard, ‘so I can only imagine what you must be feeling’ (87). Still, sparked by his power to ‘imagine’ their grief, he begins his tale of ‘loneliness, and of… what it was like to be childless all these years,’ offering them if nothing else at least the consolation of knowing that they know what they are going to miss. Thus husband and wife listen, and listening, enter the baker’s world — his story — to temporarily escape their own.
‘They listened carefully,’ the narrator says, drawing through repetition special attention to the act, ‘they listened to what the baker had to say’ (88). Elsewhere in Cathedral, remarkably, hearing and listening are treated in less optimistic terms: in ‘Careful,’ a man’s metaphorical deafness to the world is figured in the literal blockage of his ear with wax; in ‘Vitamins,’ a similar if more general kind of deafness finds its emblem in a dismembered, dried-out human ear. But in other stories — in ” Fever’ and ‘Where I’m Calling From,’ for instance — characters indeed turn their ears to others, and come away better for it. ‘I got ears,’ the says in ‘Cathedral,’ affirming, in spite of his handicap, that ‘Learning never ends’ (222).
In ‘Intimacy,’ one of Carver’s last stories, a fiction-writing narrator calls himself ‘all ears,’ exploring both the idea of the writer as plunderer of experience (as earlier, in ‘Put Yourself in My Shoes’) and of the writer as listener, as someone who, by listening carefully, reconstructs memory and experience in order to reorder the disorder of his past. In ‘A Small, Good Thing,’ more strikingly than ever, telling and listening are beneficial, recuperative activities. And yet what is crucial is not so much the substance of the stories as it is the process of the telling. ‘I was interested,’ J.
P.’s friend says of J. P.’s tale. ‘But I would have listened if he’d been going on about how one day he’d decided to start pitching horseshoes’ (132). Enveloped similarly in the baker’s tale, Ann and Howard listen, escaping the still unthinkable reality of their present circumstances by entering the far more stifling, insulated life of their host, and thus they begin a slow journey out of the darkness of grief. Though it is still dark outside, it is ‘like daylight’ inside the bakery; warmed by the light and the ovens and the sweet rolls they eat, and revived by shared compassion, Ann and Howard do ‘not think of leaving.’ The welcome light of possibility, finally, along with hopes if not promises of self-regeneration, is reflected in the shape of the story overall, which we have here in its revised form; ‘A Small, Good Thing’ is two-thirds again as long as the original published version, ‘The Bath,’ and is the longest story Carver ever collected. Like many stories in Cathedral, which Carver describes as ‘fuller and more interesting somehow’ as well as ‘more generous,’ the revised version of this story reflects part of an ‘opening up in this book’ which, as Carver says, is absent in ‘another of the books’ (Interview 22).
From the shadowy, overdetermined world of ‘The Bath,’ where the tiny enclosure of a bathtub provides a sole comfort for characters (‘Fear made him want to take a bath,’ the original narrator says of Howard), we traverse to the indoor daylight of the bakery, where food and talk and commiseration actually do make a difference, if not redeeming characters of their miseries then consoling them at least, allowing them to understand that loneliness and hardship and death are part of the natural order of things, and that as people they are not in it alone. Embodied in this ‘fuller’ version of the story, Carver’s ‘opening up’s suggests further the very real extent to which style can wall an artist in — suggests how as an artist Carver, like a few of his more fortunate characters, is capable of breaking free of enclosing environments, exchanging them not only for greater capaciousness but, we must assume, for a new understanding of himself and his craft as well. In the title story, ‘Cathedral,’ the coming out of a self-insulated figure is more dramatic than ever before, not simply because he is more fully shut off than some but because, like Meyers riding away from his son on a train to nowhere, he is ignorant of the serious nature of his insularity. Walled in by his own insecurities and prejudices, this narrator is sadly out of touch with his world and with himself, buffered by drink and pot and by the sad reality, ash is wife puts it, that he has no ‘friends.’ As are the figures in ‘A Small, Good Thing’ and ‘Where I’m Calling From,’ however, he too is given an opportunity to emerge from the strictures of self-enclosure, though here it is not a story that opens him up but a more subtle nonverbal transaction — an odd, unspoken communication between him and his blind guest, Robert. And as is often the case in the conversations of Carver’s characters, talk fails him, and yet his failure is more than made up for by the connection he finally succeeds in making, by the self-liberating results of his attempt. Not surprisingly, this narrator lives in a narrow, sheltered world.
Like Howard and Ann, he is threatened abruptly from without; the appearance of his wife’s friend constitutes — at the outset, at least — an invasion of his enclosed existence. ‘h blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to,’ he admits (209), and later adds, ‘Nowt his same blind man was coming to sleep in my house’ (212). His territorial impulses, spurred on certainly by insecurity, make for what Skenazy calls an ‘evening of polite antagonism between the two men’ (82). Thenarrator’s buried hostility, we suppose, is rooted in the blind man’s association with aspects of his wife’s past and of her independent nature in general — aspects that are intimidating to him, not the least of which is her former marriage, a subject with which he is obsessed. Simultaneously fascinated by and reluctant to hear the blind man ” story (‘my wife filled me in with more details than I cared to know,’ he says; ‘I made a drink and sat at the kitchen table to listen’ [213]) he searches for himself indirectly in his wife’s relationship with Robert. Like J.
P.’s friend, this man’s sense of a secure identity depends upon his bond with a female, a bond he seems to need to see perpetually reinforced — though, perturbed by his insensitivity, his wife isn’t about to give him the reinforcement he craves. Referring to his wife’s conversation with Robert in the living room, he says, ‘I waited in vain to hear myna me on my wife’s sweet lips’ (218). His muddled search for self, we guess, involves a continual gauging and protecting of the autocratic status of his name. A year earlier, listening to Robert’s half of a taped conversation, he’d been startled to hear his ‘own name in the mouth of [a] stranger, this blind man’ he did not know (212).
Insistent upon asserting his identity over his wife, therefore, he blankets her past the way he has lately blanketed his present — with insulating self-absorbency. Summing up her prior life, he refers to his wife’s ex-husband only as her ” officer,’ adding, Why should he have a name?’ (211). He is no ideal listener, having predicated the names and stories of others under the subject of his own tyrannical yet precarious identity: he listens for purposes of self-validation, relegating the rest of experience — like Robert’s marriage — to a place ‘beyond [his] understanding’ (213). It is fitting that Robert, the invader in the house, is insulated only physically, left in the dark only by his handicap. Extremely outgoing — not to mention friendly — he has done ‘a little of everything,’ from running a sales distributorship to traveling in Mexico to broadcasting ‘ham radio.’ His activities, unlike those of his host, bring him out into the world, his booming voice having extended as far as Alaska and Tahiti before making its way into the narrator’s home. Unlike the baker and J.
P. — relatively restrained men — Robert is characterized by the strength of his personality, and he serves accordingly as the extra-durable guide needed to pull his host out of his shell (though like the Weisses, Robert, too, is dealing with grief, having just lost his wife; ‘I know about skeletons,’ he says [223], responding to the narrator’s query regarding the TV). As the narrator fails to describe the image he sees on television, Robert listens, and having ‘listened’ to failure, takes charge of the situation. ‘Hey, listen to me,’ he says, activated suddenly by his host’s admission of verbal impotence. ‘Will you do me a favor? I got an idea.
Whydon’t you find us some heavy paper. And a pen. We ” ll do something. We ” ll draw one together.
Get us a pen and some heavy paper. Go on, bub, get the stuff’ (226). Robert’s initiative in the matter of the narrator’s failings, not to mention the remedy he employs in general, suggests that verbal handicaps — and the larger problems they are symptoms of — are debilitating as blindness (stemming as they do from the willed blindness of ignorance, oversight). Robert’s handling of the situation, finally, suggests that handicaps are first and foremost challenges to overcome.’ [M]out of the communication in this story,’ writes Michael Vander Weel, in reference to the joint project of the drawing, ‘comes through shared non-verbal work, as expression that stops short of the effort and commonality of speech’ (120). Indeed, as Irving Howe observes, the drawing of the cathedral is a ‘gesture of fraternity’ that, like the meal preceding it, establishes solid contact between the men and in turn nudges the narrator temporarily out of his self-contained world (43). The subject of their mutual efforts — the cathedral — as a symbol represents a kind of common humanity and benevolence, and of human patience and fortitude, in the process of ‘a-spring.’ (3) Curiously enough, it is within the walls of the cathedral that the narrator ultimately ends up.
‘I was in my house,’ he says at the end of the story, his eyes still tightly closed — bringing to mind the ‘box’ he drew when he and Robert began, something that ‘could have been the house [he] lived in’ (227). What begins as an enclosing spatial configuration of his home — and present level of awareness, we assume — gradually swells in proportion to become something far more spacious than what he started with, something with interior depths as enlightening to him as bakeries and bedrooms are comforting to others.’ I didn’t feel like I was inside anything,’ he says (228), unwilling still to open his eyes. While Meyers ‘close[s] his eyes,’ alternately, to whatever encroaches on his personal life — his voluntary blindness as bad as Lloyd’s deafness in its turn — the narrator of ‘Cathedral’ finds not escape but sanctuary within self-confinement, his sanctuary existing, by virtue of hip, closed eyes, within that inner vestibule of self, where selfishness gives way at last to self-awareness. A man obsessed with the faculty of vision (‘Imagine,’ he says earlier of Robert’s wife, ‘a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one’ [213]), he clings to a miraculous glimpse of a world beyond the borders of his insular life, blinding himself voluntarily to the distracting reality of his former world.
The profundity of his new awareness staggers him; ‘It was like nothing else in my life up to now,’ he says, and adds, in the story’s final sentence, ‘It’s really something.’ The indefiniteness of his language — he is usually a little more glib than he is here — expresses the sheer incomprehensibility of his revelation, and the fact that he registers it as such. He experiences ‘depths of feeling,’ as Saltzman calls them, that only a few enlightened characters in Cathedral experience, feelings that he ‘need not name to justify’ (154). The changes working in him are not unlike those ‘impossible changes’ Ralph Wyman undergoes in ‘Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? ,’ where even more pronounced tensions of jealousy, possessiveness, and self-preoccupation are vented finally in human contact. Just as Ann Weiss wants ‘her words to be her own’ after the death of her child, seeking out a personal vocabulary of grief, this narrator reaches for words weighty enough to fit his experience, and, failing gloriously in that, settles for indefinite’s.
Impossibly changed, reduced to semi-inarticulateness, he keeps his eyes fastened shut, wavering between self-awareness and habitual existence in a new and newly-spacious enclosure; he is ‘no longer inside himself,’ as Skenazy writes, ‘if not quite outside, no longer alone, if not quite intimate’ (83). Naturally, this coming out is mirrored by rhetoric of the story. Early on in the story, the narrator feels momentarily ” sorry for the blind man,’ his insulated hardness beginning to soften. As the walls of his resentment noticeably crack, he watches with ‘admiration’ as Robert eats, recognizing Robert’s handicap to be no impairment to his performance at the dinner table. The tonal shift in the final sequence of the story — marked by a kind of mild ethereality flooding the last lines — illustrates on the rhetorical level the opening up the narrator has undergone, and, certainly, is yet to undergo. Like Robert, who is on a journey by train, dropping in on friends and relatives, trying to get over the loss of his wife, the narrator is also on a journey, one signalled by signposts in his language and played out by the events of the story he tells.
His destination — as are the destinations for all of Carver’s travellers, whether they leave home or not — is necessarily a confining one. But it is also a destination where one’s sense of shared confinement makes for heretofore-unknown freedoms. ‘What’s a cathedral without people?’ Robert asks, bidding his host to add a touch of humanity to the drawing, to ‘put some people in there’ (227). Approaching his destination, the narrator begins to realize just how exhilarating confinement can be, once one sees beyond the narrow enclosure of self that larger, more expansive enclosure of society.
He begins to sense, as did perhaps the builders who toiled for years to raise the cathedrals they would never see — people who were, as Robert says, ‘no different than the rest of us’ (224) — he begins to sense, the warmth of the blind man’s touch still vibrating in his hand, that we are all in this together, and that that really is something. Carver wrote ‘Cathedral’ on a train, writing in his cabin during a transcontinental journey from Seattle to New York. (4) Enclosed in tight quarters, rubbing shoulders with all kinds of people, heading somewhere in a hurry: the writing environment seems an appropriate one, considering the story — and the volume of stories-which was to come of that ride. ‘It was a different kind of story for me, no question,’ he explains in his preface to Where I’mCalling From.
‘Somehow I had found another direction I wanted to move toward. And I moved. And quickly’ (i). Reflecting the process of his ‘opening up,’ Carver is in this collection definitely going somewhere in a hurry; in Cathedral, as in no other volume of his stories, characters connect with one another, however briefly, and as a result of their connections come away changed. Such momentary connections, of course, do not reflect the tone of the book as a whole. Most of the stories — ‘The Compartment’ or ‘The Train,’ say, ironically stories about people on trains — are slightly fuller explorations, or re-explorations, of Carver’s old familiar territory, re immersions into tableaux where human proximity not only provides no real connection but also alienates, with disconnectedness and alienation coming hand-in-hand as end-products of insularity, terminal self-enclosure.
In these stories, as well as in the lighter ones, Carver suggests that life hemmed in rigidly by walls is a hard life indeed — suggests, contrary to Meyers’s observation, that this is perhaps not ‘a good way to live,’ this having a ticket to ride and no idea where one is going, no connection with one’s fellow travellers. As Irving Howe notes, the stories of this volume ‘draw upon the American voice of loneliness and stoicism, the native soul locked in this continent’s space’ (42). While in rare moments we find characters transcending the fettered states of soul by means of smaller, personal unfettering’s of self, such moments do not deny the ‘locked ” status of the characters in general, or the darker implications of Carver’s vision overall. Still, Carver implies, it is through our collaboration with others that we free ourselves from the slavery of self-absorption. We see in these stories that compassion, as well as stoicism, is a prerequisite not just of happiness but of survival, and that while confinement may be the precondition of many lives there is still a good deal of freedom available within it — freedom which becomes tangible only when it is recognized for what it is. In this sense the stories of Cathedral are on a par with those that Carver and Jenks praise as editors of American Short Story Masterpieces, stories which have, as they say, ‘the ambition of enlarging our view of ourselves and the world’ (xiii) — enlarging us as readers, that is, both in the sense of expanding and setting us free.
NOTES 1 For a brilliant and stylistic analysis of this story see Verley. 2 See also Carver’s later story ‘Elephant’ (Where I’m Calling From), in which a reformed alcoholic refers to his drinking days, and his vision of an alcoholic relapse, as ‘rock bottom.’ 3 For this coinage I am indebted to Lonnquist. 4 This bit of information I gleaned in a conversation with Tess Gallagher, who refutes Carver’s assertion in his preface to Where I’m Calling From that ‘[a]fte r a good night’s sleep, [he] went to [his] desk and wrote the story ” Cathedral.’ ‘WORKS CITED Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. New York: Random House, 1984. — .
Interview. Saturday Review. Sep-Oct 1983: 21-22. — and Tom Jenks. Introduction.
American Short Story Masterpieces. New York: Dela corte, 1987. — . What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
New York: Random House, 1981. — . Where I’m Calling From. 1 st edition. Franklin Center, PA: Franklin Library, 1988. — .
Will You Be Quiet. Please? New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977. Howe, Irving. ‘Stories of Our Loneliness.’ New York Times Book Review. 11 Sep 1983: 42-43. Lonnquist, Barbara C.
‘Narrative Displacement and Literary Faith: Raymond Carver’s Inheritance from Flannery O ” Connor.’ Since Flannery O’Connor: Essays on the Contemporary American Short Story. Ed. Loren Logs don and Charles W. Mayer. Macomb, IL: Western Illinois University, 1987.
142-50. Saltzman, Arthur. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1988. Skenazy, Paul. ‘Life in Limbo: Raymond Carver’s Fiction.’ Enclitic 11 (0000): 00-00.
Stull, William. ‘Beyond Hopeless ville: Another Side of Raymond Carver.’ Philological Quarterly 64 (1985): 1-15. Verley, Claudine. ‘Narration and Inferiority in Raymond Carver’s ‘Where I’m Calling From.’ ‘ Journal of the Short Story in English 13 (1989): 91-102. We ele, Michael Vander. ‘Raymond Carver and the Language of Desire.’ Denver Quarterly 22 (1987): 00-000..