Cathedral: Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver’s 1983 collection of short stories, Cathedral, is filled with characters immobilized by the past. They grapple with death and divorce, and they are often alcoholics because of what has occured before the moment in time Carver captures. Taciturn, working class narrators, they stumble and grope through their present, feeling for connections with the outside world, with other human beings. They think about phone calls they could make. They sleep with their televisions on.

Although many of the narrators begin to seem similar, almost every story in the collection was gripping and fresh. The two stand-outs were the first short story, “Feathers,” and the title story “Cathedral.” I suppose it’s telling that these are my two favorites, since both are written from the perspective of men who are struggling to express a moment in their lives, and manage to transform fairly commonplace events into hazy, vaguely surreal experiences.

In "Feathers," Jack and his wife Fran have been invited to dinner by Bud and his wife Olla. Jack and Bud work together, but their wives have never met. Jack and Fran, who are childless, like to stay at home watching TV, and generally being alone, and the dinner invitation is a shock, and something of a foreign experience for them. Should they bring something? What will they talk about? When they arrive at Bud’s house in the country, a strange bird flies in front of their car, and Jack and Fran assume it’s a vulture. It turns out to be a peacock, but the fact that Jack and Fran mistakenly identify the bird reveals two things—first, that Jack and Fran truly are out of their element, and slightly out of touch as well. They’ve lead insulated lives. Second, the vulture seems to be a bad omen for whatever will happen next.

I read though the dinner party with some trepidation. Carver has a talent for cooking up strange little details, like Bud and Olla keeping a cast of Olla’s old, crooked teeth above the television, but other than these oddities, the dinner party seemed to go well. Fran (Jack’s wife), who was initially reluctant to accept the dinner invitation begins to warm up to the evening, and keeps asking to see Olla’s new baby, which is strange since Jack and Fran don’t want children, and don't seem to like them. But overall, the dinner goes well, and Jack especially seems happy and fulfilled for the first time in the story--perhaps due to the pleasure of sharing an evening with another couple, rather than spending it alone. Something changes in Fran as well, and that night she and Jack make love and conceive a child. The narrator informs us in the very next sentence, rather abruptly, that, “Later, after things had changed for us, and the kid had come along, all of that, Fran would look back on that evening at Bud’s place as the beginning of the change.”

The sign of the peacock has come to pass. Fran gets fat, and rather than the child being a source of joy, the narrator describes his child as “conniving,” and leaves it at that. Jack and Fran both miss the past, but “Feathers” differs from the majority of other stories in this collection in that it focuses on life before the events that served as a catalyst for sorrow, depression, ennui, world-weariness, whatever. It begins in a kind of resigned contement, and trails off into the inauspicious future.

“Cathedral” is more lush compared to the minimalism of other stories in the collection. The narrator’s wife has invited her friend Robert to come and stay with them for a night. Robert’s wife has recently died, and he’s blind, which the narrator doesn’t quite know what to make of. Here’s an exchange between the narrator and his wife shortly before Robert arrives, which is a brilliant sequence—it’s hilarious, while providing insight into the narrator, who I found immensely likable, though in many ways, inadmirable.

Now this same blind man was coming to sleep in my house.
“Maybe I could take him bowling,” I said to my wife. She was at the draining board doing scalloped potatoes. She put down the knife she was using and turned around.
“If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay, but if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.” She wiped her hands with the dish towel.
“I don’t have any blind friends,” I said.
“You don’t have any friends,” she said. “Period. Besides,” she said, “goddamn it, his wife’s just died! Don’t you understand that? The man’s lost his wife!”
I didn’t answer. She’d told me a little about the blind man’s wife. Her name was Beulah. Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman.
“Was his wife a negro?” I asked.
“Are you crazy?” my wife said. “Have you just flipped or something?” She picked up a potatoe. I saw it hit the floor, then roll under the stove. “What’s wrong with you,” she said. “Are you drunk?”
“I’m just asking,” I said.

What I love about this scene is the how the banter between the husband and wife works, the way the narrator interjects the “I said, she said” throughout the dialogue, as if he’s talking aloud, or relating the story through conversation. And yes, he’s being a bit of an asshole, needling his wife and giving her a hard time, but simultaneously, he’s trying to work the situation out in his head. He really doesn’t quite understand, and he continues to be perplexed by Robert, who has a beard and who smokes, until the end of the story, when he and Robert are watching TV together late at night.

A show about cathedrals is on, and the narrator tries to explain a cathedral to Robert. Again, the narrator lacks the ability to articulate the world before him, but as Robert pushes him, the narrator falls to saying, “In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God. In those olden days, God was an important part of everyone’s life.” This sentence becomes even more important, when the unreligious narrator begins drawing a cathedral on an old paper sack, with Robert’s hand resting atop his own, so that Robert can better understand the design of a cathedral.

It’s a strange moment the reader has been slowly hailed toward since the beginning of the story, and while the narrator struggles to understand the experience, we as readers realize that the narrator has, if only for a moment, broken through the chrysalis of his insulated life into a moment of communion with another human—he has built a cathedral. He has, if only for a time, come closer to God.