A Story I Loved: "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver

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Today's short story is a much-anthologized one: the famous "Cathedral" by Raymond Carver. Any lover of short stories will likely encounter this story in different anthologies multiple times across their reading journey. Each time, it holds a different kind of weight for me.

A lot of people, when they first read Cathedral, struggle to understand precisely what it is about. I can give you a basic plot summary of what occurs within the story: a man has a blind friend of his wife come over. The narrator is very much like many of Carver's protagonists: both unconsciously trapped and emboldened by his own masculinity, rugged, lower middle-class. Carver was fascinated by painting a portrait of an America that was just off the edges in 70's literature. He and Gordon Lish, with minimalism, really spurred on that heartland vision: of hard-working, fundamentally complicated people portrayed on the page. When I drove past Arizona, I came across a small, snowy town that stirred to mind the vision of Carver's America that I had been dreaming of all this time, when I read about it on the page. Dim-lit, yellowed lights, people sharing conversation late into the night, even though they have work the next morning. Discovering profound truths about the human existence despite the demands of capitalism, morning shifts, taxes. It's possible, Carver seems to be saying, throughout all of his fiction. His kind of folks are neither completely salt of the earth nor the utterly wretched. He is writing about neighbors, friends, classmates. 

He is first distrustful of the man, both, it seems, because of his friendship with his wife and his blindness. It's the kind of cynicism that is both instinctual and unable to be rationalized: the fear of the unknown, the fear of the different. Reading it back, the narrator's distrust and dislike of the man is completely ridiculous: he is blind, after all. Carver is commenting about prejudice in this way, but the absurdity of the premise allows it to shake off any heavy-handedness. If the story were to be told about race or gender, maybe it would be too difficult for us as a reader to overcome any initial dislike of the narrator. Maybe the ending would feel less profound, less earned. But lucky for us, Carver is sharp. 

The story really starts when the wife makes dinner, and the narrator and the blind man begin to make conversation. Truly, I think Carver is such a master of dialogue. His dialogue has to be read in order for one to understand what I am talking about. The conversation continues. The narrator offers to roll up a joint for himself and the blind man. He agrees, and they smoke. A documentary comes on TV as they are watching. It is about cathedrals. The blind man asks the narrator to describe a cathedral to him. But the narrator can't describe it, so the blind man suggests he draws it with his eyes closed. The narrator begins to do so. The blind man asks the narrator to open his eyes and describe what he is seeing. But the narrator keeps his eyes closed. The ending line is one of the most gorgeous in all of literary history. 

The universality of the narrator is demonstrated by his being unnamed. He is us, we are him. I am young. I have not yet lived enough life to say definitively that I will never be able to understand Carver's narrator in any capacity. As you go through life, maybe it's easy to become jaded, maybe it's easy to develop a cynicism against your fellow man, a cynicism that is completely unearned. What Carver doesn't do is judge the narrator, either. He places us in his shoes deliberately. We share his prejudices. We undergo his transformation with him. 

That ending scene haunts people, even if they are unable to articulate it, just like the narrator cannot describe the cathedral. I think that's the genius of Carver using an image-based ending, of a man feeling for paper he cannot see. He puts himself into the blind man's shoes, yes. But there is something transforming in him, some undergoing. He is seeing something that he cannot articulate, but the change is there. We come to literature to be similarly transformed. This story reminds me a lot of the quote by Rainer Maria Rilke in Torso of Apollo, the last, reverent line that says, "For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life." That's what continuously creating and reading about the experiences of others does to you. It allows you to broaden yourself, to be in more places at once, to be more people at once. To feel yourself changed with every line of poetry, every bit of fiction that leaves you in wonder at someone else's heart or experience. A lot of people can't articulate exactly what literature does to them. Why they are so moved by certain lines of poetry. I struggle with that as well, which is why I've created this column, in many ways, to better define and better give the vocabulary to people to articulate why we are so touched by certain pieces of art. But the truth is that I don't believe that articulation to be fully necessary. It's certainly nice, yes, and another great aspect of enjoying the communicative powers of art, but sometimes, sitting in that room, putting one's hand over the pages, and simply feeling the transformation inside of oneself is enough. The mystery of the process is maybe not the point, and can in fact detract from the wonder. The act of radical empathy, then, becomes the whole point. 

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Resources:

Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" here: http://www.giuliotortello.it/ebook/cathedral.pdf