Cathedral (Criticism)

Criticism

Diane Andrews Henningfeld

Henningfeld is an associate professor of English at Adrian College who regularly writes and publishes critical essays for a variety of educational publishers. In the essay below, she uses reader response theory to demonstrate how readers use their imaginations to “see” the short story, “Cathedral,” just as the narrator learns to “see” a cathedral through his collaboration with the blind man.

“Cathedral” first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1981, before Carver chose to make it the title story of his 1983 collection, Cathedral. The collection, and most notably the story, was well-received by both readers and reviewers. Subsequently, the story has become one of the most frequently anthologized and most frequently taught short stories of Carver’s body of work.

The success of the story can be accounted for in several ways. A number of reviewers (and Carver himself) identify the story as a transitional moment in Carver’s career. As Adam Meyer suggests, ‘The notion that Carver’s writing underwent a shift between What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Cathedral has become a critical commonplace in Carver studies.” The bleak, bare-boned minimalist prose of his earlier work gives way to a fuller, slightly more hopeful outlook. Carver attributes the change to a change in his life. Further, virtually all reviewers laud the shift.

Anatole Broyard, who suggests that a reader must be “something of a semiologist” to understand Carver, also links him with “strong American literary traditions.” Carver’s stories, he argues, “summon remembrances of Hemingway and perhaps Stephen Crane, masters of tightly packed fiction.” Broyard, while not a fan of minimalist prose, nonetheless offers a clue as to how a reader could approach the short story, “Cathedral.”

“Cathedral” can be called an “open text.” That is, the story is a text that encourages its readers to actively participate in meaning-making; in other words, readers must act as semiologists, reading the signs that Carver leaves. The meaning of the story is not explicitly put before the reader, but rather is often hidden in the gaps of a story. The reader, by working collaboratively with the text, arrives at understanding through a cyclic process of reading and rereading the signs, trying to fill in the open spaces that are at the heart of such fiction. This kind of approach is sometimes called “reader response criticism.”

The use of a first person limited narrator is one of the ways that Carver opens the text to multiple interpretation. Although the narrator speaks conversationally to the reader, his monologue clearly is constructed through both inclusion and exclusion of details. For example, the narrator tells the reader about his wife’s past; through his inclusion of certain details, such as her suicide attempt, and the exclusion of others, such as his own feelings for her, the narrator constructs the character of his wife for the reader. However, the reader actively participates in the construction of the narrator’s wife by “reading between the lines.” Although the narrator never explicitly states that his wife is exasperated and angry with him, he gives enough details so that the reader can make that assumption. “My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man and looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw,” he reports.

A second way that Carver works collaboratively with the reader in building the text is through his parallel rendering of Robert, the blind man, and the narrator, a sighted man. The rendering is, of course, ironic. Robert clearly is a man who is educated and who has traveled extensively. He has friends all over the world. In addition, he has had a deep and meaningful relationship with his wife. Although he is blind, he “sees” how to get along with others in profound and important ways. By contrast, the narrator, although sighted, does not see how his isolation damages himself, his wife, and their relationship. He is metaphorically blind to his own human relationships. When his wife drives up with the blind man, the narrator reports, “I got up from the sofa with my drink and went to the window to have a look. I saw my wife laughing as she parked the car. I saw her get out of the car and shut the door. She was still wearing a smile. Just amazing.” In spite of the repeated references to sight in these lines, the narrator obviously is unable to see his wife in any other than the most basic, physical sense of the word. This is particularly ironic in that the narrator has just provided a long passage describing how sad it must have been for Beulah, Robert’s wife, that her husband never saw her. “. . . I found myself thinking what a pitiful life this woman must have led. Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved.” Although the narrator believes that he is describing the relationship he imagines existed between Robert and Beulah, the reader knows that the description more accurately describes the relationship between the narrator and his wife.

Further, later in the evening when the three characters are having conversation, the narrator decides that the blind man is “beginning to run down,” so he turns on the television. Television, of course, does not demand active participation in the same way that face-to-face communication does. The narrator prefers passively to receive impersonal visible information from a television screen than actively to participate in the two-way communication his wife and Robert share. While the narrator’s wife and Robert enjoy a rich, interpersonal relationship, the narrator excludes himself from any such relationship. He is not a willing collaborator in the human project unfolding in his living room.

The limited point of view and the ironic parallels between the blind man and the narrator set up the final scene, the moment when the narrator, Robert, and the reader work together to create a moment of meaning. The phrase, “The blind leading the blind,” seems to best describe the action of this scene. When a television documentary begins showing pictures of cathedrals, Robert asks the narrator to describe them to him. Because the narrator is unable to adequately use language to create meaning, Robert asks him to draw a picture of the cathedral on a large piece of paper. Robert places his hand over the narrator’s as he draws. Significantly, while the narrator draws, the television goes off the air. At this moment, perhaps for the first time in his life, the narrator is actively participating in meaning-making. As Robert tells him, “‘Never thought anything like this could happen in your lifetime, did you, bub? Well, it’s a strange life, we all know that. Go on now. Keep it up.”

With Robert’s encouragement, the narrator continues to draw, finally adding people to his drawing at Robert’s insistence. “What’s a cathedral without people?” the blind man asks him. And then, surprisingly, the blind man tells the narrator to close his eyes as he completes the drawing. “It was like nothing else in my life up to now,” the narrator reports. Even when Robert proclaims the cathedral completed, the narrator keeps his eyes closed. It is as if in the darkness created by his closed eyelids that he finally “sees” the essence of the cathedral, and by extension, the essence of human life. In a moment of quiet epiphany, the narrator appears to make a shift toward active participation in life, made possible by the sightless communication he shared with Robert.

In this moment of epiphany, the reader’s experience of reading “Cathedral” suddenly seems to parallel the narrator’s experience of drawing the cathedral. Although the narrator has limited what the reader knows, the reader nonetheless actively uses imagination to construct the meaning of the story by filling in the gaps of information left out by the narrator. The details of the story such as the dinner menu, the wife’s background, and Robert’s beard, parallel the details of the cathedral such as flying buttresses, great doors, and windows with arches. And just as a cathedral becomes more than the sum of its parts, the story “Cathedral” becomes more than the sum of its details. The collaborative imaginative effort undertaken by the reader, the text, and Carver himself produces a moment of human understanding, a moment when options and possibilities open suddenly before the narrator, and before the reader as well.

“Cathedral” is a story that can be read and read again. Subsequent readings will never produce the same effect as the initial, naive reading; however, the act of rereading the text over time is much the same as the long, slow process of cathedral building. Each layer of bricks contributes to the transformation of hard marble to glorious transcendence. Each reading makes possible the rediscovery of the divine in the everyday world of Carver’s working-class characters.

Source: Diane Andrews Henningfeld, for Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 1999.

What Do I Read Next?

• Where I’m Calling From: New and Selected Stories (1988), is the last collection published by Carver during his lifetime. The collection offers readers the chance to compare early and late Carver.
• Bobbie Ann Mason’s collection of short stories, Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), is another example of well-written short stories. Mason, like Carver, has been labeled a “K-mart realist” by a number of critics.
• The American Short Story: Short Stories from the Rea Award (1993), edited by Michael Rea, provides students with a fine collection of short stories and minimalist prose. Rea has selected stories by Anne Beattie, Charles Baxter, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley, among others.
• Conversations with Raymond Carver, edited by Marshall Bruce Gentry and William L. Stull (1990), offers twenty-five interviews with the writer, conducted during the years from 1977 to just before his death in 1988.
• Ultramarine (1986), is Carver’s final volume of poetry, offering students a chance to see Carver the poet in addition to Carver the short story writer.
• The important Carver essay, “On Writing,” appears in a notable collection of Carver’s short stories, poetry and essays, Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories (1983).