Self-Enlargement in Raymond Carver’s Cathedral
Essay title: Self-Enlargement in Raymond Carver’s Cathedral
In “The Compartment,” one of Raymond Carvers bleakest stories, a man passes through the French countryside in a train, en route to a rendezvous
with a son he has not seen for many years. “Now and then,” the narrator says of the man, “Meyers saw a farmhouse and its outbuildings, everything surrounded by a wall. He thought this might be a good way to live-in an old house surrounded by a wall” (Cathedral 48). Due to a last minute change of heart, however, Meyers chooses to stay insulated in his “compartment” and, remaining on the train, reneges on his promise to the boy, walling out everything external to his selfish world, paternal obligation included.
Meyerss tendency toward insularity is not, of course, unique among the characters in Cathedral or among the
characters of earlier volumes. In Will You Be Quiet, Please? there is the paranoid self-cloistering of Slater and
Arnold Breit, and in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love we read of James Packers cantankerous,self-absorbed disgruntlement about lifes injustices. In Cathedral appear other, more extreme versions of insularity,from a husbands self-imposed confinement to a living room in “Preservation” to anothers pathetic reluctance to leave an attic garret in “Careful.” More strikingly in Cathedral than before, Carvers figures seal themselves off from their worlds, walling out the threatening forces in their lives even as they wall themselves in, retreating destructively into the claustrophobic inner enclosures of self. But corresponding to this new extreme of insularity, there are in several stories equally striking instances where–pushing insularity the other way–characters attempt to throw off their entrapping nets and, in a few instances, appear to succeed. In Cathedral, and in Cathedral only, we witness the rare moments of their comings out, a process of opening up in closed-down lives that comes across
in both the subjects and events of the stories and in the process of their telling, where self-disenfranchisement is
reflected even on the level of discourse, rhetorically or structurally, or both.
As one might expect, “de-insulation” of this kind necessarily involves the intervention of others: the coming out of
a self-enclosed figure depends upon the influence of another being–a baker or a babysitter or blind man, or even a
fellow drunk on the road to recovery, who, entering unexpectedly into a characters life, affords new perspective or
awareness and guides him along, if not toward insight then at least away from the destructively confining strictures
of self. As one might expect further, such interventions and influences are mobilized in the stories through the
communal gestures of language–through the exchanging of tales and through communicative transactions, particularly, where separate identities blend and collaborate rather than collide. Thus even as “Carvers task,” as Paul Skenazy writes, is to depict the “tiny, damning confinements of the spirit,” in Cathedral it is also to go beyond depicting the suffocations and wilted spirits of characters in chains (78). Engaging in what he calls a kind of writerly “opening up” of his own, Carver draws out in various uplifting moments the momentary gratifications and near-joys characters experience when, however temporarily, the enclosing walls come down–when their self-preoccupations lift and they sense new freedom, a freedom they may or may not ever truly participate in at all
(Interview 21).
But since outright freedom is for many of Carvers lot as terrifying as total lack of mobility (think of Arnold Breit
in “Are You a Doctor?” or Lloyd in “Careful”), the freedoms Carvers newly-liberated characters experience manifest themselves ironically as forms of enclosure, ample and humane as those enclosures may be. Be they a comforting memory of ones old bedroom, or the warm, fragrant reality of a bakery, or a vision of the awesome interior of a cathedral, they are enclosures nevertheless. Trying to free themselves of the fetters of insecurity and addiction, Carvers characters expand both inwardly and outwardly and, thanks to the beneficial incursion of other lives and other stories, imagine larger, more spacious enclosures–places big enough and light enough