PROSE
Raymond Carver
Cathedral
Why this work?
Raymond Carver is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of short stories. Cathedral, the first story written after the completion of his breakthrough collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in 1981, is considered to be one of his finest works.
The story
The author said of his own story:
“The story ‘Cathedral’ seemed to me completely different from everything I’d written before. I was in a period of generosity. The character there is full of prejudices against blind people. He changes; he grows. The sighted man changes. He puts himself in the blind man’s place. The story affirms something.”
Raymond Carver
The reading
One participant in a Salon study described the experience of reading this story as ‘empty’—particularly in comparison to Joyce’s The Dead. There is an emptiness here—particularly as we are in the narrative view of one who seems so . . . Cynical? Empty? Minimal?
The opening question asked of study participants was: “Is there a part of this story that makes you uncomfortable?”, to which there were various responses:
“This feels very much a piece of a particular time period: 1960s or so? Suburban America—a place of emptiness, of bland food, drinking as hobby and claustrophobic interior spaces. Even though we may place it in a recent time, the story resists identity with a particular place . . . there is a vagueness to the setting that extends to the characters. The story itself is not empty, but the characters are islands; singular and disconnected . . .”
“I would not describe my experience with the story as uncomfortable though I see how the narrator is uncomfortable . . . he sounds like a petulant adolescent—and towards the end, the blind man seems to take on the role of parent to him. There is a long build up to the end—to the moment of satisfaction—this extends the tension of the situation over a long period of time . . .”
“The visit of the blind man reveals the deep jealousy and prejudice of the narrator; and since it is a blind man, the jealousy is even more complicated as it reveals the weakness of the narrator—or underlines his prejudice since he cannot quite bring himself to admit that he is jealous of a blind man. I have been trying to work out why the cathedral? In a story where the characters have so little belief in anything, why does the creation of the cathedral offer such an epiphany?”
The blind man is so much more open and giving than the narrator – the blind man has travelled, he listens carefully to the wife, he has had a romantic love of his own. His empathy emphasises the metaphorical blindness of the narrator, notice how little the narrator cares in his telling the history of the wife’s suicide attempt, how little interest he shows in the blind man’s impression of him . . .
So, why the cathedral? We understand that none of the characters has any faith that would make the image significant to them. We can reflect on the image of the cathedral—its lofty stature, its representation as a house that opens out to the heavens, its connection to the ritual of marriage . . . and of how these ideas are so absent from the narrator’s world view. In the end, does he change and is a connection made?
Some questions you may want to consider:
- How is the narrator drawn? What are his limitations? How is he made unlikable?
- Is there anything to like in the narrator?
- What does the story tell you (both on the surface and below) about the relationship between the narrator and his wife, and between his wife and the blind man?
- What does the experience of the shared meal reveal about the characters?
- How does the narrator feel about the blind man at the start of the story and to what extent has this changed by the end?
- What does the final event – the drawing of the Cathedral – convey?
The author
American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, in 1938. His first short stories appeared in Esquire in the 1970s and he began to reach a wider audience with the 1976 publication of Will You Please be Quiet, Please. His collection of stories What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, published in 1981, brought him literary fame and was followed by two more collections, Cathedral and Elephant, in which moved away from his earlier minimalist style into a new expansiveness, as well as several collections of poetry. He died in 1988, aged fifty.
Recommended edition: Cathedral by Raymond Carver (collected stories), Vintage Classics, ISBN 978-0099530336.
POETRY
Elizabeth Bishop
Sestina
Sestina can be read here and in Elizabeth Bishop’s collected poems (see recommended edition below).
Why this poem?
This poem gives us a great place to consider the tension between form (how the words are arranged) and content (what is said). The Sestina is a very precise and complex French verse form, about which you can read more on the Poetry Foundation website here.
Elizabeth Bishop, held a particular view on the poet’s responsibility in the expression of suffering as described below:
“. . . Bishop, while her own life was filled with suffering and loss, felt that the poet needed to do more than represent the particularities of such experience. As she wrote to Robert Lowell in 1948: ‘sometimes I wish I could have a more sensible conversation about this suffering business, anyway. I imagine we actually agree fairly well. It is just that I think it is so inevitable there’s no use talking about it, that in itself it has no value . . .’ More to the point, she felt it was the poet’s responsibility not to exploit suffering, to use language with an awareness of its power to inflict as well as to expose pain.”
Susan Rosenbaum, Rereading Confessional Poetry
When we discuss poetry, we start with a close consideration of the words and how they are used. This may lead us to the larger question of what the poem does. Does a poem, as some have suggested, work to capture human experience at so sharp and close an exposure that in reading a good poem we learn a bit more about the process of being human?
Does this particular poem act in this way? How does this differ from other media forms we encounter? Could the ideas expressed in this poem be communicated successfully in any other form? Why should we do the work poetry requires?
Some references you may find useful:
“. . . Poetry arrived
Pablo Neruda
In search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
It came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when . . .”
“Robert Frost defines a poem: ‘It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.’ He contends that the wisdom might provide temporary stability: ‘a momentary stay against confusion’. Wildness is necessary to balance form – tension between the need for form and the corresponding need of freedom from form. Frost uses a container (the Sonnet, for example) to create tension.”
Earl J Wilcox, Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost
“Art is organization—a searching after order. The primal artistic act is God’s creating of the universe out of chaos—shaping formlessness into form. Therefore evaluate a poem by its unity, coherence and proper placement of emphasis: structure, form, pattern, symmetry reflect the human instinct for design.”
Perrine’s Sound and Sense
“A Poem should not mean but be.”
Archibald MacLeish
“Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.”
Nicolas Malebranche
The poet
Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, to an American father and a Canadian mother. Her father died when she was eight months old and her mother returned with her to Nova Scotia. When she was five, her mother became mentally ill and was institutionalised, remaining in the asylum until her death in 1934. Elizabeth went to live with her maternal grandparents on a farm in Great Village, Nova Scotia. In her later childhood her paternal grandparents gained custody and she went to live with them in Massachusetts, a move which made her unhappy and she missed her life in Nova Scotia, a place she returned to throughout her life and in her poetry. As an adult, she inherited enough money from her father to travel and live independently, living in France, Key West and Santos, Brazil, all places that figure in her work.
Although she was friends with the confessional poets of her era, including Robert Lowell (with whom she exchanged many letters discussing poetry), Bishop avoided this confessional style and details about her history and relationships are often disguised. She was not in any sense a “public poet” and is much more highly regarded now than in her lifetime. Many critics consider her one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century; she is revered for her skill with form, the accuracy of her observations and the restrained beauty of her language.
Recommended edition: Poems: The Centenary Edition by Elizabeth Bishop, Chatto & Windus, ISBN: 9780701186289
Content courtesy of Toby Brothers, Director & Founder of the London Literary Salon and Nicky Mayhew, Associate Director.
