A Companion to the American Short Story

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A Companion to the American Short Story Page 81

by Alfred Bendixen

What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology (2003) . One suspects that

  the sheer accessibility of his language combined with the closeness between lived and

  fi ctional experience have contributed to the fascination with Carver in areas far

  removed from traditional literary courses.

  Finally, fi lm and media studies remain pertinent charted and forthcoming areas of

  inquiry, especially since the release of Ray Lawrence ’ s fi lm Jindabyne in 2006. 10 Where

  Robert Altman portrayed the fast - paced and interlocked fate of characters from nine

  Carver stories in the now - classic Short Cuts (1993), Lawrence dedicates a full feature

  to the exploration of one story, “ So Much Water, So Close to Home. ” Set in contem-

  porary Australia, the fi lm is an excellent example of how Carver Country is as much

  a state of mind as it is a place, and how characters everywhere and anywhere are a

  part of the arduous business called life that Carver so meticulously recreated in his

  fi ction. This is the case regardless of whether they live in the small community of

  Jindabyne or sprawling Los Angeles.

  An Intertextual Assessment of “ Cathedral ”

  As our knowledge of Carver ’ s literary life has expanded with time, our understanding

  of the collection Cathedral (and its title story) as a post - minimalist work has been

  confi rmed and emphasized. The collection, written soon after Carver ’ s intense corre-

  spondence with Lish over the editor ’ s huge cuts to What We Talk About , includes

  several stories that Carver rewrote or restored from earlier versions, as well as new

  stories such as “ Cathedral ” that were to be published without Lish ’ s interference. The

  book was also written during what Carver referred to as the “ gravy ” years of his life,

  after recovery from alcoholism and before diagnosis with cancer. 11 The title story is,

  for good reasons, widely anthologized, and all of the major Carver scholars cited

  above have commented on it in their monographs. There exist dozens of individual

  critical articles on the story and at least one student study guide, 12 in addition to

  Harold Bloom ’ s (mis)treatment of it as a lesser version of D. H. Lawrence ’ s “ The

  Raymond

  Carver

  371

  Blind Man ” in his Major Short Story Writers series. Indeed, the interest in “ Cathedral ”

  exemplifi es the versatility of Carver ’ s short fi ction, demonstrating its ability to with-

  stand scrutiny and to offer up insights in readings that emphasize a range of topics

  including religion, alcoholism, disability, humor, television, feminism, and gender

  studies. This section, however, will place the story in the literary

  “

  canon

  ”

  (from

  which Bloom has excluded it) while emphasizing the larger literary and intertextual

  issues that it raises.

  Intratextuality and Intertextuality

  Before looking specifi cally at some of the intertextual traits of

  “

  Cathedral,

  ”

  it is

  important to establish that Carver frequently worked both intra - and intertextual

  elements into his writing, and that this was a lifelong process he never abandoned.

  Intra textual refers to the phenomenon of a writer ’ s self - reference; to the recycling or

  reworking of elements from one ’ s own texts. The intratextual can function on the

  level of a collection of stories, as Randolph Runyon has illuminated in

  Reading

  Raymond Carver , where he shows how each story in each of Carver ’ s major collections

  reworks elements of the previous one(s). For Carver, however, intratextuality also

  functions on many other levels, as he frequently rewrites his own stories (calling, for

  example, “ A Small, Good Thing ” not a version of “ The Bath, ” but a completely dif-

  ferent story) or pokes fun at himself as a writer. In “ Cathedral, ” for example, the

  narrator ridicules his wife for writing a poem about the blind man touching her: “ I

  didn ’ t think much of the poem. … Maybe I just don ’ t know much about poetry ”

  (211). Both Tess Gallagher (Carver ’ s second wife) and Carver himself are accomplished

  poets, so the humor is double - edged here.

  Moreover, by introducing blindness into the story as its central trope, Carver ’ s

  “ Cathedral ” is an intratextual experiment in reversal: almost all of his stories and

  poems deal at some level with the trope of vision. On the microlevel of the word and

  of the verb phrase, the most frequent intratextual element in Carver, what marks

  almost every Carver text as his particular product (whether edited by Lish or not), is

  his obsession with sight; indeed Carver scholars have long since established voyeurism

  as a central motif in his work. There is almost no story or poem that does not display

  an almost redundant use of verbs such as “ see, ” “ watch, ” “ look, ” “ glance, ” and “ stare, ”

  and related nouns such as “ eyes, ” “ vision, ” or, to borrow the title from one of his

  stories, “ Viewfi nder. ” To take that very brief, fi ve - page story as an example, we fi nd

  the following density of sight verbs: “ watching ” (2 times), “ see ” (2 times), “ look ”

  (5 times), “ looked ” (3 times), “ saw ” (2 times), “ seeing ” (once), “ watched ” (2 times),

  and “ show ” (2 times). In addition, there is an ironic sight - related adjective to describe

  the antagonist, who is “ ordinary - looking ” (except for the fact that he has hooks instead

  of hands), and several nouns related to this man ’ s vocation as an amateur photographer,

  itself a trope for viewing: “ photograph ” (2 times), “ picture ” (5 times), “ camera ”

  (4 times), “ Polaroid ” (once), “ viewfi nder ” (3 times including the title), and “ shutter ”

  (once). 13 On a larger intratextual level, this story resounds with “ Cathedral ” ; in both

  372

  Sandra Lee Kleppe

  stories, a disabled person functions as a more “ whole ” being than the main character

  who has no physical disabilities.

  This brings us to the discussion of the inter textual nature of Carver ’ s work. The

  story “ Viewfi nder ” is one among several that echo Flannery O ’ Connor ’ s fi ction, espe-

  cially the idea that the freakish is ordinary and vice versa, and that a person may not

  be a whole being despite a whole physical body. Consider, for example, the one - armed

  man in O ’ Connor ’ s “ The Life You Save May Be Your Own, ” whose adeptness as a

  handyman is similar to the photographer ’ s ease when using his hooks in “ Viewfi nder. ”

  Though there are fewer moments of grace in Carver than in O ’ Connor, he in fact

  moved closer, in his later works, to depicting moments of grace under pressure and

  even epiphany, lessons he had learned from masters such as Hemingway, Joyce, and

  O ’ Connor. Yet here it is important to underline that the notion of intertextuality is

  a cultural phenomenon that has both general and specifi c manifestations, and that

  language itself is loaded with intertextuality in the Bakhtinian sense: “ [L]anguage is

  not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the

  speaker ’ s intentions; it is populated – o
verpopulated – with the intentions of others.

  Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one ’ s own intentions and accents, is a diffi cult

  and complicated process ” (Bakhtin 294). 14 Intertextuality can be conscious or uncon-

  scious, deliberate or accidental, fl aunted or cloaked in allusion. Carver employs all of

  these forms of intertextuality in his works, sometimes unabashedly stealing elements

  from other writers ’ texts, from letters written to him, or from stories told to him by

  friends, sometimes accidentally or even na ï vely reproducing his own versions of other

  texts (as seems to be the case with “ Cathedral ” ), which in turn might be texts which

  have been recycled through the centuries. In all cases, however, the emphasis should

  be put on what artistic effect Carver achieves with his version , for all major writers

  have to a greater or lesser extent rewritten the tradition and texts of the “ canon ” and

  of their culture to suit their own purposes. Indeed, as recent studies have shown,

  Carver ’ s use of clich é and of the banal contribute to his transforming American col-

  loquialisms into an aesthetic and lyrical language. 15

  During his formative years in the 1960s, Carver wrote imitations/parodies of both

  Faulkner and Hemingway ( “ Furious Seasons ” and “ The Afi cionados, ” both collected

  in No Heroics, Please ), illustrating Harold Bloom ’ s notion of the anxiety of infl uence,

  but the symbolic “ killing off ” of a writer is only one of many types of intertextual

  writing. In most cases in his mature works, Carver is clearly not employing parody

  or anxiety, but rather consciously tipping his hat to writers he admires by confi dently

  creating his own version of another text, such as with the case of Carver ’ s “ The Train, ”

  which is a sequel to John Cheever ’ s “ The Five - Forty - Eight, ” in which the character

  Miss Dent stalks and threatens a man who has mistreated her. While Carver and

  Cheever were (drinking) buddies in life, in their fi ction Carver ’ s text marks both dif-

  ference and respect as he leads Miss Dent back into ordinary scenes of waiting room

  and train ride after the violent closing of Cheever ’ s story. Carver also shows his admi-

  ration for Chekhov and both writers ’ celebration of the ordinary by incorporating rich

  intertextual elements into the last story that he wrote and published, “ Errand. ” In

  Raymond

  Carver

  373

  this quasi - biographical tale of the death of Chekhov, Carver unabashedly lifts passages

  from others ’ texts about the Russian master. Claudine Verlay, in her illuminating

  reading of the story, makes the distinction (borrowed from Genette) between “ hyper-

  text, ” which is a derived or altered version of a previous text, and “ hypotext, ” which

  is the previous version. In “ Errand, ” she writes,

  The hypotext stems from many sources of information. Suvorin ’ s and Tolstoy ’ s diaries,

  Marie Chekhov ’ s and Olga Knipper ’ s memoirs, … and the various biographies Carver

  may have consulted, notably Henry Troyat ’ s Chekhov. (148)

  Carver, however, molds all of this into a story that most critics agree, in Verlay ’ s

  words, is a tour de force. 16 He does this by employing a characteristic rich mix of fact

  and fabrication in which the biographical details of Chekhov ’ s life are juxtaposed with

  the sheerly fi ctional account of the bellboy at the end of the story, an everyman whose

  banal concerns trump the austere moment of the death of a great world writer. Such

  a narrative pivot away from “ heroics ” and toward the everyday is indeed one of Carver ’ s

  key contributions to the short story genre.

  To sum up our examination of the wide variety of intra - and intertextual elements

  in Carver

  ’

  s works, we must conclude that, in addition to the vexed relationship

  between Lish ’ s words and Carver ’ s words, which will continue for some time to occupy

  scholars, Carver himself “ edited, ” borrowed, rewrote, and freely incorporated his own

  and others ’ texts throughout his career. Although fascinating to study, it is not always

  necessary for readers to be aware of all of the intertextual elements in his stories.

  Indeed, it would be impossible to trace all of them. Carver ’ s stories stand on their

  own as the product of his craftmanship and can be read without too much anxiety

  about infl uences. In Carver ’ s own often - quoted words,

  Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don ’ t know any writers who are without it. But

  a unique and exact way of looking at things, and fi nding the right context for expressing

  that way of looking, that ’ s something else. The World According to Garp is, of course,

  the marvellous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to

  Flannery O ’ Connor, and others according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.

  ( “ On Writing ” 22)

  On the other hand, in studies and courses that focus on comparative readings,

  whether of American writers such as the ones mentioned above, or in larger contexts

  such as the Chekhovian connections, Carver ’ s stories (and poems) will continue to

  provide a goldmine of prospects for discussion and comparison. The next sections of

  this essay consider one such connection, the phenomenon that Carver ’ s “ Cathedral ”

  so strikingly resembles D. H. Lawrence ’ s “ The Blind Man, ” yet Carver ’ s story is also

  much more than a hypertext or new version of an older text. “ Cathedral ” is an “ origi-

  nal ” Carverian text, unaltered by Lish, and singled out by readers and critics alike as

  a favorite.

  374

  Sandra Lee Kleppe

  Carver, “ Cathedral, ” and D. H. Lawrence

  D.H. Lawrence was one of the best writers in the language and one of the worst, and sometimes

  in the same story.

  – Raymond Carver in the classroom, as quoted by a student 17

  Readers wishing to study specifi c intertextual connections between Lawrence and

  Carver are advised to steer away from Harold Bloom ’ s reductive and unsubstantiated

  claims: “ Carver, whom perhaps we have overpraised, died before he could realize the

  larger possibilities of his art. … There is a reverberation in Lawrence ’ s story that carries

  into the high madness of great art. Carver, though a very fi ne artist, cannot take us

  there ” (11). The Lawrence scholar Keith Cushman, on the other hand, presents a more

  balanced assessment in his essay

  “

  Blind Intertexual Love:

  ‘

  The Blind Man

  ’

  and

  Raymond Carver ’ s ‘ Cathedral. ’ ” Rather than diminish Carver to an imitation of Law-

  rence, Cushman opens up both stories by showing how the literary trope of blindness

  is a staple in the Western canon, well established in antiquity and thus a shared

  intertext for writers of all eras. Intertextuality is not about tracing the source from

  one writer to another and embracing an authoritative version, for as Cushman rightly

  points out in citing Kristeva and Barthes, intertextuality is concerned with the trans-

  mission of both language and culture, which are always already given, yet also always

  open and malleable. The on
ly original human words, as Bakhtin has pointed out, were

  spoken by the Biblical Adam; since then language has been in continual dialogic

  development.

  Cushman and others have noted the very striking resemblances between “ Cathe-

  dral

  ”

  and

  “

  The Blind Man.

  ”

  There is the same triangle of characters: a married

  couple and a male visitor. In both stories one of the men is blind, though in Law-

  rence ’ s it is the husband Maurice Pervin and in Carver ’ s it is the visitor Robert. In

  both stories, the visitor is a close friend of the wife, an aspect that both husbands

  initially resent. In his correspondence with Cushman, Carver claimed he had not

  read

  “

  The Blind Man

  ”

  before writing

  “

  Cathedral

  ”

  and that any similarities were

  coincidental (although Carver later did read, appreciate and teach Lawrence ’ s story). 18

  What makes the resemblances between the two stories stranger than fi ction is the

  fact that “ Cathedral ” was based on the actual visit of a blind man, Tess Gallagher ’ s

  friend and earlier employer, Jerry Carriveau, who took the train to see the couple

  in Syracuse in 1981. 19 But like the story “ Errand ” discussed above and in most of

  the stories that have their sources in biographical and/or intertextual material, Carver

  uses the visit as a source only insofar as it can serve his own fi ctional and aesthetic

  purposes.

  What a comparative reading of

  “

  Cathedral

  ”

  and

  “

  The Blind Man

  ”

  ultimately

  reveals is that the similarities ultimately serve to highlight the specifi cally Lawrentian

  in Lawrence ’ s fi ctional world and the specifi cally Carverian in Carver ’ s. One crucial

  difference is in the narrative techniques employed: Lawrence uses a third

  -

  person

  omniscient narrator who allows each of the main characters focalization, showing how

  Raymond

  Carver

  375

  they are isolated beings at the same time as they desire strong bonds; Carver uses a

  fi rst - person narrator who, in the course of the story, discovers the shallowness of his

 

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