Raymond Carver\'s \"Cathedral\": Investigation Into Symbolism

Carver, "Cathedral"

Despite its prominent placement in the title of the story, the cathedral in Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" takes quite a while to make its appearance. The story instead is about a marriage -- a husband and wife have a guest to dinner. Carver's story is narrated in the first person, from the perspective of the husband, so to some extent the symbolism of the story is constructed with a sort of irony: the narrator himself is not explicitly aware of the symbolism, nor does he comment upon it directly. As a result, the relationship of the central symbol of the story is more or less oblique: its significance is signposted by the story's title, but is otherwise withheld from the reader for what seems a very long time until it makes its appearance. However, I hope that, with some close reading of the story as a whole, the meaning of the story's central symbol will become apparent.

"Cathedral" is about a marriage that is fraught with rather ordinary tension. Part of the central conceit of Carver's story is that, in telling it through the voice of a first-person narrator, the reader is put in the position of having to evaluate the story as it is told, and decide the extent to which the narrator is, in fact, reliable. In other words, it might be easy to miss the full meaning of the story upon a cursory first read, if the reader is merely taking the narrator at his word. The real issue, of course, is that the narrator's denials and asides eventually begin to add up -- after so many claims that his wife's "blind man" is unimportant and that "he was nothing to me" (1), the reader eventually realizes that we should not be trusting the narrator. In reality, the narrator's attitude toward the blind man is one of suppressed jealousy: in some sense, "Cathedral" is quite nearly a story about adultery, except that the adultery has never taken place. Instead, what the blind man and the narrator's wife have shared is intimacy without sex: we learn this in the story's second paragraph, where the narrator describes how his wife's first acquaintance with the blind man (she had worked for him reading out loud) had ended with a weirdly intimate encounter, in which the blind man "asked if he could touch her face." The significance of this event -- or at least the indication that the relationship between the blind man and the narrator's wife had passed from one of co-workers to something more like an intimate friendship -- is marked by the wife's decision to memorialize the event in a poem. As the narrator says, dismissively, "she was always trying to write a poem…usually after something really important happened to her." This indicates the distance between how the narrator couches the story, and the actual significance: the fact that the wife had turned the event into a poem certainly indicates its importance to her, but what that importance might be is never examined by the narrator, who prefers at the story's opening to downplay any meaning or significance to the blind man's visit.

And yet to a certain extent we are certainly aware that the structure of the story and of the relationship between the three central characters is one that suggests a tale of adultery. This is made clear even in the earliest paragraphs of the story, when the narrator describes the wife's means of communication with the blind man. They communicate by means of tapes: "next to writing a poem every year, I think it was her chief means of recreation," he states dismissively. Yet we have already learned that the poems are used by the wife to mark important occasions in her own life, and we now have some glimpse of what meaning the exchange of tapes might have. This is not about sex, but rather about intimacy -- as the sexless intimacy of the blind man physically experiencing the wife's face earlier might indicate, what the wife enjoys with the blind man is a sense of sympathetic conversation. Because he cannot see, he is more than willing to listen. This is brought home by the narrator's account of actually listening to one of the tapes with his wife (after she volunteered it):

After a few minutes of harmless chitchat, I heard my own name in the mouth of this stranger, this blind man I didn't even know! And then this: "From all you've said about him, I can only conclude -- " But we were interrupted, a knock at the door, something, and we didn't ever get back to the tape. Maybe it was just as well. I'd heard all I wanted to. (2)

Again, this seems to mimic the structure of adultery without having the actual content of adultery. The husband finds himself offended by the fact that his wife has told her old friend about her new marriage. There is nothing untoward here, but in some sense the narrator does not need to know the blind man's opinion of him, which is (of course) precisely where the dialogue cuts off in aposiopesis. The narrator "heard all [he] wanted to" presumably because he is jealous -- of his wife's level of intimacy with another man.

As a result, the husband's behavior during the blind man's visit begins with petulant jealousy, which is held at arm's length because the narrator is unlikely to acknowledge that his own behavior qualifies as petulant or jealous. However, as the dinner concludes and the husband is left to awkwardly entertain the blind man on his own, the story takes a different and surprising turn. With the wife upstairs putting on her nightclothes, the husband invites the blind man to smoke marijuana. As a result, he is forming a sort of relationship with the blind man apart from his wife. In consequence the husband's attitude toward the blind man softens, and as the two of them sit in front of the television it occurs to the husband to try what his wife herself had experienced -- to attempt to assist the blind man in navigating the outside world. While the television shows a documentary program with a European cathedral, it occurs to the husband that the blind man may not know what a cathedral looks like, and so he asks the blind man if this is the case. The answer is surprising, insofar as the blind man understands cathedrals in terms of time (taking "fifty or a hundred years to build") and not visual appearance. The narrator therefore attempts to describe a cathedral to the blind man, but discovers that his word feel inadequate and confesses "I can't tell you what a cathedral looks like" (12). At this point, the blind man makes a suggestion: "We'll draw one together. Get us a pen and some heavy paper." (12). As a result, the narrator ends up getting some sense of the intimacy that his wife must have experienced: "His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now." (13). The fact that the wife walks in on the two men performing this strange act only adds to the sense that the dynamic of sexless adultery has been reversed: if previously the wife had experienced an intimacy with her blind friend that had been denied to the husband, now the husband experiences a taste of the same sort of intimacy.