Essay: Food and Community in Raymond Carver's CATHEDRAL

While discussing Raymond Carver has not yet become a cottage industry à la the study of Hemingway or Shakespeare, a considerable number of people have written an equally considerable number of reviews, articles, and essays on Carver and his work. One of the most popular points of interest for these critics appears to be Carver’s putative role as “the chief practitioner of what’s been called ‘American minimalism,’ a mannerist mode in which the intentional poverty, the anorexia, of the writer’s style is mimetic of the spiritual poverty of his or her characters’ lives, their disconnection from anything like a traditional community” (Gorra 155). Besides discussions of Carver’s characteristic lean, bleak style, the other prominent object of critical attention is the prevalence of alcohol and alcoholics in his stories. Peter J. Donahue even conflates the two concerns in his essay on alcoholism as ideology, in which he presents the need for a drink as a sort of predatorial signified, towards which every signifier used by an alcoholic inevitably points.

Surprisingly, despite, or perhaps because of the attention lavished on alcohol and drinking, a disproportionately small amount has been written about the role of food and eating in Carver's work, specifically in Cathedral. Many critics and reviewers do mention the sacramental tenor of the meal at the end of "A Small, Good Thing," and somewhat fewer note the conflation of Scotty-the-boy and Scotty-the-cake, but I found only one discussing how Carver uses earlier, less prominent images of food to develop this motif and prepare for the final meal (or "last supper") (Bugeja 75). And while in his essay comparing D.H. Lawrence's "The Blind Man" and "Cathedral," Monroe Engel contrasts the table manners of Maurice Pervin and Robert, the other sources limit their observations concerning food and eating to "A Small Good Thing." Yet a healthy percentage of the stories in Cathedral have titles that allude to the world of food; e.g., "Preservation," a story about a broken refrigerator and several sorts of meat that risk spoilage. Still more stories involve prominent meals or foods, such as the trout dinners that represent domestic stability in "Chef's House," and all include some significant reference to food, such as the one-armed man eating (ten-armed) fried squid in Venice, who mirrors Myers' own alienation and spiritual autocannibalism.

At its most basic level, this paper's approach thus will be to complement what I interpret as the existing foci of materials on Carver, by working with the discourse of cuisine in Cathedral. It will not primarily concern itself with evaluating Carver's style, but with examining a particular Weltanschauung and set of cultural codes derived from his representations of food and eating in Cathedral. Irving Howe states that Carver portrays "a meager life . . . without religion or politics or culture, without the shelter of class or ethnicity, without the support of strong folkways or conscious rebellion. It's the life of people who cluster in the folds of our society" (Howe 42). What does tie Cathedral's characters together, however, is Raymond Carver's culinary ethos. In The Raw and the Cooked, Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrates how dietary habits reflect and shape how a particular group sees the world; in the same way, Raymond Carver's own familiarity with Western cultural codes and experiences as a recovering alcoholic seem to inform his representations of food and eating.

Maybe the simplest, most obvious point to make about meals is that they imply a shared community, a strengthening, however temporary, of interpersonal bonds. Whoever is at the table is in the group. The meal and communion shared by Howard, Anne, and the baker in "A Small, Good Thing" is probably the most prominent example of this in Cathedral. Anne initially seeks common ground with the baker and with Franklin's family. But the baker makes her "uncomfortable" and he has not, in fact, had children or "gone through this special time of cakes and birthday parties" (Carver 60). Nor can she get past the initial polite small talk with the family, who has already finished eating, apart from her, by the time she arrives at the lounge. The deep connections are not forged until she and Howard sit with the baker to accept his food and personal confessions.

The meal of community also appears in other stories. While the couple is at Chef's house, they not only reaffirm their marriage, but together "shopped for specials [i.e., groceries] at the Safeway" and catch and eat trout for dinner (28). After Carlyle's wife deserts him in "Fever," leaving a gap in the family circle, she facilitates the appearance of Mrs. Webster, who cooks for Carlyle's family and acts as a sort of maternal proxy for them until Carlyle himself is ready to attempt to heal the breach and preserve his domestic order. On a bleaker note, a key contribution to the ominous ending of "Preservation" is that Sandy's husband physically leaves his pork chop and the kitchen table, where Sandy had just set down her own plate, in order to return to the couch. He not only isolates himself and passively advances his own dissolution, but also undermines Sandy's pragmatic attempts to preserve their (shared) food and economic well-being.

It may not be accidental that Carver places the two largest and most complex meals in Cathedral, the multi-course dinners in "Feathers" and "Cathedral," in its first and last stories, so that the meals effectively contain between them all the characters and meals of "Cathedral country." The meals eventually lead to two very different outcomes -- one narrator loses his domestic bliss and gains a bitter wife and a "conniving" offspring, while the other gains some measure of wonder and forges a bond with a man his wife cherishes, which might succeed in mitigating some of the bitterness and hostility she already feels toward him. In both cases, the dinners themselves are substantial -- meat, potatoes, vegetables, bread, and dessert -- each weighty enough to anchor one end of this collection of narratives.

But when food is absent, so is a sense of belonging. While the members of the "Negro" family in "A Small, Good Thing" face their common tragedy together over a meal of fast food, Howard and Anne refuse to eat and first face Scotty's coma as two individuals. Anne feels Howard's hand as "a weight on her shoulder" (64), as though he were a burden, and later admits that she has not considered Howard to be sharing in the ordeal with her and Scotty; once she has included him, each begins trying to give the other an opportunity to go home and eat. Their initial isolation may be linked to their upper-middle class standing (Howard is a partner in an investment firm); Carver may be making a point about the emptiness and alienation that lie at the heart of contemporary American capitalism.

Consider that the only other well-off main character in Cathedral is Myers in "The Compartment," who leads a quiet, solitary lifestyle back in the United States and currently finds himself surrounded by unintelligible foreigners on a train through Europe. Significantly, Myers is also the only protagonist who does not eat or drink anything within the bounds of his or her story -- even Miss Dent, who also finds herself alone among people who make no sense, drinks some water from a fountain. His two closest experiences with cuisine or community are watching a one-armed man eat fried squid, an experience that exemplifies his disappointment with Venice (in Italy, the land of good eats) and underscores his general sense of estrangement in Europe, and recalling the last time he saw (and violently fought with) his son, just before his family disintegrated, like smashed bits of cups and china on the dining-room floor.

Eventually, the groups who do succeed in eating together and affirming a sense of fellowship and common identity must also collapse back into their individual parts. Although periodic eating is, of course, vital, no meal can last forever. Carver seems to assert that the nature of any given network of relationships is transitory and contingent at best. Howard, Anne and the baker “talked on into the early morning, . . . and they did not think of leaving” (89), but what Carver leaves unsaid is that Howard and Anne will inevitably have to leave the warm confines of the bakery and learn to lead lives without their son -- “the Weisses avoid confronting a host of existential demons, including Scotty’s death and the resulting life-long grief and aloneness with which they have yet to spend a single night” (Powell 647ƒ). By the same logic, it shouldn’t be surprising that Mrs. Webster has to leave the Carlyle household at the end, though it might seem apt that this cook and maintainer of families is not leaving the Carlyle’s out of an individual inability to sustain interpersonal bonds or in order to pursue a selfish agenda, but so that she can cook for and support her own family.

Frank Martin’s drying-out facility offers alcoholics AA-styled community in place of the self-destructiveness that is threatening their relationships in the outside world. While at the facility, time and community are ordered and reinforced by set meal times; “eleven o’clock in the morning” means “an hour and a half until lunch” (129), and breakfast is a moment to come together as a group with a common identity, Homo alcoholicus, as much as it is an occasion to eat. But members only stay at the facility for a limited time, a week or two, after which “eleven o’ clock” will signify whatever the individual wants it to. And one never knows when the trembling and shakes may become a seizure like Tiny’s, forcibly pulling one out of the circle and making one lose one’s appetite.

The tone of any given story in Cathedral, as well as the hopefulness of the prospects for the story’s narrator, seems to rely on a hierarchy of sanctified spaces. Possibly stemming from the 1940’s and 1950’s working-class food ethos of his childhood, Carver privileges home cooking over restaurant food, meals prepared at a character’s own home over meals eaten at another’s. At the top of this “food chain” are the meals cooked by Mrs. Webster at the Carlyle’s in “Fever” and the dinner eaten at the narrator’s home in “Cathedral.” Not only the dinners left warm in the oven, but also the juice and care distributed to the feverish Carlyle leave him ready to accept Eileen’s absence and to take care of his children; the wife’s big meal in “Cathedral,” of course, precedes the transcendent moment experienced with Robert by the narrator, which may presumably carry over to and ameliorate his shaky relationship with his wife. Consider that a large proportion of the story's action takes place in the kitchen, at least until Carlyle gets a fever.

The meals eaten at Bud and Olla’s house, in “Feathers,” and Chef’s house are also associated with considerably happier times. But the fact that they are not eaten at the narrators’ own homes may be linked to the more definitely transient character of the gratifying interpersonal bonds enjoyed by the narrators and their spouses. The meal at Bud and Olla’s marks an end to the first couple’s happy life, while the second couple’s domestic tranquility lasts only until they learn they will have to vacate the premises.

At one rung lower than this, I would like to pair Frank Martin’s place from “Where I’m Calling From” and The Pantry Bakery in “A Small, Good Thing,” which straddle the line between home and business. Frank Martin’s facility offers some shared meals and community, but it is a home where you pay by the week. The Pantry Bakery, conversely, is primarily a business, one that evidently takes a great deal of time and effort to keep running, but the baker offers his wares for free and tries to make the Weisses comfortable. And in a way, the bakery is his home, where his heart is. For what it’s worth, I found the very name “The Pantry Bakery” to have a homey, cozy, everyday ring to it -- the store is not named after the baker, which might also make it seem informal and personable, if in a more egoistic, self-aggrandizing way, nor does the name strongly connote the special celebrations for which thousands of cakes have been made.

Despite these domesticating factors, the mixed tone of both these home-cum-businesses still applies. The alcoholic narrator and the Weisses are in these two places not because they want to, but because they have been driven there by despair and anger. At the end of their respective stories, the alcoholic may be ready to call his wife and girlfriend and to start the new year off right, and the Weisses may have taken the edge off their initial shock, but none of them have yet had to deal with, much less defeat, the long-term pressures of addiction or grief and loss. They are, I think, at a further remove from lasting hope than Carlyle, whose wife has only left him, not died, and is actually quite well-disposed towards her estranged husband.

Further still is the would-be adulterer who recounts the events of "Vitamins." His girlfriend cursing him and having a nightmare about vitamins, his date with Donna aborted, the narrator drinks scotch in the bathroom as "Things kept falling" (109). He has recently arrived from the Off-Broadway, a "spade place in a spade neighborhood" whose crowd he has been trying to fit in with for some time now. While he thinks he fits in well enough, his attention to "spades" and "spade" things emphasizes his whiteness, his otherness, which in turn anticipates Nelson's disturbing and hostile behavior and Donna's own rather alienating admission that she probably would have fellated Nelson for money. His attempts to transform the bar & grill into a familiar home-away-from-home are further undermined by the fact that he cannot take Donna to his actual home. But who knows? Had he and Donna stayed in the front room of the Off-Broadway, where people concentrate on eating instead of drinking, Carver's ethos of the culinary might have culminated in something other than disillusionment, degradation and deterioration.

Any place to eat outside the home has unfavorable resonances in Cathedral, especially if it has a liquor license. At the steakhouse in "Where I'm Calling From," the alcoholic narrator eats nothing but soup and a hot roll, but kills off a bottle of wine in the process. His next full meal mentioned is a bucket of take-out chicken, which he and his girlfriend eschew for the champagne, ensuring that their alcoholic tendencies are reinforced one last time before they arrive at Frank Martin's. Roxy offers to take J.P. into town for lunch, but he wisely recognizes the temptations implicit in restaurants and decides to stay at Frank Martin's. The Chinese takeout place in "Careful" is associated with the other occasion Lloyd's ear was plugged up, leaving him isolated from communication and community, as well as recalling his current blockage, which is exacerbated by his alcoholism and his separation from his wife. Betty Holits from "The Bridle" pulls double shifts at an Italian restaurant, reminding the reader of the Holits' continuing financial hardships and, possibly, how poorly food-service workers are generally paid. Finally, at the bottom of the sanctified food-space totem pole, eating fast food from hamburger joints occurs, oddly enough, alongside outright violence and family tragedy, as seen in "A Small, Good Thing" (Franklin's stabbing death) and "The Bridle" (Holits' lobotomizing fall).

If the home and the restaurant function as sanctified and desanctified spaces, then cooks would, at least ostensibly, be the sanctifiers, the mediators of the sacred. This title most saliently belongs to such purveyors of stopgap miracles as Mrs. Webster, whose name suggests one who weaves things together (or, if the reader prefers a darker interpretation, one who ensnares her employer and his children in a cocoon of dependency, then threatens to desert them once they have grown to rely on her meals and assistance). Olla, whose own name signifies a cooking pot, is another cook who contributes to a protagonist's sense of well-being. While no amount of ham and sweet potatoes in the world can ensure the lasting happiness of a marriage, the meal Fran and her husband share with Olla and Bud marks a memory of paradise in the narrator's life (although Fran, who is shown to have a somewhat pricklier sensibility, associates this Edenic moment with the subsequent (obligatory?) Fall). We might also be justified in placing Inez, Lloyd's wife in "Careful," among the ranks of the gastronomic clergy; Lloyd sees her at his stove looking as though she were cooking, "heating something in a little pan" (119), after which she successfully cleans out his ear canal so that he can communicate with and be reached by others, at least in an acoustic sense.

Several cooks in Cathedral are not entirely benevolent figures; Carver indicates this group by tacitly or explicitly indicating that they do not eat the food they cook. Chef of "Chef's House" does not visit the couple, much less eat with them, until he arrives to announce they'll have to leave. He functions more as a god (sacred beef?) than a minister/chef: the Chef giveth Wes a home base and a chance at rebuilding his marriage, the Chef taketh away. As a recovering alcoholic, Chef would and does feel bad about kicking Wes out, but his eviction nevertheless endangers the tentative connection between Wes and his wife. The baker in "A Small, Good Thing" reverses Chef's order of enabling and disabling. He first causes the Weisses a great deal of anguish and rage, and then provides the food and much conversation for the Weisses' back-room breakfast table. Like Chef, he does not eat with the couple. Unlike Chef, the baker does join them at the table, and he shares, rather than imposes, his sorrows and concerns. Insofar as one reads the baker as a sort of priest, Carver may be offering a minor critique of Catholic priestly celibacy here. His lack of a wife or, more specifically, of children has indeed allowed him to dedicate his life more fully to "a necessary trade . . . [i]t was better to be feeding people" (89), but at the cost of losing close connections with the same people he devotes himself to feeding and serving. His obsession with closing the financial transaction, the economic connection he has with Anne, likens him to a priest who has wrongly exalted dogma, a rigid code of ritual connections, over meaningful, more immediate human contact. The choice of identities he has had to make, between baker-as-community-provider (both providing a sense of community and providing necessary services and goods for a larger, geographically-determined community) and baker-as-hard-businessman, complicates his comment “I’m just a baker” (87).

Irving “Spuds” Cobb, the cook who appears in “The Bridle,” is another culinary minister whose relationship to his eaters is tentative or ambivalent. Spuds works for Denny’s, a restaurant chain whose buildings are so constructed as to almost completely conceal and separate those making the food from those eating it. As a Denny’s worker, Spuds is not even in a position to entertain the same moral dilemma faced by the baker; his role as a cog in this late-capitalist institution is to help guarantee that the corporation’s products continue to reach its millions of faceless, interchangeable customers. When the other members of the apartment complex are persuading Holits to leap off the roof of the cabana, Carver specifically identifies Spuds as the speaker of one of the coercive comments, the only member of the group so singled out. His very appearance, as dark, dry and wrinkled as beef jerky, recalls the parched environment of Arizona, which finally leaves the Holits family’s dreams of a new beginning and a decent life as barren as the apartment manager’s prayer plant

The semiotics of the world of vitamins invert the schema of the sacramental dinner table, and drain the hopes out of both provider and consumer. No one prepares them for consumption (no minister), they are often eaten on the go (no sacred space), and as we see in Carver’s story, no one except for Patti wants to buy and eat them in the first place. The traveling salesgirls of “Vitamins” are cooks without kitchens, pastors without sheep. Girls come and girls go, as abundant, disposable and devalued a commodity as the vitamins themselves. By the end of the story, Patti is still managing to stay in the business, but the unlikelihood of continued success (if she had any in the first place) and her lover’s date with Donna imply that Patti is, ultimately, as valueless and easily replaceable as any of the other women.

The vitamins themselves have questionable nutritive value -- Patti wonders if they are somehow affecting her skin and whether a person might overdose on them -- but I don’t know if this indicates that Raymond Carver distrusted vitamins per se. Still, as seen with the hierarchy of sanctified spaces in the last section, Carver seems to draw upon some type of blue-collar American conventional wisdom in associating certain types of food with fellowship and moral fiber (maybe that’s too strong a phrase) or with alcoholism and weakness. Ideally, a “meat and potatoes” diet -- meat, fish, starches, and breads as main courses; vegetables as side dishes; minimal or moderate portions of desert -- offers substance and nutrition for substantial, dynamic people who eat as a group.

As stated before, the two biggest meals in Cathedral are closely affiliated with Paradise and a spiritual dimension that his characters do not tend to reach; these meals clearly center around meat and potatoes. The heart of Olla’s cooking consists of baked ham, sweet potatoes, and mashed potatoes, while the wife in "Cathedral" heaps plates with cube steak, scalloped potatoes, and green beans. The good times last until the end of the trout in “Chef’s House,” while Sandy’s husband in “Preservation” faces both his own fate and the fates of his fish sticks and Steak-Ums with an attitude of resignation or indifference. In “Careful,” the only non-dessert food in Lloyd’s apartment is lunch meat, a far cry from steak or Steak-Ums.

Processed lunch meat, whose original muscle fibers have been pressed and chemically treated until they have become sodden pulp, strikes me as an apt food for an alcoholic man who has made himself so ineffectual and partial that he cannot manage to clean out his ear. Especially damning is the fact that Lloyd doesn’t even attempt to eat the meat, but sticks to champagne and crumb donuts. The narrator of “Where I’m Calling From,” at least until after he has listened to J. P.’s story and told the reader his own, also has no appetite for anything requiring too much effort to pick apart and digest. The tone of the story becomes a bit more encouraging once the reader compares the narrator’s meager meal at the steakhouse with his appetite for the steak and baked potato (note both menus) served at Frank Martin’s.

Carver also plays with the simple equation of meat with personal strength, sustenance, and willingness to maintain one’s relationships with others. What “tore it” for the indignant woman in “The Train,” alienating her from whoever the man and she had been spending time with, was the image of “‘Kentucky Fried Chicken at the North Pole! Colonel Sanders in a parka and boots’” (152). Whoever would place a restaurant chain familiar to her in such a foreign locale is more than suspect -- “If I never see that outfit [alias “that tribe”] again, it’ll be too soon” (151). The fried squid in “The Compartment” also marks a foreign culture, one of many that Myers doers not belong to and cannot communicate with.

Particularly interesting is the conflation of food and genitals in “Vitamins.” In the middle of the bar & grill, Nelson proposes that Donna do to him what he claims Patti is doing to another man somewhere else -- “‘You know she got her mouth on somebody’s hammer right this minute while he here with his hand up your skirt” (105) -- in effect, that she “eat” him. Another way to read this paragraph is that he only wants her to “French” him, reversing the roles of fellatio so that he would be taking her protrusion (her tongue) into his mouth, as if he were eating her. Bearing in mind that Donna plans to quit selling vitamins because “ . . . I have to eat,” and that the veteran offers her two hundred dollars to fellate or tongue-kiss him, the story’s bleakness comes through quite clearly when one contemplates that dining à la Nelson would satisfy Donna’s nutritional needs much better than vitamins have.

Nelson also threatens to harm Donna and the narrator, should Donna let the narrator put his face in her “sweets” (107). When Nelson thus combines “sweets” and adulterous, illicit liaisons, he touches upon Carver’s general attitude toward desserts and sweet things: they are fine in moderation, or if they come as a last-priority item at the end of a meal (perhaps to “sweeten” the return to individuality from the communality of the dinner table?), but excessive consumption marks a dangerous self-indulgence or, as in “Vitamins,” a betrayal or breach of a covenant between members of the group.

The gingerbread cookies collectively made by Mrs. Webster and the children in “Fever” seem innocuous enough, perhaps because the three are baking them, not eating them. And in “A Small, Good Thing,” Anne eats only three of the sweet rolls -- a fair amount, but not a great amount for someone who hasn’t eaten anything in several days. Indeed, the fact that J.P. and the narrator of “Where I’m Calling From” have only two pieces of cake might indicate that they have mastered some of their cravings for bad things that taste good going down; the narrator even has the self-control to wrap up one piece for later. At the other extreme, Olla’s rhubarb pie is unnecessary because of the huge meal that preceded it, and triggers memories of nausea and past overindulgence in her guest. The strawberry pie in “Cathedral” recalls both the rhubarb pie and the strawberry ice cream of “Feathers”; it largely contributes to the couple and Robert’s sitting “as if stunned” (218, 220) and to the wife’s falling asleep, which prevents her from sharing the final sublime moment with Robert and the narrator.

For a recovering alcoholic like Carver, perhaps the most telling criticism of excess sugar is that he tends to couple sweetness and alcohol. Overindulgence in either substance is shown to lead to stupefaction, feelings of alienation and/or other breakdowns in community; I guess it’s a good thing that the television program on cathedrals didn’t air earlier in the night, before the men had finished digesting. After Sandy’s husband has lost his job in “Preservation,” just before he takes to the couch, he brings home a box of chocolates and a bottle of bourbon. The two-timing scotch-drinker in “Vitamins” does not say what the people in the front room of the Off-Broadway were eating as they “worked over plates of food” (101), but he goes into some detail in describing the house drink, RC Colas (sweet) with a shooter of whiskey. He also notes that a sugar donut lay on the pillow beside him when he woke up after the party, “still drunk and [unable to] figure anything out” (96). In “The Bridle,” as Spuds shows films of his dead first wife to Harley and the narrator, giving them some pause for thought, if not making them outright uncomfortable, Spuds’ new wife continually pours more sweet drinks.

And the most commonly identified type of alcohol in Cathedral is champagne, which is also, incidentally, an alcoholic beverage with one of the highest sugar contents. Lloyd washes down his crumb doughnuts with champagne as he tries to normalize every step downward he takes. The narrator of “Where I’m Calling From” drinks champagne on the way to Frank Martin’s, and the man who is in denial about his alcoholism (yet so against solid food that he distrusts ice in his drink!) calls out for some champagne, instead of a piece of cake, with which to celebrate the New Year. Yet champagne celebrates nothing in Cathedral so much as the lack of anything worth celebrating; furthermore, as a drink traditionally associated with special occasions and the blitheness of the upper-class, it would seem antithetical to the hard-won, impermanent and partial moments of grace that Carver scatters among his portraits of everyday failure.

Many of Raymond Carver’s characters live alone, drink alone, and die alone, often managing to wash away a meaningful interpersonal bridge or two behind them. They sit indoors, insulating themselves from a menacing outside world, or they run away from home to escape suffocation. His style mimics their linguistic poverty and spiritual retardation. But sometimes they manage to eat together, an act that evaluates (and in a way establishes) the possibility that they will be able to temporarily reconnect with something or someone larger than themselves. And even if the group that forms at the dinner table dissolves back into limited individuals more quickly than anticipated, one may regain an appetite for life and a willingness to confront life’s difficulties at the same time one is regaining an appetite for one’s meals.

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