https://www.bu.edu/writingprogram/files/2015/08/Simpson-I7.pdf

Sara Kornfeld Simpson “Alcohol, Emotion, and Tension in Raymond Carver’s Fiction”(excerpt)

            In “The Art of Evasion,” Leon Edel complains that Ernest Hemingway’s fiction evades emotion by featuring superficial characters who drink: “In Hemingway’s novels people order drinks—they are always ordering drinks—then they drink, then they order some more . . . it is a world of superficial action and almost wholly without reflection” (Edel 170). If Edel fails to recognize the deep emotional tension in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” where one of the characters reflects critically, “that’s all we do isn’t it—look at things and try new drinks” (211), then one can only imagine the qualms he would have with Raymond Carver’s stories. As Charles May notes in “‘Do You See What I’m Saying?’: The Inadequacy of Explanation and the Uses of Story in the Short Fiction of Raymond Carver,” literary “critics often complain that there is no depth in Carver, that his stories are all surface detail” (49). A self-avowed “fan of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories” (“Fires” 19), Carver also saturates his stories with alcohol; his characters often consume inordinate amounts of alcohol and generally struggle with emotional expression. Do Carver’s inebriated and/or alcoholic characters drink to evade emotional connections? Is his fictional world superficial and devoid of tension? 

            Carver’s critical essays suggest a radically alternative approach to these issues. In “On Writing,” Carver insists that in a short story, “what creates tension . . . is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it’s also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but some- times broken and unsettled) surface of things” (17) suggests that critics who respond solely to the characters’ consumption of alcohol to blunt or evade emotion on the “surface of things” miss much of the emotional tension created or revealed by alcohol underneath the “visible action” of the story. In the same essay, Carver notes, “I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories . . . ere has to be tension, a sense that something is imminent” (17). is essay will explore the many levels on which alcohol functions to enhance emotional expression and to create tension, a “sense of menace,” in four of Carver’s short stories. 

….

            “Cathedral” presents alcohol not as a destructive force, but as a constructive one, a means to build emotional connections between strangers, a way of liberating the mind and expanding consciousness. Alcohol functions in a positive capacity in this story, releasing tension, liberating the narrator, allowing him to see and connect in a way he is only open to do because he is stoned. The story opens with tension at its peak, with the narrator in his most jealous and closed-minded state. A friend of his wife, a man she has a close emotional connection with, a blind man, is coming to visit. The wife used to read to the blind man, and after she left, she kept in close contact, constantly sending and receiving tapes on which they would tell each other every detail about their lives. The narrator is bothered by their closeness, that “they’d become good friends, my wife and the blind man,” (210), irritated when his wife dismisses his jealousy with the retort, “you don’t have any friends” (212). 

            As the story progresses, drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana release this tightly strung man’s inhibitions, facilitate male bonding, and finally expand and deepen his narrow, superficial vision. From the start, alcohol is introduced in a positive light, called a “pastime,” and received good-naturedly, even jokingly, by the blind man. Although the narrator begins drinking to drown out his jealousy of the emotional connection between his wife and the blind man, the end result of his intoxication, social lubrication, allows the man to reach an epiphany. Because his wife is smaller, she promptly falls asleep under the influence of the alcohol and drugs they all consume together, and neither man wakes her. When she no longer speaks, the source of tension between the two men is relieved and they are able to begin bonding. As the narrator drinks, he begins to appreciate the company of the blind man, and gradually realizes the emotional emptiness of his own life: “every night I smoked dope and stayed up as long as I could before I fell asleep. My wife and I hardly ever went to bed at the same time” (222). Drinking and bonding with the blind man allow the narrator to confront his own loneliness and emotional evasions, and his mind and life start to open to new possibilities. 

            Gradually, guided by the blind man’s more expansive vision, the narrator begins thinking beyond the confines of his own narrow reality. As they “watch” a television program about cathedrals together, he suddenly remarks to the blind man, “something has occurred to me. Do you have any idea what a cathedral is?” (223). Although he describes the physical appearance of cathedrals, the narrator cannot capture their spiritual essence and begins to realize the limits of his perfectly healthy vision. Under the liberating influence of alcohol and drugs, he responds positively to the blind man’s suggestion that they draw a cathedral together, and allows himself to experience a physical and emotional connection that would have disgusted his sober self: “His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now” (228). This intimacy of hand touching hand, one man’s fingers riding another’s, recalls and transforms his vision of the blind man’s hand touching his wife’s face. Facing his deepest fear of real intimacy, the narrator inhabits and experiences the other man’s blindness; he closes his eyes, and then does not want to open them again, because he “didn’t feel like [he] was inside anything” (228). He feels completely free, no longer possessed by his jealousy, tension, or fear. The alcohol endows him with a liberating vulnerability he would never have been brave enough to reach were he not intoxicated. Although this story, too, ends with darkness, it is created by the narrator closing his eyes in an act of communion; the darkness signifies not unresolved tension or emotional evasion, but connection and revelation. The narrator has achieved a profound transformation of vision while under the influence of alcohol. 

Works Cited 

Carver, Raymond. Cathedral. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1983. Print. 

--- “Fires.”Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1983. 19–30. Print.

--- “On Writing.” Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories. Santa Barbara: Capra, 1983. 13–18. Print. 

--- “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. 137–54. Print. 

Edel, Leon, and Robert P. Weeks, Ed. “The Art of Evasion.” Hemingway: A Collection of Critical Essays. Eaglewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1963. 169–171. Print. 

Hemingway, Ernest. The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Edition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987. Print. 

May, Charles E. “‘Do You See What I’m Saying?’: The Inadequacy of Explanation and the Uses of Story in the Short Fiction of Raymond Carver.” The Yearbook of English Studies (2001): 39–49. Print. 

McCaffery, Larry, Sinda Gregory, and Raymond Carver. “An Interview with Raymond Carver.” Mississippi Review (1985): 62–82. Print.