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Almost without exception, critics endorse the idea that Raymond Carver's Cathedral marks a turn toward affirmation in the context of his career. That the stories themselves strongly suggest otherwise shows the degree to which Carver studies is enthralled by a redemptive career story propagated in part by Carver himself. That narrative and its popularity derive from the poverty of the career imaginary, which favors a developmental logic unlikely to do justice to the complex relations between texts. Reading Cathedral against the grain of the critical consensus shows how Cathedral revisits the bleak perspective of his earlier work and enables Carver to serve as an example of the need to enhance our understanding of modern literary careers.
Keywords: Raymond Carver / modern career / Cathedral / surface reading / development
"It has been said, repeatedly," writes Carol Sklenicka in Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life, "that the stories in Cathedral are fuller and more generous than Carver's previous work" (408). She adds a qualification: this "belief" is founded on the difference between the "[Gordon] Lish-edited stories" in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and those in Cathedral, whereas "a truer reckoning may be made" by comparing the earlier stories before they were cut by Lish with the later ones (408). But even using the uncut stories for the comparison, Sklenicka repeats yet again the claim that Cathedral is "fuller and more generous" still and thus marks a critical juncture for Carver: it is a "book of richer perspective and more complex humor than the previous one," and it "lacks the raw pain and meanness and nihilism" of earlier stories (408). Having framed the comparison to weaken the impression of progress, Sklenicka finds progress in the difference between the books anyway: the latter marks a move "beyond Hopelessville," as William L. Stull influentially put it (1).
Sklenicka's procedure suggests the difficulty of resisting the developmental imperative intrinsic to the conventional career. Though the twinned ideas of Carver's artistic growth and affirmative turn have sometimes been put in question, they have remained entrenched as commonplaces for Carver critics since they first emerged in the mid-1980s.1 No matter how skeptically monitored, career makes its way back into the discussion time and again.2
In narrating Carver's development...