Return to Mercer Street 2003 Table of Contents

by Evan O’Connell

Raymond Carver is glaring from the other side of the table, one beefy arm dangling on a chair, the other planted firmly in front of him. His eyes are white, ethereally white, and his hair is a salt and pepper gray. He looks like someone who buys rounds of drinks for everyone at a bar downtown, or, as one critic noted, maybe he’s your son’s little league coach. He is tough but jowly, going slightly soft, like a man who had a hair-trigger temper once but has worked all these years to overcome it.

Flannery O’Connor, on the other hand, is a Sunday school teacher: bookish, awkward in a necklace, looking much older than 39. She is smiling crookedly, furtively, smiling away from us. At church socials, she would be a fixture, a great conversationalist, or possibly the woman that holds everything together, flitting from table to table, cooing in a gentle Georgia lilt.

You might see Carver at the hardware store, or O’Connor picking through the stacks at the library. You might spy Carver raking his lawn on Sundays; O’Connor would be trying to settle a group of eight-year olds in a church basement with colorful stories of Noah and Moses. They seem like people I know, people I have seen around town, people I wave to on Sunday mornings. Yet for all their vigor, for all their presence, their days are numbered. I know that these are snapshots of people who are going to die. In a few years, their vivacity will be undercut by mortality, their photographic presence instead marked with the great void of absence.

The later pictures show a Carver who is puffy, bald, with jowls dropping to the floor, paying for all those nights at the bar and all those cigarettes, a victim of intensive radiation treatment. O’Connor deteriorated in the opposite direction, not bloating but shrinking: the sinews in her neck jut out like those of a strange, scraggly bird, her soulful eyes bulge, and her body is rigid with lupus. In the final days, she had her God and her peacock farm in backwoods Appalachia. He had his friends, his writer’s reputation, his temporal achievements. Their intensive creative lives visible across their faces in the early photographs have been replaced by tranquility, the comforting promise of death, and a final absolution.

Carver was asked by an interviewer, near the end, “Are you religious?” He replied, “No, but I have to believe in miracles and the possibility of resurrection.” Flannery O’Connor, on the other hand, was always asserting her Catholicism and its orthodoxy, writing in a letter before her death, “I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness.” For O’Connor, “the modern consciousness” meant secularism, applying reason and elasticity to inflexible religious dogma. She used her life to inform her faith, and not the other way around. For Carver, the pervasive “modern consciousness” meant admitting his own spirituality, scaled-back, downplayed, the religion of a non-believer now facing death. O’Connor was a connected Catholic, not isolated by her beliefs, but enhanced by them, while Carver was a connected atheist, bolstered by a pragmatic “possibility of resurrection.” Both were strong in the face of religion, and their religions were strong in the face of their imminent death. Only while dying did these writers fully grasp the elusive modern consciousness, an oscillating consciousness, at the same time secular and spiritual, promising both temporal fulfillment and eternal, religious rebirth.

Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation,” one of her last stories, is “peculiarly possessed” of both religiousness and an overwhelming secularity. Mrs. Turpin, stout, middle-aged, and churchgoing, sits in a doctor’s office. She hastily judges everyone around her in the room: the fat girl with the ugly face, purpled by acne, the white trashy woman, wrinkled and dirty, her piggy little son, the ubiquitous nigger, despised by all. “I want to reduce!” Mrs. Turpin cackles to the nurses, laughing through her judgments, covering up her hatred. I am better than all these people, she seems to say, my life is better than their lives will ever be. Not ugly, not trashy, and certainly not a nigger, Mrs. Turpin is happy with her life here on earth; she thanks Jesus for his generosity in creating her, a perfect person, at least in her own narrow self-image. The ugly girl sees through Turpin’s façade. “Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog,” the girl screams as she lurches across the waiting room. Her fingers dig into Turpin’s fat neck, and they wrestle to the floor. Turpin is a hog, fattened on her own self-importance, bloated by her suppressed disdain for humanity. In her ferocity, the girl exposes Mrs. Turpin at her core: judgmental, misguided, immoral, and utterly godless.

Later, Turpin is back on her plantation, welted, bruised, and deflated. She is watering the hogs when she erupts in anger. A stream of hard water hits the old sow in the eye and Turpin aims directly at her, screaming to no one in particular, “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” Her life on earth is a sham, a lie, a put-on; her faith in God is equally baseless. How can a person evil in a secular life still be promised salvation and absolution? How can the ugly soul of a warthog be the same soul that is committed to a moral, religious life? Finally, how can the person unfairly judging in this life be judged in another?

O’Connor shows us that religion alone is not enough for salvation. Instead, the application of religion, a carrying over of belief into the secular realm, represents the unadulterated spirituality of a true believer. Whereas an earlier O’Connor protagonist might have been saved if she merely atoned for her earthly sins, Mrs. Turpin will never be absolved. She is stuck forever in limbo: a judgmental warthog on earth, and an irreligious hypocrite in Heaven.

The story “Cathedral” shows a mature Raymond Carver at work, a Raymond Carver beginning to understand “miracles and the possibility of resurrection.” Where O’Connor’s last stories revealed a hardnosed rejection of blind faith, Carver’s are softer, gentler, than his earlier works. His characters are given a glimmer of hope, the potential to transcend their squalid lives and find something more meaningful and sacred in spirituality. In “Cathedral,” a husband, blue collar, inarticulate, stubborn, is opposed to his wife’s old friend, a blind man, coming to visit. He has never met a blind man before; for someone already mired in an inability to communicate, how would the husband connect with someone who couldn’t see him? When the blind man arrives, the husband’s apprehensions are running full throttle. There is small talk, some painful stabs at reaching out, at connecting, and then the two are left to watch TV. There is a program on cathedrals, and the blind man, matter-of-factly, asks what a cathedral is; he has never seen one, felt one, experienced one. The husband’s attempts at expression are excruciating. The blind man has a suggestion.

Robert, the husband, retrieves some paper and a pen. At the blind man’s urging, he begins to draw, frantically, expressively, begins to draw a cathedral. The blind man’s hands trace the spires, the ink of the gargoyles, the pressed-in pews and the congregation, dancing over the sketched cathedral in relief: “His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now.” Robert, eyes clenched shut, mind opened wide, feels displacement, ascension: “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. ‘It’s really something,’ I said.” Carver’s protagonist, once close-minded, even atheistic, experiences “something” that is beyond himself, something spiritual. The cathedral is not just the vehicle through which the husband finally connects to his secular world and finally discovers communication. It is also the agent of absolution for him; it represents his newfound spirituality, a faith in a church that promotes kinship, connectedness, and the possibility of resurrection for a previously lost soul.

It would be a mistake to assume that all of Raymond Carver’s later work is governed by religious principles, just as we cannot assume that Flannery O’Connor abandoned her Faith to write desperate characters trapped in godless situations. However, both authors, nearing death, moved closer to understanding their lives in a more spiritualized framework. Gone was the Ray with the penetrating eyes, forearms bared, ready for a friendly fistfight, or a couple of quick whiskey shots. Also gone was the severe Flannery, hair pulled back, ill-fitting pearls jangling around a taut neck. Instead, the photographs show teddy bear Ray. His eyes are often closed, in ecstasy, and he wears a floppy wig to cover his radiation baldness. Flannery is shot in soft focus, and she is whittled down to the bare essentials of a skeleton. She too smiles more completely, more roundly. It’s as if before they died, the spiritual ground they discovered, malleable, accepting, open to shifting interpretations, was their greatest comfort.

Matthew Goulish tells us to shy away from negativity when reading texts, to stop harping on imperfections, and to consider instead the work’s moments of fascination, its relative perfections. Cautioning, he writes, “Whatever we fix our attention on seems to multiply before our eyes. If we look for problems, we will find them everywhere. Out of concern for ourselves and our psychic well-being, let us look instead for the aspects of wonder.” For too long, I was working against Goulish, using Carver and O’Connor to back up my mean-spirited suspicions about the inaccuracies, the hypocritical oscillations, of religion. I was locked in a one-man battle of polemic, and, looking for problems in the institution that I wanted desperately to debase, I found them everywhere.

Prior to reading stories like “Revelation” and “Cathedral,” I was using, in fact exploiting, O’Connor and Carver for a clean-cut dichotomy. Carver, the atheist, was my pal: Bleak in describing religion, cynical in promising absolution, he was, I thought, a reflection on me. I looked at O’Connor more disdainfully: she was the paradigm of flowery Catholic ceremony and dogma that I never understood. I was forcing both authors into servile roles where they didn’t belong. I reconsidered their photographs, both sets: young and old, closed and open, narrow and free. I was doing these authors, these towering short story geniuses, these influential 20th century minds, a great disservice. I couldn’t pigeonhole them any longer.

Many critics find that Carver’s early work is too bleak, too simple, because he does not give his characters the promise of absolution or resurrection. Critics have also panned Flannery O’Connor’s early stories for their prototypical Catholic hang-ups. In both cases, the critics, whom Goulish might have been answering, wanted more out of Carver and O’Connor. They, like me, wanted those aspects of wonder, resurrections, mutable religiousness, and evolving spiritualities. They wanted to see the authors gravitate toward a spiritual middle ground, where complexity of character would unfold and thematics, unclouded by stratifying, narrowing religious beliefs, would begin to emerge.

Luckily for us, Carver and O’Connor did not suppress their keen observational skills, their acid wits concerning 20th century American society, when, later in life, they suppressed their fervent religious beliefs. Instead, their social critique, particularly of the family structure and its dissolution in the face of religion, grew stronger. O’Connor, with a secularized vantage point, now looked at the family in terms of interpersonal dynamics and human, not spiritual, relationships. Carver, on the other hand, began to examine the family through the lens of religion: families with a blind, unwavering faith in God were often met with bleak ends, while those with a liberated religiousness, like the husband in “Cathedral,” were promised absolution. The scrutiny of the family structure is of paramount importance to both; in their later works, it is shown as a strained institution, forced to a breaking point, pushed to complete implosion.

Children hate their parents, spouses can’t communicate, dinners disintegrate into screaming matches, and behind closed doors, families fight with each other as inarticulately as if they were mute. The characters are truly children of discord, symptoms of a mechanical, disengaged age, without the comforts of home, without familial love, and without a reliable support system. In this milieu, human suffering is primarily a domestic suffering; the inability to connect comes from the fragmented, dissolved American family. And, as Nietzsche warned, religion, and religious participation, becomes an outgrowth of social fragmentation. It is the creation of the sufferers. In 20th century America, the America of Carver and O’Connor, religion promises a sort of surrogate family, a domestic opiate, for the disconnected masses. Robert D. Putnam, a sociologist studying the collapse of American community, notes in Bowling Alone, “Measured by the yardstick of personal beliefs, Americans’ religious commitment has been reasonably stable over the last half century—certainly much more so than one might assume from some public commentary about the secularization of American life. Virtually all Americans say they believe in God, and three out of four say they believe in immortality. There is no evidence that these beliefs have wavered over the last half century.” If anything, the unwavering commitment to religious beliefs, to the surrogate community of religion, has replaced a commitment to family.

In Flannery O’Connor’s “Greenleaf,” Mrs. May, an embittered old spinster, hates the wife of a nearby sharecropping family, the Greenleafs, for being too engaged in religion to tend her familial duties. O’Connor writes, “Mrs. May winced. She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom.” There is, of course, a distinct delineation: the bedroom, the symbol of domesticity and traditional family values, is placed in counterpoint to the freewheeling, ramshackle, wild nature of the Southern Pentecostal Church. When Mrs. May finds Mrs. Greenleaf writhing on the ground in the woods, overcome with frothed religious ecstasy, pleading, “Jesus, stab me in the heart!” Mrs. May is spiteful: “Mrs. May felt as furious and helpless as if she had been insulted by a child. ‘Jesus,’ she said, drawing herself back, ‘would be ashamed of you. He would tell you to get up from there this instant and go wash your children’s clothes!’” In O’Connor’s world, the world of a Catholic believer newly cynical, Mrs. Greenleaf represents the fragmentation of the American family vis a vis an overwhelming reliance on religion. Instead of tending to her domestic sphere, her stereotypical and gendered role as mother and caregiver, Mrs. Greenleaf tends to her own piety. According to O’Connor, it is selfishness then, the cardinal sin of self-absorption and religious vanity, that is breaking up the community of family.

In her last novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf wrote, “The love…that they should give to flesh and blood they give to the church.” Later, she describes a sibling relationship as nothingness, a void of disconnect, a complex miscommunication: “…brother and sister, flesh and blood was not a barrier, but a mist. Nothing changed in their affection; no argument; no fact; no truth. What she saw he didn’t; what he saw she didn’t—and so on, ad infinitum.” Displaced love in Woolf’s family leads to miscommunication and misinterpretation. She also suggests, subtly, that as long as religion is prized over “flesh and blood,” then familial fragmentation will occur “ad infinitum.”

Raymond Carver’s “The Student’s Wife” encapsulates his approach to blind faith, and its potent role in collapsing the American family. In Carver’s bleak scenarios, an unflinching faith in God is hollow faith; to Carver, a spirituality with no inherent questions, no complications, is all artifice, no substance. A husband and wife lie in bed together. The wife is bursting with want to communicate. The husband rolls over and tries to sleep. “…‘You’re asleep,’ she said. ‘I’m not,’ he said.’ ‘I can’t think of anything else. You go now. Tell me what you’d like.’ ‘I don’t know. Lots of things,’ he mumbled. ‘Well, tell me. We’re just talking, aren’t we?’ ‘I wish you’d leave me alone, Nan.’ He turned over to his side of the bed again and let his arm rest off the edge.” The notion of “just talking” is horrifying to the husband; at a loss for words, unable to carry a meaningful conversation, all he can muster is “I wish you’d leave me alone,” a proclamation of his own muteness, an assertion of his own detachment.

After more rebuffs from the husband, the wife, now desperate for any communication whatsoever, begins to pray: “She wet her lips with a sticking sound and got down on her knees. She put her hands out on the bed. ‘God,’ she said. ‘God, will you help us, God?’ she said.” In a time of need, when her husband, that pillar of family and domesticity, cannot provide support, her eyes turn skyward. In effect, her faith in God manifests itself at a time when she has faith in nothing else. Her relationship with Him, her “profound” spiritual connection, is founded on nothing but her own despair and helplessness. Blind faith, followed blindly, means nothing to Carver, even late in his life. For the student’s wife, there is no possibility of resurrection or redemption. Surely, her prayers will fall on deaf ears.

As Matthew Goulish once recommended, I fixed my attention on something tiny, an aspect of wonder, and it brought forth a wellspring of discovery.

I started with four photographs.

As both Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor were preparing themselves for death, as Carver’s chin muscles sagged and O’Connor’s knotted, they both moved closer toward a personal reconciliation with religion, a new self-awareness. With their illnesses creeping onward, they stayed awake and writing, commenting on the gravity and levity of final absolution, even as they faced it. In that slow, final crawl to immortality, both writers, reflecting philosophically, ruefully, found in their writing something they were too blind to see before: self-contradiction. O’Connor started to question if there even was a God; Carver finally started to believe.

Writing is an act of connection, of reaching out in the dark to the masses, of praying for acceptance, of hoping for community. If nothing else, their movements toward death helped them connect, connect with the great pantheon of writers, with their idiosyncratic spiritualities, with an American time and place, with a family. Carver spent his final days with his lover Tess, lolling under shady trees in WashingtonState, playing fetch with his dogs, growing pastier with each sleepless night and each grueling session of chemotherapy. O’Connor had her surrogate family of peacocks, huge, beautiful birds, clucking and picking around her cabin in rural Georgia while she was inside, straining a smile through inflamed glands and swollen organs. There are photographs from these days, but they are grainy, fading, hard to come by. O’Connor tossing bird seed in the blood red mud, Carver on his front porch, reading the paper to Tess, feet up on the banister. We don’t need to see their faces. We know intuitively, spiritually, that their deaths will be painless, and that they will be surrounded by family and friends when they close their sparkling eyes for the last time. We don’t even need photographs to know that.

Works Cited

Carver, Raymond. Where I’m Calling From.New York: Vintage, 1989.

Goulish, Matthew. “Criticism.” The World Through Art: The Advanced College Essay.Ed. Darlene A. Forrest, Pat C. Hoy II and Randy Martin. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002. 179-83.

Hathcock, Nelson. “‘The Possibility of Resurrection’: Re-vision in Carver’s ‘Feathers’ and ‘Cathedral.’” Studies in Short Fiction 28.1. Winter 1991. 31-9.

McMullen, Joanne Halleran. Writing Against God: Language as Message in the Literature of Flannery O’Connor.Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 1996.

O’Connor, Flannery. Everything That Rises Must Converge.New York: Farrar, 2000.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.New York: Simon, 2000.

Woolf, Virginia.Between the Acts.San Diego: Harcourt, 1970.

Return to Mercer Street 2003 Table of Contents