The Dignity of the Unremarkable
Carver's people do not have insights. They do not undergo epiphanies in any conventional literary sense. They sit at kitchen tables, drink, argue about small things that are really about large things, and the stories end without resolution because the lives they describe do not resolve. A reader trained on fiction that rewards attention with meaning – a twist, a revelation, a changed life – can find Carver's stories frustratingly flat. Nothing happens. And yet something does happen: the reader has spent twenty minutes paying the kind of close attention to an unremarkable person's unremarkable life that almost nothing else in that person's actual life would prompt anyone to pay.
This act of attention is not nothing. It is, in fact, close to the center of what it means to treat a person as made in the image of God: to take seriously that this particular life, with its failures and its small kindnesses and its unresolved griefs, matters – not because it is exceptional, but because it is a human life, and human lives are the kind of thing that matters absolutely. Carver's spare style refuses to tell the reader this. It simply enacts it, story after story, until the pattern becomes impossible to miss.
What Cathedral Reveals
The title story of Cathedral (1983) follows a man whose wife's blind friend comes to visit – a visit the narrator dreads and resents. The story's climax is almost absurdly modest: the narrator and the blind man, both a little drunk, end up drawing a cathedral together on a piece of paper, the blind man's hand resting on the narrator's as they draw, the narrator closing his eyes to feel what it might be like to see this way. Nothing is resolved. The narrator's resentments are not explained away. But something has happened between two people who have no reason to understand each other, and the story ends with the narrator's eyes closed, still drawing, not wanting to stop.
This is as close as Carver's fiction comes to grace, and it is characteristic that it arrives through the body – a hand on a hand, eyes closed, a shared and pointless act – rather than through words or insight. Carver's people are generally bad at words. What connection occurs between them occurs despite their inarticulacy, not because of any eloquence, which is itself a kind of testimony: that whatever dignity and connection these people are capable of does not depend on their ability to name or explain it.
The Seed of the Woman
The doctrine of the image of God does not say that human dignity is a property visible only in people who have achieved something, said something profound, or transformed their circumstances. It says dignity is constitutive – a fact about what a person is, prior to and independent of what they do with their life. Carver's fiction, read against this doctrine, is a sustained demonstration of exactly this claim, made by a writer who by his own account did not think in theological terms at all. He simply could not stop looking at people the culture had stopped looking at, and his looking, rendered with total honesty about their failures, never once implies that those failures are the last word about who they are.
Genesis 3:15 promises a redemption that reaches into the ordinary – into kitchens, into failing marriages, into the lives of people whose stories will never be told by anyone with power or platform. Carver's fiction does not know about this promise. But it insists, story after story, that these lives are the kind of thing a promise like that would have to be about, if it is to mean anything at all.