Failed Transcendance
I always liked his titles,” said author Richard Ford. “They often seemed arbitrary and hooked onto the story; but as titles they seem to be quirky, and affecting, and new” (Ford qtd. in Halpert 172). Richard Ford was speaking of the rambling, memorable titles of Raymond Carver’s short stories, titles such as “What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Love?” and “Where I’m Calling From,” but also parsimonious ones such as “Cathedral” and the one considered in this essay, “Feathers.” Should this title – “Feathers” — be dismissed as arbitrary or might it add to the readers’ understanding of Carver’s story? Some remarks once made by Carver in an interview suggest that the title might illuminate his story.
“ I didn’t realize in advance that the peacock image would so dominate ‘Feathers.’ The peacock just seemed like something a family who lived in the country on a small farm might have running around the house,” said Carver, at first seeming to minimize the symbolic importance of the bird and its feathers (perhaps justifying the assessment of “quirky,” “arbitrary”). However, he then reassesses to explain how the unconscious power of association can substantiate what might at first seem insignificant: “When I hit on an image [such as feathers] that seems to be working and it stands for what it is supposed to stand for (it may stand for several other things as well), that’s great” (Interview 105-106).
What Carver “hit on” and what “it stands for” will be explored in this essay, which argues that the peacock (and its feathers) offers complex and contradictory symbolism of both transcendence (going beyond the mundane and predictable)1 and of vanity or narcissism (being self-absorbed). This symbolism of peacock feathers informs, then, our understanding of the relationship between the central couple in the story, Jack and Fran, whose initial, liminal state of “waiting” could provide opportunity for a new vision of marriage, but whose immaturity and narcissism may (and ultimately does) hinder such a vision.
Feathers, birds, peacocks have mythological and symbolic implications and these are relevant to understanding Carver’s story. Birds, in psychological and mythological terms, most often symbolize transcendence – a time of transition, according to Jungian critic Joseph Henderson, in which a human being seeks not so much to connect with a social group or collective pattern but rather to liberate his/ her self from “any state of being that is too immature, too fixed or final” (146). The bird, of course, is a perfect symbol of transcendence simply because it flies, migrates, sings and is at home both on land and in the air (and as well, in some cases, in water [duck] or in fire [phoenix]), thus connecting with and at the same time escaping or transcending the boundaries of elements and mediums. According to professor of ecology Paul Shepard, who studied the symbolic importance of animals to human beings, birds predicted the future in some early pagan belief systems; birds delivered messages for the gods in Greek and Roman myths (193). In world folklore, many folk tales including the Turkish tale “The Bird of Sorrow” and the French tale “The Blue Bird” feature birds as mediators to the supernatural. In literature, Walt Whitman pays tribute to a shy hermit thrush in “When Lilac Last at the Dooryard Bloom’d,” one who has brought him a song from Death and who “receives” the poet “from deep secluded recesses [. . .] and the ghostly pines so still” (129-130). T. S. Eliot also features a messenger thrush in Four Quartets, one who urges the narrator and his companion with the words “go, go” to explore a garden of roses where “past and future” intersect in “the still point” of the “turning world” (Burnt Norton 62-70). And while the jewbird and old-man-bird of Bernard Malamud and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, respectively, are arguably not divine messengers, the full impact and humor of their characters depend on their contrast with birds from a literary tradition that casts them as noble harbingers of the gods. These avian associations inform “Feathers” in a general way, but the story stipulates a very specific bird, the peacock, whose singular beauty and its implications will be discussed in relation to the story’s main characters, Jack and Fran.
The main couple in the story – Jack and Fran – are self-involved, narcissistic, and mutually infatuated. Jack tells Fran that he is in love with her because of her beautiful, long blond hair, that he “might stop loving her if she cut it” (Cathedral 5). Fran swings her long hair “back and forth over her shoulders,” as she reacts to an unwanted dinner invitation. According to Jack, she seems to be asking, “Why do we need other people? [. . .] We have each other” (4-5). Although not newly married, the couple might be prolonging their honeymoon. They wish for vacations and cars (material items perhaps to fill a spiritual void), but not for kids. “We were waiting,” Jack, the narrator, tells us. “We thought we might keep on waiting” (5 ).
The story, then, presents an undefined couple who waits to be challenged, to expand into the wider world, to begin a new stage in marriage.2 In accordance with a collective pattern, a stage that comes a while after the honeymoon is parenthood. But parenthood does not appeal to Jack and Fran. Perhaps they are not suited to it, and their waiting, then, might need to go beyond honeymoon loafing to allow them to form their own creative way forward into the unknown. Although readers cannot perfectly envision the transcendent form their marriage could take, readers might sense that as long as Jack and Fran hold out against conventional expectations which do not suit them, individuation and spiritual growth (transcendence beyond convention) are possible, even if not probable, given the couple’s self-absorption and immaturity.
A need for individuation is apparent: Jack’s thoughts intermingle with his wife’s (or what he imagines his wife’s to be) to such an extent that he seems in great need of perceiving the world solely with his own sense and intuition: After Olla tells her story about her teeth, for example, Jack tells us, “I didn’t know what to say to this. Neither did Fran. But I knew Fran would have plenty to say about it later” (Cathedral 14). Thus, Jack and even Fran (who, the reader is told, feels she only needs Jack, not other people) might be waiting for the “liberating change” that allows them to transcend the pitfalls of couple-ism or co-dependence (Henderson 151).3 An invitation to change comes in the form of a dinner invitation. Bud, Jack’s co-worker at the factory, invites Jack and Fran to have dinner with him and his wife Olla at their country home where they live with a new baby boy and a pet peacock, Joey.
The feathers in “Feathers,” belong not just to any bird, but to a peacock. Bud identifies the peacock as “a bird of paradise,” and Olla links the bird with beauty: “I always dreamed of having me a peacock. Since I was a girl and found a picture of one in a magazine. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I ever saw” (18 ). Jack and Fran, however, are not able to find the peacock beautiful. As they drive up to Bud and Olla’s house, the bird lands in front of their car and lets out a “wild and dangerous” cry. Fran and Jack are nearly speechless. Jack, as the narrator, does comment on the peacock’s colorful tail, but the predominate reaction of the besieged couple is one of disbelief and annoyance: “If it’d been something I was hearing late at night and for the first time, I’d have thought it was somebody dying [. . .] ,” Jack complains (8). In retrospect, Fran remembers the bird as “smelly,” and Jack, in typical fashion, mixes the grotesque with the nostalgic: “I recall the way the peacock picked up its grey feet and inched around the table” (26).4
Indeed, Jack and Fran have difficulty appreciating beauty – even, when like the peacock, it drops from heaven and challenges them to notice. When Jack momentarily lapses into a pastoral about Bud and Olla’s rural surroundings – “red-winged black birds,” “gardens,” “little houses set back from the road” — Fran undercuts his sentiments with a caustic remark: “It’s the sticks out here” (7). To truly perceive and value beauty, to balance the grotesque with the beautiful, might be part of what a successful transformation in their marriage could bring to Fran and Jack. The peacock, in part, challenges them to go beyond their narrow view of their surroundings.
As Jack and Fran enter the country home (after their scare with the peacock), they find warm hospitality. The affection between Bud and Olla seems genuine and embracing and mature, but any serious consideration or appreciation of the bond is undercut by Jack’s penchant for observing the grotesque and the uncouth: the mold of plaster teeth with “thick yellow gums” on the television set, the ugly baby with “pop eyes,” and the “damn peacock,” wailing or making “a ticking sound as it walked back and forth on the shingles”(18) – to name only the most unforgettable images forever linked with the country couple. At best, Jack is ambivalent.5 He acknowledges that the “evening at Bud and Olla’s was special” (25). But at the same time, he insists that it brought “bad luck” (25).
This ambivalence toward the transforming power of beauty and love, as symbolized by ambivalence toward the peacock, has precedents in mythology. Frazer identified the peacock as a totem of the Mori clan of the Bhils in central India. Their worship of the peacock was coupled with a disdain of it – a fear that contact with the peacock would result in illness, disease, and even death. Any woman of the clan who saw a peacock veiled her face and looked away. Moreover, Frazer documented many cases of such ambivalence toward divinity, most specifically toward divine animals, among many ancient peoples: “[T]he primitive mind seems to conceive of holiness as a sort of dangerous virus, which a prudent man will shun as far as possible [ . . .]” (550). This ambivalence is quite understandable, if one considers the uncomfortable change, even the death – death of a previous way of seeing and living (remember the peacock reminded Jack of someone dying) — that transcendence demands.
Peacock feathers – the feathers themselves — have an added folkloric meaning in accordance with this ambivalence – that of the evil eye. In classical mythology, Juno set the eyes of Argus on the tail of a peacock, and in actuality, each tail feather of a peacock is marked with ovals, resembling watchful eyes. In England and other European countries, bringing peacock feathers into one’s home was (and sometimes still is) regarded as bad luck, notes animal folklore researcher Melissa Tulin ( 219). Bad luck, associated with peacock feathers, might come from the danger associated with change, and from that danger comes the wariness needed as one undertakes transcendent change. As Fran and Jack leave Bud and Olla, Olla gives Fran some peacock feathers to take home. This gesture, within the context of the story, can only be seen as hospitable, well intentioned (Olla obviously has not read Roman mythology nor traveled rural England), and indeed, Fran and Jack drive home full of cheer and intimacy. But the good will of the evening soon dissipates. The feathers do not make the peacock; that is to say, Jack and Fran have not been able to replicate Bud and Olla’s mature love, perhaps because Jack and Fran must find more unconventional ways to address struggles in their relationship.6 Jack and Fran conceive a child, but the child does not bring maturity, love, or beauty to their marriage; the story suggests that parenthood is not the couple’s true calling.1 While Bud and Olla’s relationship is able to thrive within traditional boundaries of marriage, Fran and Jack arguably are called upon to transcend the traditional. Their sudden impulse to make a baby seems a pale imitation, a desperate attempt to copy Bud and Olla, to precipitate change, any change at all, to end their uncertainty and waiting and, one might argue, to avoid the existential call to transcend convention. They fall into the collective pattern without insight or mission.
If the peacock with its feathers is a symbol of transcendence as I have suggested, it is also a symbol of “several other things as well” as Carver put it. As a true symbol, it surpasses one-dimensional allegory. Traditionally, the colorful male peacock is associated with foolish pride and vanity. Vanity is certainly a motif in the story – Fran with her long blond hair that she is forever preening, and even Olla with her straightened teeth that she sometimes remembers not to hide. As already suggested, though, Fran’s hair signals her tenuous relation with Jack, who might leave her if she cuts it, while Olla’s straightened teeth suggest authentic intimacy and gratitude. Bud has genuine concern for Olla’s well-being and Olla, a sincere appreciation for his concern: “Then Bud came along and got me out of that mess,” Olla explains. “After we were together, the first thing Bud said was, ‘We’re going to have them teeth fixed’” (13). One can’t help but contrast the “gift of new teeth” motif here with that same motif posed by Eliot in the Waste Land (“He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you/ To get yourself some teeth. . . .You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set” [Eliot lines 142-145]): both Eliot and Carver’s work explore failed transcendence, but while Eliot’s imagery links false teeth with crude sexuality,Carver’s imagery of the dental plaster tempers crudeness with caring. Bud fell in love with Olla before she was attractive and transforms her through love (and straightened teeth); Jack falls out of love with Fran (as he threatened to do all along) once she is not conventionally attractive, after she cuts her hair and gains weight. The symbolic peacock, directing our attention to different manifestations of vanity, then, deepens our understanding of the relationships in the story. In the case of Fran and Jack, vanity signals self-absorption and a failure to find imaginative and spiritual ways to support both individuation and growth as an intimate couple who can embrace beauty when life offers it to them.
Carver names his story “Feathers,” not “Bird” or “Peacock.” We can understand feathers as the part standing for the whole (pars pro toto), but at the same time, not as the whole (as intimated above, feathers do not always make the peacock): at times, feathers are only feathers — fluffy, insubstantial, feather-weight. However, regarding a feather, as a folkloric symbol, pars pro toto, Von Franz observes, “Since the feather is very light, every breath of wind carries it. It is that which is very sensitive to what one could call invisible and imperceptible psychological currents” (49). She goes on to associate wind with inspiration, intuition, and “spiritual power” (49). However, regarding feathers divested of spiritual power (not as pars pro toto), one is left with a symbol of triviality: a bag of wind, so much fluff. “I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter,” says Eliot’s Prufrock (6). And similarly, accepting an invitation to supper in Carver’s story should be “no great matter.” But like Eliot’s Prufrock who belabors the “the taking of tea” and who laments the bald spot on the back of his head, Jack and Fran obsess over the trivial. Should Fran bring dessert? Raspberry coffee ring? Cupcakes? But surely Olla will make dessert. But what if Olla makes Jell-O? Fran and Jack do not like Jell-O. Fran makes a loaf of bread. Olla makes rhubarb pie. Jack hates rhubarb pie, he got sick on it when he was thirteen years old while “eating it with strawberry ice cream” (17), but he politely takes a piece of Olla’s pie. Jack also smokes, uses an ash tray that Bud hands him, and spends several sentences belaboring the “event”: “It was one of those glass ashtrays made to look like a swan. I lit up and dropped the match into the opening in the swan’s back. I watched a little wisp of smoke drift out of the swan” (11). The glass swan, its long, graceful neck, the rising wisp of smoke — divine inspiration? Surely, not. Trivial pursuits? Surely, so. By paying attention to small and insignificant details, Jack, as our narrator, gives all experience equal worth, and so experience flattens, diminishes, attenuates to worthlessness: the transcendent does not take flight. Feathers, in this context, are only feathers, commonplace — so much pillow stuffing. At the same time, we know, because of their mythological associations, that feathers have the possibility of being more, of standing for the whole, of being (re-quoting Von Franz) “very sensitive to [. . . ] invisible and imperceptible psychological currents.” In other words, feathers offer the main characters a possibility of transcendence, but Jack and Fran are at times afraid, at times vane or self-absorbed, and at times hindered by mundane, unimaginative responses. Transcendence in this story, ultimately, fails. ,7
End Notes
1 The term transcendencein this analysis has been used for the most part in the colloquial sense of moving beyond a fixed state or a conventional notion. The term, even in its colloquial usage, does have a philosophical connotation, reminiscent of Kant’s usage of the term signifying that human knowledge can go beyond sensual perception; that is, it can draw upon intuition and imagination. The term, as used colloquially, may also have a religious connotation stemming from the American transcendentalists who believed that divinity infused this world, and thus to some extent humans could read the divine in natural phenomenon and find it in their own souls. Likewise, the term calling has a philosophical or theological connotation, suggesting a knowable purpose that should be fulfilled in a life or relationship.
2 Jack, the narrator, is well aware of the concept of stages. When introduced to his friends’ “ugly” baby, he imagines the child’s parents rationalizing their child’s lack of physical attractiveness, understanding it as only a stage: “Pretty soon there’ll be another stage. This is this stage and then there is the next stage. Things will be okay in the long run, once all the stages have been gone through” (Cathedral 24).
3 Henderson uses the term “liberating change,” but not specifically in relation to Carver’s story. Henderson also speaks of solitary journeys as symbolic of transcendence (147). In Carver’s stories (unlike Joyce’s), one seldom finds the solitary journey motif. Couples, not loners, usually inhabit Carver country.
4 Diana Wells, who researched the origin of bird names, notes that the peacock’s “bloodcurdling scream” was once thought to be a cry of “despair” over the “ugliness” of his feet. Scientists today more soberly interpret it as a warning cry (175).
5 Even Carver’s diction is ambivalent, undercutting a serious consideration of the transcendent. When Bud says grace before dinner, Jack says, “I got the drift of things – he was thanking the Higher Power for the food we were about to put away” (Cathedral 16). The formal register of “Higher Power” coupled with the low register of “drift of things,” and “put away” creates humor and deflates any special regard we might be willing to afford Bud’s prayer.
6 The story suggests that Olla and Bud’s marriage continues to mature. After a number of years, their peacock is replaced by the owl, a symbol of wisdom. Jack tells us, “Joey’s [the peacock’s] out of the picture. He flew into his tree one night and that was it for him. He didn’t come down. Old age, maybe, Bud says. Then the owls took over” (Cathedral 26).
7 Somewhat in accordance with the analysis this paper argues, Nelson Hathcock finds possibility in “Feathers” – he calls it “the possibility of resurrection” (31). His analysis of the story focuses on Jack as the narrator – by retelling the story, Jack gains control over experience and achieves the “sanctifying power” of art (36). Hathcock interprets the last paragraph of the story as hopeful in that a good memory can be consoling in an otherwise despairing situation (36-37). I would question, to some extent, Hathcock’s optimism: Is the glass half full or half empty? I am stressing the failure of possibility, whereas Hathcock stresses its hope. I also wonder to what extent we can attribute the artfulness of the narration to Jack, and/or to what extent Carver, as author, supersedes Jack. The use of the present tense in the fourth paragraph, for example, seems beyond Jack’s artistry as a story-teller. Though initially not obtrusive in any way, the tense-switch, once realized by the reader, cannot help but be regarded as authorial manipulation. The tense-switch places us in a time frame that is not the true time frame of the narration (presumably when Jack tells his story Fran has already cut her hair and has gained weight). But because of the tense-switch in the fourth paragraph, the reader assumes that, as Jack tells the story, Fran still has long hair and a trim figure (and all that that implies about the relationship between the couple). The ending of the story then is somewhat disturbing, not only because of its content but also because of its unexpected time frame. Thus form reinforces the meaning in a very artful way, in a manner that would seem appropriate to and in accordance with Carver’s storytelling prowess, but not necessarily Jack’s.
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The Story Ends -- The Story Never Ends 