Prophets of the Posthuman: American Fiction, Biotechnology, and the Ethics of Personhood

Chapter 7: Technology, Contingency, and Grace. Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing”

153 C H A P T E R 7 Technology, Contingency, and Grace Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing” In each lived moment of our waking and sleeping, we are technological civilisation. —George Grant, Technology and Justice Raymond Carver is not typically the writer we talk about when we talk about technology. When we want to explore our technological society, we usually turn to speculative fiction, stories in which megalomaniacal scientists accidentally kill all humans, or stories in which machines become self-aware and go on a rampage. But to limit our discussion to these stories is to limit our understanding of just how deep the assumptions of our technological society run and how many are its ramifications. Although Carver did not write about technology per se, his story “A Small, Good Thing” grapples with it on a more fundamental level. The story reveals how completely and devastatingly our technological society has embraced one of its primary goals: to eliminate contingency. As C. S. Lewis has argued, the goal of modern science applied through technique is to “subdue reality to the wishes of men,” 154 From Posthuman Individuals to Human Persons and its most ambitious proponents believe it possible to one day completely control nature and spare humans from any suffering.1 Carver’s story challenges the ascendancy of this goal by showing how it has isolated us from our neighbors and thinned us morally. The story dares to suggest that contingency, even radical contingency, is a small, good thing in an age such as ours. Properly understood and received, contingency is one of the few ways that people who live in an advanced technological society can learn to receive grace. Carver published his final version of “A Small, Good Thing” in the collection Cathedral in 1983.2 It is a gut-wrenching tale of a woman who orders a birthday cake for her only son’s eighth birthday party, only to have him get hit by a car, enter a coma, and die three days later. The conflict in the story comes from the fact that the baker she had ordered the cake from, angry about the fact that no one had picked it up, continues to call the family, ignorant of the boy’s death. The parents had, of course, forgotten all about the cake, so the unidentified caller who keeps gruffly saying, “Have you forgotten about Scotty?,” seems to them to be some kind of psychopathic maniac. Eventually they remember the order and go to the bakery to confront the baker. After they express their anger, he apologizes and invites them to sit with him. They eat fresh bread together and share stories, talking into the dawn. This brief plot summary does not do the story justice, of course. One of its strengths is that with a few sparse sentences, Carver is able to render a scenario we all recognize: in America, consumer capitalism has largely turned neighbors into nodes of impersonal economic exchange . Carver claimed that a story always came to him by way of its first sentence—a sentence that he rarely changed—and the first sentence here explains a lot: “Saturday afternoon she drove to the bakery in the shopping center” (SGT, 59).3 It is Saturday in the suburbs, and people drive to nameless places in order to consume goods. Ann Weiss, the child’s mother, attempts to be friendly, but the baker is all business; he is abrupt, and “there were no pleasantries between them, just the minimum exchange of words, the necessary information” (SGT, 60). Though the baker plays a major role in the story, Carver never gives him a name beyond “the baker,” and it is clear that for quite some time he Technology, Contingency, and Grace 155 has thought of himself only as what he does. The baker’s later description of how he repeats his days “with the ovens endlessly full and endlessly empty” (SGT, 89) makes him exemplary of what Hannah Arendt calls the ascendancy of “animal laborans,” the laborer. In her book The Human Condition, Arendt worries that human dignity has been compromised under the modern reign of techne, in which people are reduced to the roles they perform. Arendt’s concerns are laid out in this story: the baker has no public visibility or sphere of action outside of his labor and its exchange. His abruptness with his customer despite her polite...