Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Smooth Structures: Narrative Form as Ethical Contact in Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop

2013; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

2374-6629

Alexander Hollenberg,

Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis

Willa Cather's reluctance to categorize Death Comes the Archbishop as a novel is telling; in a letter to The Commonweal she says that she prefer[s] to call it a (On Writing 12), and she draws aesthetic parallels between her text and the frescoes detailing the life St. Genevieve by Puvis de Chavannes and the martyrdoms in the Golden Legend in which human experiences, measured against one supreme spiritual existence, were about the same importance (OW 9). Indeed, Archbishop is no modernist bildungs. It is structured through a series juxtaposed vignettes that oftentimes only loosely cohere. Although the nine episodes plus the prologue that make up Cather's narrative center upon the experience Bishop Jean Marie Latour in the newly established diocese New Mexico, they do not form a demonstrably progressive or teleological whole as one might expect a novel. What the values constituted through such a form? What ethical demands does this text make upon the reader? In Mimesis, Erich Auerbach demonstrates what he sees as the essentially paratactic quality Medieval storytelling. Using the Chanson de Rolande and the Chanson D'Alexis as his prototypes, he argues that the way in which dramatic episodes in these texts patterned bespeaks an ultimate faith in Divine Providence. Events need not be linked horizontally (temporally, by means cause and effect) because their relation is justified by means a vertical connection (to God). Things that happen are posited argument as pure theses; these the facts. No argument, no explanatory discussion whatever is called for (101). And in this way, according to Auerbach, the independent episodes which strung together like beads come to resemble the surfaces of the sarcophagi late antiquity, where figures cease to any reality and have only signification (116). If Cather borrows this mode structural parataxis, it is not to proselytize nor reaffirm providence but to draw attention to the rhetorical relationship between the work art and its audience. In other words, insofar as Cather attempts to write a narrative without accent that refuses to use an incident all there is in it--but to touch and pass on (OW 9), she conceives the very form her narrative as ethically-inflected, as a type surface that ought to be handled and felt but never wholly possessed. In On Writing, Cather grieves the loss meaning when a handcrafted artifact is removed from its context by a collector--a collector whose particular desires suddenly dwarf the artifact's integrity as an aesthetic object beyond possession. In the same way, she supposes, narrative suffers when the author imposes herself upon a text. Thus, to write without accent is to bear responsibility the integrity the text as a form otherness that can never fully belong to the interpreting self. In Cather's hands, the genre does not renounce the material world, as David Stouck argues (142), but instead interrogates how the material world is marked by human interpretation and imagination. Cather's narrative is a site contact, a smooth surface upon which we can lightly run our fingers, but which firmly resists the pressures interpretive imposition. To attend to the dimension smoothness in a text is to attend to the way in which that text challenges how we leave our interpretive mark upon both it and the world. If interpretation is the means by which we leave traces our selves upon the text, the smooth narrative, insofar as it is something accent, unmarked and yet accessible, questions the nature the self's inscriptions upon the other. This is an especially pertinent ethical question in regards to a narrative that treats so directly the contact between the Catholic Church and the Indigenous peoples the Southwestern United States in the second half the nineteenth century. As I will come to show, it is possible to read smoothness itself as a rhetorical mechanism intercultural exchange, a place where the known and unknown productively mingle. …